Tour de Les Bois

This weekend Brian went to the cabin to pick up his dad. He decided to take Darby since she's the mountain girl leaving me all alone with two little boys. What to do? I decided we needed to do something. It's nice outside and I don't want them cooped up in the house all day watching movies or playing video games. And I didn't want them to be running around the neighborhood either. I looked in the activities section of the newspaper and saw that an ice cream shop was having a grand opening in downtown Boise. They were having free samples and balloons and entertainment and such. Sounds fun to me.

We all get ready and head to Boise. We made a stop in the in between city of Meridian to do a little yard sale shopping, which ended up being a complete waste of time. The only things I bought were a soda and a pack of candy for the boys to share. I know, what a great, healthy snack, but this is fun day. That doesn't matter. We dropped Jillian off at my mom's at about 10:30 and drive to my work parking lot, because they always have parking and it's a pretty short walk to this ice cream shop. I wasn't exactly sure which part of 8th street the shop is on, so we start at the beginning (or is it the end?).

This also gave us a chance to walk by the Capitol building that Riley was excited to see. He orginally thought it was the the Capitol building, but it's not. It's just Idaho's Capitol building. However, it was designed after the nation's Capitol so it wasn't such a far fetched mistake. Had I known that you could take self-guided tours of the building Monday through Saturday we definitley would have walked through. I was not informed of this until later.

We take a right turn on 8th Street and notice several booths set up and a crowd of people. The farmer's market. I had forgotten about the farmer's market. This will be interesting. The ice cream shop was suppose to open at 11 and it wasn't quite that time yet. We proceed to walk through the many people to see what the market had to offer us. The first stop was to test out the Marionberry pie. I'm not a big pie eater, but the boys tell me the pie was delicious. I would hope so since it was an $11 pie. Is that a lot because it seems like a lot? I don't recall buying pie that didn't have Sara Lee's name on the box. Or does Sara Lee even make pie? I don't know.

Anyway, we also tasted some dried apples, chips and salsa (very good, I'm thinking I'm going to go back to buy some), and cheese. Of course, this was the favorite part of the day so far. There's nothing better than sampling food, unless your sampling wine, which was also available, but that's something to do with Brian and not two little kids.

Well, it's now 11 and we decide to turn back around (we passed the ice cream place while browsing the market) and go get some ice cream. We get to the shop and nothing. The place is completely dark and the table and chairs aren't even set up. It lookes deserted except for the signs. What a bummer! Well, I decide we should just keep walking. We take 8th street back the way we came and turn right on one of the streets I always get confused with. There's Jefferson and Idaho and we turn somewhere around there. We begin our trek once again and this time we come to a race. I believe it was some kind of fundraiser for the hospital, but I don't know the details. We watch several kids as they finished their race in their yellow t-shirts.

After a few minutes we continue to walk down Capitol Blvd. We stop to look through these binoculars set up at several locations downtown. They show a picture of what that exact spot looked like 100 years ago, or some time, a really long time ago. (I'm guessing on the 100 years.) I thought this was cute because everytime they would see the red binoculars they would want to look through them.

We finally reached BODO, a little shopping center with not a lot of stores for little boys. We didn't stay long and at that moment I realized that I had forgot to leave Jillian's binkie with my mom. I panicked a little because it's hard to get her to take a nap without it. I just imagined her crying the entire time, not being able to get to sleep. We rushed back to the car, which at this point was pretty far away. However, I did not hear one complaint about anyone being tired or not wanting to walk anymore. Seriously, this is unusual.

Since they were being so good and so open to doing these different things, I decided we would have lunch in the park and then maybe check out the tour trolley. It's an hour long ride and the guide gives a few little facts about several places around the park and downtown.

We had such a great time. Jordan was annoyed on the trolley because "the guy kept talking". But we learned some interesting facts about the very old houses lining Warm Springs Ave. These houses are spectacular and if ever I made or won or somehow acquired a large sum of money I would want to live there.

All in all it was a perfect Saturday afternoon. Amazingly enough, I convinced two little boys to browse at a farmer's market, window shop downtown, have lunch in the park and take a tour of the city. They even want to go back on another Saturday afternoon and visit both the historical museum and the art musuem. I am so proud of our little video game freaks.