After I returned from the trip to London, daughter Norma had another trip planned. We were to go to Boise, Idaho, where her youngest daughter, Norine, had bought a house and moved there from San Jose, California. Norine is fortunate, she has a job that can be done mostly on the phone and she found a house that was practically new. A previous owner had burnt green pine that had stunk up the house so that the next owner had ripped out all the flooring and anything that smelled bad and had installed new so that it is in fact a brand new house.
 
Norma's first daughter, who lives in Moscow, Idaho, has a daughter who pilots one of those big rafts on the Salmon River in the summer and lives in a little log cabin summers and works in a restaurant or goes to school in Boise winters. Gerry, Laurie's son, is studying to be a doctor, cuts grass summers, keeps a parking lot clean winters, and had just bought a truck load of Christmas trees, rented part of a parking lot, and he and his two buddies were ready to start business. I watched him set up an eight foot tree in a temporary stand, cut some of the ragged branches from around the bottom then smooth the tree with a hedge trimmer. There were 10 members of his family (not including me) for they had set me in a chair, covered me up and handed me a hot chocolate. Anything that had any green on it was used to make wreathes. He had sawed the trunk off that tree and loaded it in a lady's pickup. I asked what he got for a tree like that. He said $55. I said "Didn't she object?" He said, "No, she was pleased. If I had had one like she wanted, would have been $200."

 A few days before this, he and his girlfriend came and got me and said they were borrowing me for the day. Said they were going to show me where his sister works, and the little log cabin she lives in summers. In the hill country out there the roads follow the course of streams. We saw three different hot springs. One was heating a house and one provided a swimming pool. 

 When we pulled into Stanley, which is a little bit of a place, Gerry drove to a little log cabin and there were two Cessna planes parked at the end of an air strip. While I was in the men's room, Gerry and Kiah made arrangement for the pilot to take us up over the Sawtooth Range. Mr. Danner got me in beside him, and Gerry and Kiah in back, fitted us with headsets, belted us in, and we were off. 

 Flying in a little plane is much different than an airliner. The pilot would say "that is 
Redfish Lake we're about 11 thousand feet up" And you'd look at the end of the wing and about 100 feet further there would be a bare, sharp rock spire, You could see for miles but I couldn't see a place bare of big enough to set a plane down. It was a perfect day for flying, not even enough breeze to ruffle the sock. It looks like there must have been a big explosion that left this big bowl with these jagged bare spikes at the edges. 

 It was -4 degrees that morning but warmed up enough so that while the pilot was scraping a little new snow off the runway, we sat at a picnic table and ate some wonderful sandwiches made of some real Italian bread that Norma had brought from Syracuse. A real fun trip.