Building and Bonding in Boise
While in Boise, Faith and I spent our time hanging out with Faith’s family, working, and exploring the area. I started working a part-time summer schedule to facilitate adventuring while Faith hung out with her siblings and got stuff ready for vanlife. Amongst other things, she helped Ella clean out some of her many clothes, visited family friends, and squared away legal paperwork for our new van. We took a morning to ourselves to hike up the face of the Camel Back in Boise and followed it up with a lovely lunch at a local restaurant.
During this time, I purchased the website domain and hosting service and started setting up our blog. As of writing this article, the site redirects to hui.lbn.mybluehost.me… which is not what I intended or want. I have tried several times to get it to stay at lafeandfaithsodyssey.com with the “help” of Bluehost’s customer service chat, but to no avail. Generally, the website becomes unreachable and provides the ever-so-helpful 1001 DNS error until I get back onto the chat and have the changes reversed.
On one of the weekends in Boise, we went hot spring hopping in central Idaho. The first required crossing a river which was still snow probably 10 or 15 minutes before we crossed it. Unless you’ve crossed such a river before, I don’t think you can understand how unbelievably frigid and painful the water is. The crossing to the hot springs was bearable as you could immediately jump into the warm waters; the return journey was much less so as there was nothing but a steep bank to greet you. The second hot springs involved a bit more hiking and scrambling, but we found a lovely little alcove in a rock wall filled with hot water and a vista of the surrounding mountains. The third and final hot spring was much busier than the first two, but it had a great variety of pools with varying heat and bacterial growth to explore. Fortunately, we didn’t see any nudists at any of the springs, which I’ve been told is not uncommon. We ended the day with a winding road back through the mountains that provided excellent views and some excitement. Stefawn’s contact was also taking a vacation and so only Faith warned us of the narrowly-avoided deer on the road.
Each evening we spent some time with Jon working on our van. We began with our bed frame and panels as that was the largest piece to build. We had a rough idea of what we wanted to do with our bed and were inspired by this video to create a bed that would allow us to convert it between “bed mode” and “lounge mode”. In preparation for this, we purchased a mattress that folded into three sections in the way that we wanted. After we created a frame to hold the panels and allow them to slide freely, we cut and reinforced plywood panels that the mattress would sit on. We made only one real mistake when creating the movable legs for the front mattress panel caused by measuring from the floor to the bottom of the edge support (a 2×2) instead of the floor to the plywood panel. Oops! As a side note, I did not realize that a 2×2 is not actually 2″x2″, it is 1.5″x1.5″; similarly, a 2×4 is not actually 2″x4″… When I learned this I was flabbergasted and felt deeply lied to. Needless to say, it was good that we used a tape measure for all of our measurements instead of relying on the assumption that a 2×2 was what it claimed to be.
Once we had our bed panels made, we linked them together with piano hinges and put them in place… They worked! Not only did they work, they worked really well. The panels slid smoothly, and we could pretty easily switch between the bed and lounge modes. After getting the bed squared away, we started work on some shelving that would go between the bed and the opposite wall of the car to hold some as-of-yet undetermined stuff. The interior walls of cars are generally not square, and our Odyssey is no exception. So, we embarked on a several hour long adventure to create a pattern to fit the contour of the wall by holding it up to the wall, trimming it slightly, holding it up to the wall, trimming it slightly, and so on. But that was just the first step, once we had a pattern that fit well, we put it on a piece of plywood and went to town with the jigsaw before repeating the pattern process to get a piece of wood that mostly fit the hole we wanted to get it into. Our hard work paid off as we have a couple pieces of plywood that nicely fill the holes they’ve been put into.
We called that good for van building and left the rest for part two in Iowa as we bid a very fond farewell and started another trek across the country.
Animals Seen
- Deer in the road
Stats
- ~200 miles of driving
- 3 hot springs
- 6 trips to Home Depot