Since it had been a whopping almost two months since my last road trip ended, last weekend seemed like the right time to get out of town. My brother, my partner and I drove just over eleven hours to the booming metropolis of Boise, Idaho. Actually, after two months in rural northwestern Washington, Boise did kind of feel like the big city. And it’s a cute city, too. We got some sunshine (and a little sunburn) and a lot of great food. Here’s the recap.

We had pretty unattractive weather for the long drive out to Idaho, but northern Oregon’s scenery more than made up for it. We arrived in Boise relatively late and enjoyed a couple of beers at a bar downtown before crashing. For much of the next couple days, we wandered around Boise’s cute downtown. It’s full of neat-looking historic buildings, and also a lot of bank plazas. Can you guess which I photographed more?

We also wandered through a few parks, at least three of which offered views of the state capitol building–up close (ok, we were in the park surrounding the capitol, not pictured), from a distance  (through an archway), and from above (on a five-or-so mile walk through a series of public trails).

And then there was the food… Boise is home to a large Basque population (from the Basque region of Spain), so we were fortunate to get to try Basque food a couple of times, including some insanely delicious tapas. And then our friends cooked us a big meal of awesome Spanish dishes, which was pretty wonderful.

I also took advantage of being in a real city to go to the fabric store, and I maybe went a little overboard. Here’s most of what I picked up:

All in all, a delightful weekend. Later this week, I’ll be sharing some new projects I’ve been working on–new hats and new bags have been keeping me busy!