10 Very Boise things we’ll be doing with company this summer

midlife sentence | boise things to do

My dad liked to tell a story about a conversation he’d had with a colleague, maybe an intern or some other young employee, about how time passes faster every year the older you get.

“Well, the years must just be whipping by for you, then,” this person pointed out, a statement my dad found particularly adroit, and enjoyed sharing with us a number of times over the years.

I usually think about that “whipping by” sentiment this time of year, when I realize summer has snuck up on us again, leaving me totally unprepared for weeks of juggling family activity and working from home, and I’m on the edge of frantic all the time when I’d much rather be taking some time to enjoy the season.

In fact, I think shared that little anecdote about my dad in an earlier post, so apparently, I’m at the age where not only are the years whipping by, but my memory regularly takes a powder as well.

I’ll just warn you, I don’t think things are going to improve.

Anyway … that’s not the point of this blog. The point is: it’s summer. Already. And while we don’t have any big trips planned, we will be having company. Jack’s invited a friend to visit from Denmark. He’ll be staying with us a little less than a month, which is just about the perfect amount of time to share a summer sampling of my awesome hometown. Here’s a little list of ten very Boise (and close to Boise) things we’ll be doing with our out-of-town guests this summer:

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Seattle with Teenagers

Midlife Sentence | Seattle Space Needle

“I’m a weed detector,” Jack said as a distinctive acrid aroma filled the foyer. From the living room we heard the front door open and then close not one second later, followed by a chorus of giggles.

Apparently our Weed Detector had been successful in locating the enjoyer of said aromatic herb, standing in her own little fog on the front porch about five feet away from our entry.

I don’t know if most towns would appreciate a travel blog starting out with an anecdote about pot, but if you’re planning a trip to Seattle with adolescents, it’s probably helpful to come to grips from the outset with the fact that that Seattle is one of the most weed friendly towns in the US. If you happen to hail from a conservative state like ours, and you’re traveling with a small gaggle of teens, you can probably expect a little fascination with the topic, as well as someone pointing out the head shop on just about every single corner.

Midlife Sentence | SeattleIf nothing else, we established right off the bat this weekend that our sophisticated older kid is quite the bloodhound, able to suss out cannabis smoke within a radius of little more than arms length. Nothing gets by that guy.

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A little more time in Copenhagen: Tivoli, the Zoo, and a Spectacular View

Midlife Sentence | Copenhagen, Christiania

A couple of weeks into our trip, we had another opportunity to explore Copenhagen, when we returned from Finland with the honeymooners, en route to Sønderborg. The flat we rented this time was more centrally located than the one in Nørrebro, and if the weather cooperated, we’d easily be able to walk to a few attractions.

The weather did cooperate (which in Denmark means temps in the low to mid 60s, intermittent rain and some sun. As with our last trip to northern Europe, I made the mistake of packing sundresses. Sigh.), so we came up with a plan to do way more than would be physically possible for mere mortals in one day (if you know us, you know that’s kind of our MO).

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Exploring more of Denmark: Haderslev, Aarhus, Skagen, and a Viking Graveyard

Midlife Sentence | Denmark Skagen

We returned from Germany on Sunday and dropped Jack off at his host family home in Sønderborg (he’ll finish out the last week of his exchange and then travel home from Billund. Our tickets are outbound from Copenhagen), and continued on to see a couple of other points of interest in Denmark.

One of those was the town of Haderslev, not too far north of Sønderborg. Mike picked this place out because he thought it would be a quiet stopover on our way north, and also because at least one of my ancestors is from here: my grandmother Betty’s great grandfather Nis Jensen Krough, to be exact. Nis was born in 1849 in Haderslev, and died in 1908 in Des Moines, Iowa. He married Gertrude Marie Christiansen, also of Denmark (although her birth city is unknown to us).

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What to do with one day in Germany, or zwei or drei

Midlife Sentence | Lüneburg Am Sande

It has happened before: regardless of what Einstein said about the definition of insanity, we’ve done the exact same thing we’ve always done and had something totally unexpected happen. Take this trip, for example. We’ve had such good luck finding lodging with minimal knowledge about where we were going or extra wads of cash to spend. Even when we were in Copenhagen, and I’d made our airbnb reservations after reading exactly one article on how cool the Nørrebro neighborhood is, we ended up getting a hip, little flat in what turned out to be the neighborhood about which everyone we’ve talked to since has made that sucking-air-through-your-teeth-sound at, even then we had good luck.

That luck-with-the-lodging thing kind of went pfhht in Hamburg.

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Our Denmark Adventure: How Somebody Totally Undersold Sønderborg, and I’m Going to Need a Pastry Intervention

Midlife Sentence | Sonderborg

Our oldest son is a young man of many talents, but I must say, he’s got a ways to go if he wants a future in the travel industry. When we’ve talked about the town he’s called home this past year, he totally undersold it. The impression he left us with was: safe, small, and rainy. There’s a rocky beach and a harbor, a decent mall, and a great kebab shop within walking distance.

We weren’t really prepared to be blown away by Sønderborg, a seaside town of around 30,000 that straddles the narrow straight of Alsslund in southern Denmark.

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Deciphering Finnish Wedding Traditions

Midlife Sentence | A Finnish Wedding

Two summers ago, Saara, who’d been our first exchange student nine years ago, visited with her beau, Joona. We did all the usual Idaho stuff to see if we could scare him off. We camped, set off fireworks in the street, made him drink cheap beer at a baseball game in a zillion-degree heat, and asked him all kinds of intrusive (to Finns) questions like “how was your flight?” and “did you sleep well?”

Anyway, we and the other members of Saara’s Boise circle failed to scare him off that week and – long story short – he proposed before breakfast on their last day in town, and then we all hugged (more intrusion), and sat down to pancakes.

Midlife Sentence | A Finnish Wedding

Later that same year, Saara sent me a locket with a small slip of paper inside asking if I would be a bridesmaid. Saara’s the kind of person who puts a lot of thought into things like that. The fact that she knows I am more of the kind of person who recruits bridesmaids over beer and still thought I would be suitable for the job tells you a little about the bond we have.

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Pori, Huikee and the Sea

Midlife Sentence | Pori

It’s obvious how much thought Joona and Saara and others have put into planning our stay in Finland. On our first full day, Saara had to work for part of the day, so Joona took us on a short walking trip around Pori and to visit a natural history exhibit in the town museum. That evening Joona’s parents, Matti and Pirkko, fixed another meal for us in their home in town.

Pori is a town of about 85,000, with a university, and lumber and manufacturing as major industries. Established in the 1550s, it has burned down and been rebuilt nine times until someone got the great idea to install wide esplanades as firebreaks.

Midlife Sentence | Pori
Photo by Mike Markley

Next week, it will host its annual Pori Jazz Festival, and organizers were setting up tents and platforms in the streets while we were exploring in the drizzly weather. I don’t know a lot of the artists on the bill, but Chaka Kahn and Grace Jones were two I recognized.

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Sauna Time in Finland

Midlife Sentence | Finnish Lake, Sauna Time

In Finnish there are, apparently, a number of different words for “mosquito,” and one that in certain dialects, also means “cow.” I don’t know what that says about Finns, the complexity of their language, the mosquitos around here, or cows for that matter. I haven’t seen any cows, but the mosquitos are prolific.

For the most part, they’re also thankfully disinterested in our party. I think if one of those words is for “polite mosquito,” that’s the kind we appear to be dealing with this week.

We arrived in Pori yesterday via Onnibus, a low cost transit service that features double decker buses, with free wifi and chargers. For about 30 Euros per round-trip ticket, plus a small charge for seat reservations, I was able to secure the front row on the top deck for our party. It’s about the most fun and lowest cost way to travel the three and a half hours from Helsinki to Pori I could imagine. The scenery was fantastic, and the chance to sit and watch the landscape go by gave us a nice respite from the crowds and cobblestones of Helsinki (although that is one of our favorite cities).

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A sunny day in Suomenlinna

Midlife Sentence | Suomenlinna

I have to say, I thought our kids would remember more about Helsinki from our last trip here than they actually do (which just goes to show, if you’re trying to make family memories with young-ish kids, or even with pre-teens, you should formulate your plans around what the adults want to do and just tell the kids later what a great time everyone had, but I digress). The last time we were in Helsinki, the boys were twelve and eight years old, and I’m thinking they were more focused on not losing track of their luggage than they were on taking in the scenery.

… Maybe it’s because we kept saying: “if you forget anything, we’re not coming back for it,” which was not the exact truth, but at twelve and eight years old, one rather freaks out about losing one’s Gameboy, or being abandoned on a train platform. I don’t know why either kid would think we’d abandon him, but I am impressed with how each of them tends to keep up on our trips.

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