Twin Falls, Idaho!

Leo and I are at the Best Western in Twin Falls, ID — where, the prepubescent boy at the front desk assures me, there are actual twin falls. We have no plans to actually see them, but I may pick up a brochure when I leave tomorrow. It is also home to the slowest Wi-Fi connection on the planet. So bear with me.

We began our journey on I-90, and soon moved to I-82. It took us through Yakima, Washington, which is Leo’s birthplace. I tried to explain this to him, but he was unimpressed. Mostly he was interested in the french fries I’d purchased at the Burger King there. (Calories don’t count on road trips.)

We got to Oregon (and switched to I-84), and drove through a great deal of eastern Oregon, which is, for the most part, unbelievably boring. I took a bunch of photos of the boringness to show you guys, but then the replacement cable I ordered for my camera — which I was assured would work on any Sony camera — does not work on my Sony camera. So the photos are a no-go. But mostly — no offense to eastern Oregonians — it’s not anywhere near as beautiful as western Oregon. It is, however, much more beautiful than all the boring desert in my home state of Arizona, so I have no room to talk.

Now, I’d always believed that any given state is on a single time zone. I was wrong. This is not true of Oregon. You enter Mountain Standard Time a good solid 80 miles from the border. My first reaction was “Doesn’t it upset the people who live here that they’re on a totally different time zone from their Oregonian brethren?” I quickly realized why that wasn’t a problem: nobody lives there. There is just this gigantic stretch of Oregon that is completely and totally deserted. Interestingly enough, this stretch of I-84 is called the Old Oregon Trail Highway. And — once I got bored of asking Leo whether we should caulk the wagon or ford the river — this made me realize that those old Manifest Destiny people were serious long-range planners. Hundreds of years later, we still have miles and miles of usable land going unused. Like, you wanna know how to fund a universal health care plan in the U.S.? Sell Eastern Oregon to Japan. We’re not using it.

There is also no cellular phone service for like 200 miles in that part of Oregon. Over the course of an hour, I had four 30-second phone conversations with my best friend, because the service kept cutting out. She was finally like “Where the fuck are you? You should find the nearest U.S. embassy.”

We eventually hit the border town of Ontario, Oregon, which smells, almost in its entirety, like garlic. Being a girl, my first reaction upon smelling something unfamiliar was “Oh my God! What’s wrong with my car?” Once I had assured myself that engine problems do not, under any circumstances, smell like garlic, this was my next thought: “There must be a huge Italian restaurant around here.” I’m not joking. That was my actual thought process. Finally, it occurred to me that they grow garlic there. We were driving through fields of garlic. I’m such a moron.

I’d filled up with gas right before we hit Oregon, because I am scared of getting gas in Oregon. Because there’s a very serious law that you can’t pump your own gas in Oregon. Now, the gas-pumper people have never been anything but 100% super-ulta friendly to me in Oregon, but something about the whole scenario still worries me. In Ontario, I thought I’d crossed out of Oregon, but I was wrong, as I learned when I tried to pump gas and a man came running toward me. “Oh my God!” I said. “Am I still in Oregon???” He said I was. I was honestly afraid they were going to cart me off to jail right then and there. I apologized profusely, and he didn’t billy-club me or anything. He just pumped my gas. It got pretty tense there for a minute, though.

A little bit later we got to Boise, which was totally not what I expected. I have no idea what I expected, but this wasn’t it. It’s a very cute, modern-looking city. It kind of reminded me a little bit of Scottsdale, actually. We stopped there and walked around. I definitely know I was expecting a bunch of overweight mountain-type people in dirty overalls, because I’m an ignorant bitch who watches too much TV. What I found instead were a group of very pretty, very sweet and very well-dressed Boisean girls my age who played with Leo and chatted with me about their own dogs. So I’m sorry, residents of Boise, for being such a pre-judging bitch. I liked Boise a lot, actually.

We drove another two hours to Twin Falls, the home of the College of Southern Idaho, which touts itself as “the fastest growing educational institution in the State of Idaho.” It is apparently not growing fast enough to catch up with the hyphen it needs in “fastest-growing.”

Anyway, I’m super excited for tomorrow, when I will get to drive through Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo and — hooray! — Beaver, Utah. Perhaps I’ll spend the night in Beaver. Deep, deep in Beaver. Heh.