More from the 5th

More notes from the 5th Jan. 

Another sister has arrived with her family - Cathy and Dave, and their three boys.  This family is staying in a nearby motel (although nearby in Nampa terms can be several miles.) 

We’re supposed to be having a Thanksgiving Dinner (somewhat out of season) and there’ll be a host of people here, though the turkey was taking its time to cook through.  The best man has arrived with two of his brothers and the girlfriend of one of those brothers.   They've been in Houston, Texas for a family reunion, and have made this part of the USA stay.  Liz's brother and sister are here, and her grandparents.  There seems to be people everywhere.  

Most of the men had gone shooting this afternoon, including those who've never touched a gun in their lives. The ones who do know what they're doing gave the others careful instructions, and they were only shooting at targets anyway.   The only accident of any sort was when the gun the best man was holding recoiled onto his face and nearly gave him a black eye to sport at the wedding.  You can see this on You Tube, believe it or not: the video has the title, The Moneyshot. 

Meanwhile, Celia and I were taken into Boise by Sarah to pick up Chris’s sister, Carol, and she came with us while we went around the Capitol (see photo) and some of the streets nearby. (There was even the leftovers of an Occupy movement tent site in the park nearby - and squirrels frolicking.)   This was the first time we'd done any touring around, and it was nice to see a different side of the area: more built-up and not nearly so spread out.  

We met a woman from Glasgow in the Basque museum shop; she’s married to a bloke from Idaho who came over to Glasgow to ask her father for his daughter’s hand (!)  

Carol is from California (Newport Beach) and has a nice wit.  We were talking about Dom being a toy-boy at one point, because he’s six months younger than Liz (whose birthday is the day after the wedding!) and someone else said it was more the other way around. I can’t remember what word they used, but I suggested cougar.  Carol said she’d told someone who said she was a cougar she was more like a sabre-tooth tiger.  

2nd day in Boise

Notes written on the 2nd Jan relating to that day. 

I didn’t wake till 9.am Boise time, which was great, because it meant I actually slept very well in spite of the changes of time.  The house didn’t rouse up much until later, in fact, but my older son, Ben (who'd arrived the day before) and Celia and I spent our first ten minutes trying to figure out how to get the water to come out of the shower instead of the bath in the bathroom nearest to our bedroom.  Our hostess, Cindy, arrived and saved the day: there’s a little round disk that needs to be pushed up - that’s all it is; very simple.   

After breakfast - or maybe even before it (with all the guests mealtimes were a bit erratic around here) Chris  (my future daughter-in-law's dad) showed Celia and me his workshop. Massive. Not only the main workshop but a toilet room, an office, a paint shop, and a cupboard in which there are two big pipes for sucking the dust and chips out of the main workshop.  Everything is neat and there are places for everything: he’s in the middle of doing a walnut entertainment cabinet for someone, and has done a host of other similar projects over the years.  He has stacks of spare wood and machines and tools - you name it.  The ’tour’ took nearly an hour by the time Celia has asked about this and that.   And he was pleased to tell her.  They enjoy talking, these Idaho people - everywhere we go they’re happy to talk and tell you stories, and find out more about you.  It’s great, really, and very friendly. 

Cindy, Celia and I went and visited the place where the reception is going to be held.  The colouring of houses and countryside is rather muted perhaps because all the grass is browned off and the trees are bare.   I think it’s the lack of greenery that surprises me, but of course we've come from high summer.  Everyone here has been expecting snow, but there's no sign of it, and the ski fields are getting desperate. 

Celia and Cindy had a big sort out as to what we’d be doing for the meal (pretty much a buffet) for the wedding and have got it in hand.  They went shopping this afternoon and bought in all the supplies.  At the same time Liz (fiancée), Dom (son getting married), Ben and a friend of Liz’s called Heather who’d been at the house organising something else to do with the wedding - and me - all went into Boise, met up with Liz's sister, Sarah, and dropped her car off to her, and coincidentally met her father-in-law. Sarah and her husband Joel have an apartment above where Joel’s dad works, and also above the restaurant Sarah used to work.  Joel has guns, and a massive collection of Lego - which impressed Celia.  Guns are popular in Idaho, as we were to find out. 

Then we went onto the airport and hired a car - Ben seems comfortable with driving and thinks that having an extra car would be good, but on this trip Liz drove back because we had some navigating to do.  

In the end it had got dark by the time we dealt with hiring the car - the guy behind the counter was very friendly and chatty, as was the girl in the next booth, who came in to help - and so we headed onto the tuxedo place where the fittings needed to be sorted out for Dom and Ben.  One of the girl assistants turned out to be from Russia even though she seemed to speak American English with no accent at all.   Curiously she didn’t seem to know about Siberia being used as a prison area - don’t ask me how we got onto that…!

Travelling to Boise, Idaho

Travelling to Boise in Idaho for my son's wedding.  Notes written on 2nd Jan relating to 1st Jan. 

We spent some thirty hours getting from our house to the my daughter-in-law-to-be's house in Boise.  That was leaving our house at around 9.45 am on our Sunday, and arriving in Boise at around 7.30 at night their time.  There were breaks between our arrival in Auckland and leaving again, and the same at the Los Angeles end.  This added considerably to the length of the trip.   I’d picked up a cold the night below we left, and was feeling too tired to do anything much, so in a way I was quite relaxed about the trip, more than I would have been otherwise.   It meant on one hand I read no more than half a dozen Kindle pages on the two first plane trips, and didn’t even read in the airports, and on the other felt quite comfortable about the great length of time the trip involved.   I only began to feel alive again by the time we got to Los Angeles (and this was after a night of not really sleeping well on the plane - though at least I did sleep; Celia didn’t much at all), and that was when I started reading again, finishing off The Eyre Affair (a novel recommended to me by a friend).  My cold seemed more like really bad hay fever, in the end, and I got something to offset that at a pharmacy in the Auckland airport, and along with vitamin C tablets and Panadene, kept me more alive than otherwise.

We didn't have to worry about our bags anywhere, after Dunedin, which was good (only the easy little transfer from one room to another at Los Angeles); the only stuff we were carrying were a largish black holdall with some clothes and odds and ends, and Celia’s backpack with various items including the laptop, and her purse, which carried everything else.   My older son had told us that there was a quiet spot along by Gates 5-10 at Auckland, and so after having some lunch and going through security, we stayed there for the afternoon, having the occasional snooze laid out full-length on the seat.   It was fairly muggy in Auckland, and earlier on we’d stayed outside for a bit, but it drizzled occasionally, and the place we’d chosen was obviously the smoker’s ’hut’, so we didn't stay there long.  

Our plane for Los Angeles left around 7, and we’d been able to get a two-seater, right towards the back.  This was good because we didn’t want to be sorting out with another person all the way (or two, if we were in a four-seater - there are no five-seaters on these planes), and meant we could spread ourselves a bit in terms of luggage.   However, we’d hardly got off the ground before the young married couple in front of us pushed their seats right back as far as they would go - this meant not only were we more cramped but we couldn’t easily watch the little movie screens.  We pushed our own seats back, but being the last row we couldn’t push too far back.   I asked the girl if she would mind moving the seat back a little more forward again, and she did, but her husband wasn’t nearly so obliging, and for much of the trip, including during the night, he kept it pushed right back.  We talked to the hostess early in the piece but she wasn’t in the mood for confrontation it seemed, and didn’t do anything, even though Celia said it was hard on her back being forced to sit that way.  Next morning, when breakfast was being served, the (very) old steward (he was older than me, I think!), without much persuasion got the guy to put his seat up straight - the guy’s comment was, What, further?  However, we both survived.  Celia said afterwards the man had very long legs, and would have been cramped too, but…

The staff began to serve the evening meal very soon after we took off, but in spite of that we didn’t get our meal until around 9.30 by which time there was no choice - one type of meal had been used up completely.  The older steward commented that at least at breakfast we’d be first on the list, but even then he only meant that we’d be in the first serving, rather than being first altogether.  

There was a huge choice of movies and tv programs, but the noise in the plane made it hard to hear some dialogue easily, so some movies were more accessible than others.  I started to watch Puss in Boots, but apart from it being a bit inane, it was set at night for quite a while at the beginning and didn’t show up well.  So I gave up on that and watched the oldie, The Night of the Hunter.  Directed by Charles Laughton it was a rather weak story layered with pseudo-symbolism and some hysteria.   The boy who was one of the main characters (Billy Chapin) wasn't too bad, but his little sister (Sally Jane Bruce) was weak.   Robert Mitchum played the supposed preacher who went round marrying women for their money and then murdering them, and Lillian Gish the old lady who eventually took the children in.  Shelley Winters was in it for about two-thirds and had a rather underwritten role - she became Mitchum’s latest victim.  The film also seemed to reach its climax and then develop a whole new section, making it seem more longwinded than it probably was.   Of course I had a meal in the middle so that didn‘t help it to be more cohesive.  Roger Ebert gives it a rave review, calling it 'one of the greatest of all American films,' which seems a bit over the top for the otherwise sound Ebert. 

I tried watching Jane Eyre as well, but the sound was just a blur, so I gave up, and watched, out of the corner of my eye, and without sound, Drive, with Ryan Gosling.   It looked very slow, but well made - and increasingly violent.  Celia switched it off before it finished. 

As we were starting to descend my ears began to ache something awful - to do with the cold, no doubt.  They wouldn’t clear and it was extremely painful.  The same thing happened, to a lesser extent, coming down into Boise.  

Los Angeles airport was an unpleasant place: lacking in humanity somehow, very undecorated, huge and awkwardly laid out - we landed at Gate one and had to go to Gate seven, which was a good hike around the ‘horseshoe’ that forms the airport.   We could have got a shuttle, but it seemed reasonable to walk, even though it was fairly warm - hot in fact, considering it‘s winter here.  We decided to go up to the third floor to check out the departures section, thinking there would be restaurants, cafes etc.  Nope, nothing but the security section, and an enormous queue, many of them standing out on a bridge that led into the security section, in the heat.  Incidentally, the queue at Auckland into the plane to Los Angeles took forever - we sat waiting to join it and waited and waited.  It never came to an end, and it began to look as though it never would before the flight was supposed to take off.  They were trying to process both Los Angeles and San Francisco flights, but they didn’t have a computer system, for some reason, and everything was being done manually.   It seemed impossible to believe that that many people would be getting on one plane. 

I had a bit of a meltdown at the LA security: they were being rather over-the-top, and when he told me not only to take off my money belt, but my trouser belt, and my handkerchiefs out of the pocket, I had had it.  I didn’t go off at the security people but to Celia, who told me to pull myself together. Anyway, we got past security and discovered that on the other side of security there were some places, like two Starbucks for example, and a couple of bars, and a newsagents, but that was almost it.   Had some rather expensive lunches sealed up in plastic boxes, and got coffees (after discovering that the girl behind the bar and I were both deaf - she couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t understand her - partly cultural linguistics and partly blocked ears from the plane).   Celia had a sleep, and, finally feeling better, I did some reading.  The plane to Boise was a fifty-seater, not too noisy, and served by one hostess who rattled through all the safety precautions at such speed that if you didn’t know the instructions from having heard them dozens of other times, you’d have had no idea what she was talking about. 

Finally arrived in Boise and met by my son and his fiancée.   Relief!