Teh Weekend
There was a lot of awesome this weekend. The awesomest of the awesome, though?
Breakfast at Goldy's.
On Sunday morning I dragged Z out of bed (this took a while) and we went to breakfast. I'd been jonesin' for some breakfast food for weeks. We got there and there was an hour's wait, so we walked down to the Boise Co-op and browsed their vast bulk tea section and I bought one of these (v. exciting!)
I am going to bake it with honey and butter.
But I digress. Eventually it was time for breakfast. Oh, what a breakfast it was! Goldy's calls itself a breakfast bistro - they're only open through lunchtime, and 90% of the menu is breakfast items. Bon Appetit calls Goldy's one of its 10 favorite breakfast joints in America (by the way, I think I'm going to archive that list for future traveling purposes).
We walked in and had hot coffee within seconds - really good coffee. After an arduous decisionmaking process, we ordered and sat back to smell the coffee and baking things and listen to the bustle of a Sunday morning Boisean crowd. And then came the food.
Mine:
Scrambled eggs with cheddar and broccoli
House-made sage sausage
Sweet potato hash browns
A blueberry scone
Endlessly refilled smooooth coffee
His
Blueberry pancakes
One egg over easy
Smoked salmon and caper hash
(with house-made hollandaise)
Ditto on the coffee
I'm not really patient enough to describe my meal in excruciating detail, food pr0n style, but I'll say this:
Perfectly scrambled eggs are hard to do and these were perfect.
Sweet potato hash browns = tha bomb.
Scone: good, but not good enough. alas.
Pancakes to rival Eaton's (though not Wasp's, of course)
SMOKED SALMON AND CAPER HASH OH MY LORD. I am going to learn how to make it. Pronto.
Combine that with reasonable (though not dirt-cheap) prices, friendly service, and portions large enough to eliminate the need for another meal until 7 pm, and you get a new addition to Sarah's Top 5 Breakfast Places. I'd say the above was on my Top 10 Breakfasts Ever Eaten, too.
After breakfast we went shoe shopping and gear ogling. Dude, since when does a nice sleeping pad gotta cost me $79? Well, let me state that more precisely. Since when do I need the top-of-the-line women's 4-season Thermarest that will cost me $79? Somehow all the cheap ones just don't look as, well, cool. (didn't buy it, though)
But - I'm at the end of Sunday here and I never got to the beginning on Friday. Starting from there -
I took off early from work on Friday so that we could get an earlier start out into the woods. We headed out at dark, with a tasty stop at Flying Pie on the way. The 4-lane turned into a 2-lane turned into a 1-lane dirt road and I pulled out our list of scrawled directions to potentially sweet hot springs: Fire Crew, Boiling Springs, Moondipper, Pine Burl.
It was a drizzly night with a low-hanging sky and shrouds of fog on the hillsides. There were no other cars, there were no other people: just everywhere shades of night blue and the wet sheen of rain. We stepped out of the car to check out a trailhead by the river and I remember looking around and thinking, Am I really standing here?
We didn't have much luck with the springs, though - Fire Crew was inundated with cold water, Boiling Springs was only lukewarm, and the other two were a 2-mile hike in, which seemed like a bad idea at 9 pm.
So we made camp and decided to try again in the morning. Not gonna lie, setting up a tent in steady, cold, drizzling rain was not so fun. But curling up dry and warm inside sure was. Morning broke still and close. We broke camp, ate our leftover pizza, and set off for the springs.
(side note: Z's tent is a Walrus - the Armadillo model - and it has a big armadillo graphic on the side. At some point just past dawn, I woke to hear a group of hunters on horseback clomping by: "Hey look, I ain't never seen no armadillo in Idaho before!")
After a fast and glorious little hike along the Payette River, we found our landmark - Dash Creek, narrow and rocky, as swift as its name suggested. 50 yards upstream was Moondipper, lovely but not quite hot enough. We found Pine Burl another 50 yards upstream, and it was just about perfect. I'll describe it for you here, and you'll think I'm being cheesy, but it really was like this: a rock-lined pool tucked deep between boulders; a swift, clear stream; moss and lush, low-hanging plants lining the steep cleft through which the stream runs; big, ancient smooth logs on which to rest when you need a break; water that's just hot enough to push your limits but still feel really great.
And, to top it off, there's a campsite at the top of the rise that looks down on the springs to the north and over the Payette River and the foothills to the south. Yeah. I think I'll be visiting this place again.
So we soaked for a couple hours and then we hiked back and drove home and puttered and ate and did laundry and Z went to orchestra and I puttered some more and then we watched part of this (effin' STRANGE movie, y'all) but started to fall asleep and called it a night.
And then there was Goldy's. And that was my weekend.