Boise, ID

Our second trip to Veterans Memorial Park was amazing. The last time we were there we decided to save the river/greenbelt path for a different day. We started out were we left off right before we could hear the river. The bridge going across was red and had a sign ‘no swimming or wading’ because it was hovering over a fast paced canal that looked slightly dangerous but not very deep. We saw a whole bunch of people coming back from swimming in the river. It was a really nice day and they seemed to not even be cold and some weren’t even wet. We followed the bridge and went into a tree infested area that looked more like a forest than part of the park.

We saw a green stable bridge that had the actual river flowing beneath it. It surprised us to find so many fallen branches just in suspended flowing animation.

We saw a broken branch that we didn’t know how it was still standing straight up because the bottom part of it that was in the river had decayed off. I figured it must be because it was connected to another tree somehow.

We continued on the path that in itself had a design imprinted on it; with most of the path a light cement color and then in the middle a separate darker color. It was interesting to walk on because it wasn’t all even. We saw even more branches/logs in the water non-moving and almost identical. Soon there was a hilly dirt path that if a person weren’t paying attention they would or could fall into the calm river/lake and hit a whole bunch of branches.

Being very careful we came onto a few paths that split into different directions, we took the most direct path or what we thought was the most direct path and we saw what we thought was the river, but instead it was a lake that went around in a circle with people swimming and fishing. We saw a black fish but it disappeared quickly. Andrew tried to get more to come out and swim but none did. We saw a green bench and sat down to enjoy the view and because we were kind of worn out from walking so far already.

The view was really beautiful with the trees reflecting in the calm water. We sat there for a good fifteen minutes before we realized it would be dark soon. So we walked forward thinking that it’d lead us back to where we had initially come. We obviously had to wait a while because we really had no idea where we were going and people usually don’t hand out maps.

We walked past a tree swing with that we had no idea how a person was supposed to grab it to swing. They’d have to put a lot of effort into not hitting a branch that was sticking out and would have impaled a person if they landed on it properly. Soon there was a magical path that came out of nowhere and we headed back to the car.