kitchtrips

Saturday 17 May 2025

Slept nearly ten hours. Felt great.

Overcast skies in Boise on Saturday morning with rain forecast later in the day. I went for a walk past the Depot and down to the Boise greenbelt, which is a fantastic multi-use path that follows the Boise River on both banks, for twenty-five miles, and through the Boise State University campus. The combination of the two is one of my favourite places to walk and run, anywhere in the world. It was a cool morning, and it felt great to do some exercise that knocked the rest of the proverbial cobwebs off.

By ten o’clock, it was raining steadily. One of those days best spent inside, watching TV, which we did for most of it. Went out for lunch at Jimmy Johns – like Subway, but better – then back to the house where it was warm.

I honestly think that aside from a stray storm or two cooling things down on hotter days here in the past, this is the first time I’ve seen it rain in Boise. And rain it did, all afternoon, despite suggestions from everyone’s weather app that it would end around 3:30pm!

Later in the afternoon, we went over to Dave and Lisa’s house and then to a brewery (of which there are many in Boise) that is best described as a giant bottle shop. There are fridges along one wall stacked with all sorts of beer and other drinks – some of which I’ve never heard of – and you buy them by the can. A pretty cool idea. They have big tables set up, so we sat around and chatted for a few hours before going across town to an escape room.

For the uninitiated, an escape room is where you go into a themed room and have to solve a series of puzzles and challenges to get out within the allotted time of one our. Ours was a ‘Vegas party’ theme, surely inspired by The Hangover. We were supposed to have woken up after a big bachelor party, missing the wedding ring for the ceremony later in the day. The challenges we had to do were all aimed at finding the ring, which would allow us to escape.

It was my first escape room, and the hype is real – a really fun time. We asked for two hints from the guy running the show (which he told us was below the average – most people doing that room ask for three) and managed to get out with six minutes to spare. I think we all made valuable contributions, but Kat’s tiny hands and karaoke efforts (singing “Call Me Maybe”) to help us spell out a hidden message deserves a special mention. I pity the guy running the challenge when, at one point, all of us were singing the song badly off-key. Must have sounded like a bunch of screeching monkeys. Or something worse…

After escaping, we had dinner and drinks at Buffalo Wild Wings where too many TV screens showing sport are not enough, then one final beer to close out the night at a cool bar called Mulligans.

It rained pretty much all night, and was still raining heavily when we got home just after 10:30pm, a very reasonable time to end celebrations on a miserable night. Always a fun time hanging with Dave and Lisa. Looking forward to seeing the sun tomorrow, even if it is accompanied by the wind – there’s actually a wind advisory warning for Boise and surrounds from 6am to 6pm tomorrow. So that’ll be interesting.