Long and dusty roads

Turns out Boise is a lot of fun!  It was also horribly hot.  We spent our first day there exploring- alleys covered in local artists' projects, live music in the main square after five, a basque quarter... where it turns out you can get two large sangrias for $4.  Anyone who's had the dubious honour of observing us in such a situation can fill in the blanks and anyone who hasn't doesn't need to start now.

Boise's got nice local ales- we had a few during our stay and also found local Huckleberry Wine.  C hardly got any of the wine though, because he was horribly ill by that point due to a severe case of foolishness.  More on that later.

One of the 'Boise' things to do is float down the river in a hired raft or big tube with a sealed base.  It's not too expensive and it was horribly hot, so we trotted down there happily on Thursday morning, having left behind everything we didn't want soaked, including C's shoes.  Turns out in order to hire one of the tubes you need photo ID and a credit card, not something we'd bothered to stuff into the little plastic bag of money in J's bra.

But you can BUY inner tubes there, in cash.  Only obviously it's twice as expensive.  But not if you have the frankly genius idea of just buying one tube and somehow fitting you both into it.

So this is how we came to be bobbing down the river for a couple of hours, sipping a homebrewed beer from a friend of our host, chilled in the river, scraping C's butt off rocks on several occasions, soaked to the skin and looking a bit shabby compared to the raft and paddles outfits everyone else had.  We only capsized once though and it was lots of fun :).

And having worked up an appetite we'd planned to get a burger later.  I had a nice bbq veggie burger.  Slowly.  It was good- J

But...

I wanted to visit the Midwest or generally non-coastal States for many reasons.  Primarily, people told me not to.  Also this;

which I'm pretty sure is not a direct quote.  Another reason was the snobby coasts always say nothing is happening out here, but as you can see they were wrong.  Another is to easily find the food we think of when we think of 'American';

This is at Big Jud's.  It's a 1lb burger, with 1lb of tater tots and a litre of soda (good ol' crime against nature and trading standards Mountain Dew in this case).  You have to eat it all within 30 minutes.  Why?  Because you can.  Then they put your photo on the wall as a cautionary tale to children.  There's a 2lb burger challenge, which if completed, gets you a bigger picture, a T-shirt, the burger for free and a place among the eating-disorded 'elite'.

Because let's be clear about this, these challenges are symptomatic of a seriously bizarre attitude to eating.  It's not fun.  You don't savour or even enjoy the food you're eating.  It's analogous (though not nearly as awesome) as the attitude of some of the broncho riders we met up in William's Lake at the Stampede, who weren't working with the horses as part of a team, the phrase they used was 'fighting a horse'.  This is fighting a burger.  There are issues with corporations telling us it's manly to eat certain food, but they aren't as relevant or upsetting as the general issue of a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and idea of 'food'.  Food isn't about moral issues, with "tempting treats" and "good" or "bad" food, nor is food something to be conquered and 'defeated'.  Speed eating 3lbs of food is fighting not only the food but your own body and hormones when they say things like 'Stop...STOP!'  I would also make clear this isn't a problem of the central States, it's everywhere in the West, like the end of Easy Rider taking place in the South, (if you haven't seen it, do) it's a geographical coincidence I was here.

All this said: I am not often compared to Julius Caesar; he was a tactical genius who plucked out all his body hair with tweezers and precipitated the change of a decaying republic into a dictatorial empire.  I am none of these things (yet... I might get some body hair soon).  BUT...I veni-d, I vidi-d and I totally vici-d that burger.  Yes, I am being hypocritical right now, but I paid for it in feeling very ill. -C

We spent a nice evening with some of the Boise Couchsurfing crowd and set off early Friday morning for California.  Well, Winnemucca was the goal of the day (and if you've heard of Winnemucca, you either live there or have heard the Johnny Cash song 'I've been everywhere', there is no other good reason to have).  We got picked up by a really friendly rancher near the Idaho-Oregon border who took us quite a distance, explaining the history and locals of the area (the least densely populated county in the lower 48, apparently).  He showed us his farm, complete with Sweetcheeks the free-range yard pig (natch),

He kills rattlesnakes... 

   and a hike up a hill that gave us a beautiful view of the surrounding desert.

And then we hit the road again.  And that desert went on and on and on.  Hours of driving with nothing but sage brush.  Highly flammable sage brush- we passed half a million acres of blackened ground from a recent wildfire.  Nothing but scorched ground, ash and dust devils as far as you could see.  Tom Petty kept us good company until our next lift's cd player broke, and by then we were in Nevada and casinos had leapt out of the ground all around us.

Our lift was headed to California himself, stopping in Reno for the night- so we got a lot further than we'd thought.  Then we got to Reno and discovered that camping is prohibited ANYWHERE within city limits (with a tent.  Not an RV, of course), including in campsites (we also discovered that if we did shoot a man in Reno, we'd have been doing him a favour - C).  We'd have been a bit stuck but our lift thought this was as ridiculous as us and we just drove into the mountains (Donner Pass, with all its great camping heritage, famous for pioneer cannibalism, obviously a great choice)  for a while and camped in a quiet spot.

In the morning he brought us to Sacramento, over the pass.

There's not a huge amount here (and that's according to people we met from here), like a lot of official State Capitals.  But we had an explore of the Old West preserved bit of town, known as Old Sac (heh), and spent a day in parks reading and talking to a lot of street people.  It's scary to see how little of a safety net there is for people here.  Not that anywhere is great, certainly not what we're used to.  But talking to people about the laws and support here it really feels like it would be pretty easy to get stuck in a horrible situation.  For instance, if you've ever had a drugs conviction (ever.  That's everything from really vulnerable recovering addicts to people caught with weed when they were young) you don't get any form of social security.  Being in mind you do if you're just out of jail for murder, this seems a bit tough and also unconstructive.  We met a lot of people while we were sitting outside the library which was closed due to staff furloughs- this is where they give them compulsory unpaid leave because it's a form of cutbacks the unions apparently can't fight.  Somehow they still had the money to send 90 cars of riot cops against about half a dozen Occupiers last month.

In our lift's car we'd seen a very cheap coupon for a motel here, and yesterday when we learnt we couldn't meet up with nearby friends until Tuesday we decided to look it up online, and for about $20 each we are spending a couple of nights with a real bed and air conditioning and stuff.  The guy who owns the place is very nice.  He's loaned us his laptop and took a reduced deposit based on the money we had at the time.  It's nice to have some time to just relax but without being in someone else's house or hot sun.

To anyone who made it to the end of this one, well done!  Sorry, there's no prize.  But at least you don't feel sick from eating a pound of meat and far too many tater tots.