Bad timing in Boise

 After four days, it was time to leave Twin Falls, Idaho, and continue west. We wanted to stop in Boise to see the state capitol, but we couldn't find a good campground (for a good price) here. So we decided to see this city as a stop-over on a moving day. Mark found a big parking lot a mile away, and we parked the motor home. Then we unhooked the pickup and drove to the Idaho state capitol.

It's a beautiful old building that takes great pictures from the outside.

At the bottom of the steps in front, notice the bell in the picture below.

Years ago, the U.S. Treasury had 50 Liberty Bell replicas produced, and shipped one to each state capitol. The stipulation was that it was to be displayed on the grounds of the state capitol, where it was accessible for citizens to see and touch. We've seen these bells over and over in our quest to visit all the state capitols, and Idaho did a good job of making sure visitors didn't miss seeing and touching their bell.

It's a good thing that the outside tour of the building was so successful, because we had bad timing in touring the inside. It looked like we walked into a construction zone when we started our tour at the visitor office.

Some of the sections further from the refurbishing work looked quite elegant with their marble staircases.

And you can almost crop all of the scaffolding out of this picture of the ornate Corinthian columns and sky lights on one of the upper floors.

But that tower of scaffolding continues all the way from the basement to the top of the dome in the most picturesque center of the building. If it wasn't so ugly, it was actually interesting to see the engineering behind this temporary metal structure inside the capitol.

All of our pictures have backgrounds with lumber or metal scaffolding. This picture of the columns that surround the tall  foyer illustrates the use of scagliola--a mixture of gypsum, glue, marble dust and granite that makes concrete pillars look like polished marble. Using real marble columns would have been too heavy and too expensive.

Even though we had bad timing in seeing the inside of the Idaho capitol building, we did think they had a very well done film in the visitor center that mentioned many interesting facts about the capitol. It described the pieces of artwork in the art gallery on the fourth floor, but we found that most of them are now covered up.

But by poking a phone through the wide open edges, we got an interesting view of this statue of George Washington that was described in the film. It was carved out of a single piece of pine by an Austrian immigrant. He worked on the carving at night by candlelight, and his model was a postage-stamp size likeness of the first president. The carving took four years, and it has been bronzed and then gold-leafed to make it the shiny statue we got a peek of today.

We guess that the next piece wasn't valuable enough to cover during construction, but it has an interesting history. After World War II, France sent gifts to the United States to say "Thank You" ("Merci" in French) for the gifts of food, medicine, fuel, and clothing sent to France after the war. A "Merci Train" delivered gifts to each of the state capitols. This was Idaho's gift--a concrete replica of the "Winged Victory of Samothrace."  It makes us wonder what the other states received and where their Merci Train gifts are now.

While we are used to viewing the chambers of the Senate and the House in other state capitols, in Idaho we were not permitted.

So our timing was bad for an inside capitol tour in Boise. It's a good thing that the flower beds were pretty on the outside.

The zinnias love the weather here in Boise, Idaho!

Because we like college campuses almost as much as state capitols, our next stop was Boise State. We found a very helpful visitor center at the football stadium, with a volunteer that took this picture for us.

Both of our sons are college football fans, and we texted them a picture of the football field with the question, "Can you guess where we are today?" They both shot back quick replies like, "I will always recognize the "smurf turf" of Boise State University.

After finding out that we were from Oklahoma, the volunteer at the visitor center was also quick to point out the Fiesta Bowl trophy, and the OU football helmet beside it. That was the year that Boise State upset a power house football program like OU using the Statue of Liberty trick play. That win helped Boise State gain prominence in the sports world. Our son with two degrees from OU texted, "That turf sure is ugly."

They are proud of their Boise Broncos on this campus, and it was an interesting stop on our moving-day.

We also made a successful stop at a produce stand in Boise, and then we picked up the motor home from its parking lot and continued our journey west. We will travel 209 miles today--a long travel day for us. Most of our repositioning days are around 100 miles. Much of the 3.5 hours on the highway was through flat desert-like terrain, so it was good to have a place to stop and look around--even if we had some bad timing in Boise at the state capitol.