"No, it will be fun," I keep promising David, as he travels around the West with me, helping me reach my goal of visiting ten new LDS temples each year. We spent March 15 and 16, 2019, in Boise, Idaho. We finished the five hour drive from SLC to Boise just in time for the 7 p.m. Boise Temple session. It was a dark, chilly night, but the temple was filled with warmth and light.
I love this photo of the six-steepled Boise Temple, framed with summer flowers. The Chicago, Dallas, Manila, and Taipei temples are of the same vintage (mid-1980s) and have similar designs.
Each temple has distinctive features. The Boise Temple was filled with stained glass. Not just one major piece, but a dozen.
The stained glass next to the baptismal font was particularly beautiful.
On Saturday morning, March 16, we visited the new Meridian Temple, on the outskirts of Boise. It is massive, like a Meso-American temple.
The temple was decorated in blues and golds, representing the sky and harvest of the Idaho land. I especially loved the murals of Idaho mountains and fields in the endowment rooms.
Mission accomplished. After finishing our temple sessions, Dave parked by the Idaho statehouse. While Dave answered the never-ending texts that follow him everywhere, as a bishop, I wandered through this beautiful old building and learned about Idaho history. Idaho has struggled to forge a distinctive, unified identity. Nevada and Washington have both tried to carve off pieces of it, and Idaho has, from the beginning, been an uneasy amalgam of its LDS, agrarian south and its non-LDS, resource-rich north (lumber, mining, tourism).
Dave and I searched for a Basque restaurant for lunch, since many Basques settled in the Boise area. "We serve paella only on Thursdays," our best bet informed us, so we chose soup and salad at this downtown pub. I forgot to take a photo of our meal, so the best I could do was take a photo of our check!
Our last adventure was visiting the Old Idaho Penitentiary. Boise is as much a part of the Old West as Cheyenne or Tucson. This Penitentiary housed cons from the 1850s, when Idaho was just a territory, until the 1960s. Our guide told tales of prisoners escaping by scaling the limestone walls and riding off on horses, or of digging beneath the walls with knives and spoons smuggled from the cafeteria.
The solitary confinement cells were barbaric.
I paused at the penitentiary shop to buy sheriff's badges for Sam and Henry. I also bought a kit to make a lie detector. "We need that around here," Jonny said. "We hear some tall tales."
