We began the Christmas weekend with a nighttime visit to the Winter Garden aGlow at the Idaho Botanical Garden. The garden is outfitted with an amazing display of holiday lights and it is a popular winter attraction in Boise.
We spent Christmas with Tiana’s family at their ranch home outside of Boise. Everyone had a good time, including the animals!
We headed on to Boise to spend Christmas there with Andy and with Tiana’s family. We had never been to Boise and we were very pleasantly surprised. It is a beautiful, vibrant little city. We rented an old Victorian house (built in 1903) in the Hyde Park section of Boise’s North End. The neighborhood, just north of downtown, is filled with beautiful old houses and we enjoyed long walks there.
It snowed a couple of days before Christmas and the snow stayed on the ground for the remainder of our stay in Boise. The Christmas decorations in the neighborhood were beautiful in the snow.
On our way to Idaho for Christmas we crossed Nevada on U.S. 50, the loneliest road in America. The drive is over 100 miles between Fallon and Austin and there are few traces of human activity along the way.
Austin is a tiny town in the middle of Nevada which swelled to over 10,000 people during a silver boom in the late 1800s. Now the 21st century has left it behind and it is struggling to stay afloat. There are several beautiful churches and homes in Austin, left over from the silver boom years.
Eureka is a bit more prosperous than Austin but it also has a number of shuttered old buildings.
We spent the night in Elko had had a Basque dinner at the Star Hotel, a Basque tradition for over 100 years. The restaurant was only a couple of blocks from Elko’s red light district (brothels are legal in Nevada). We couldn’t resist a photo of “Inez’s Dancing & Diddling.”
We celebrated Andy’s birthday at Open Studios in Berkeley. Local artists open their studios, located in an old bakery building, for the public to see where they create their art. They have artwork for sale, also. We ended the day with drinks at the Sierra Nevada Torpedo Room and then dinner at Rivoli.
We arrived back in Northern California for a week and celebrated Andy’s birthday. We stayed at a Hilton extended stay property, Homewood Suites, in Cordelia. Just to the northwest of the hotel was a beautiful neighborhood that incorporated walking/biking trails throughout. Taking daily walks there through the chaparral was a dream!
Our journey west ended in Paso Robles, CA, where we joined long-time friends for a few days. We started our visit with a lovely dinner followed by a tour of the Derby Winery the next day. Carrie was happy that the party included two friendly cats, Buff and Bama, who came to Paso Robles with their mama because Ojai, CA was evacuated due to the massive Thomas Fire.
Old Mesilla is on the outskirts of Las Cruces, NM. The plaza there reminds me a lot of Santa Fe, but not as fancy. I imagine that Santa Fe used to look like this when it was first built, since the builders are the same people.
After spending the night in El Paso, we drove through UTEP’s campus, where the buildings are modeled after the architecture in Bhutan.
Before leaving El Paso, we visited the Chamizal National Memorial.
“In 1966, Congress established Chamizal National Memorial to commemorate the Chamizal Convention (treaty) of 1963. The Chamizal treaty finally ended a long-standing border dispute between the U.S. and Mexico. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo established the Rio Grande/Río Bravo as the international boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. However, rivers naturally move over time. In this case, the river gradually, and at times abruptly, moved south, which left Mexico with less land than the 1848 treaty established. The land disputes that arose because of the river movement caused tension between the U.S. and Mexico for more than 100-years. Finally, in 1963 U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Mexican President Adolfo Lopez Mateos met to discuss the “Chamizal Issue” and through diplomatic negotiations, they solved the Chamizal Issue with the signing of the Chamizal Treaty.”
We bid adieu to family and drove 118 miles west from Spicewood to Junction, TX, through the rolling hills of the Texas Hill Country with its scrubby bushes and wide open spaces. There we saw a variety of roadkill: 7 deer, 2 skunks, 3 raccoons, 1 armadillo, 1 porcupine, 1 opossum and many more critters that were unidentifiable bits of fur, etc. (I’ll spare you the gory details).
We appreciate the familiarity of the wide open spaces of the West. It feels like home.
It’s pretty swampy in Texas at the Louisiana border on I-10. There is a comprehensive Welcome Center there with the standard state maps and travel brochures, but also some interesting interpretive info on the surrounding Blue Elbow Swamp.
We were lucky to arrive in Spicewood outside of Austin in time for our great-niece’s 6th birthday party. We had dinner at a place that pleases kids and adults alike: a play area for the kids, good beer for the adults! After that, we headed over to the Christmas Tree lighting complete with Santa Claus, the Chick fil-A cow, cookies, s’mores, and music.
