Day 5: Boise, Idaho to Mack's Inn, Idaho

Sadly, the J.J. Shaw House was not serving breakfast this morning because one of the innkeepers was taking her daughter to college for the first time, so Aaron and I had to find other breakfast. On the recommendation of various internet restaurant reviewers, we chose Goldy’s Breakfast Bistro in historic downtown Boise, within view of the Idaho Statehouse. It is located, appropriately enough, on Capitol Boulevard, which was identifiable on the Boise city map in our 50-state and Canada atlas. Unfortunately, most of the streets close to the B&B were not on the map. While Route 20 was easy to stay on and easy to exit in Boise, it was not particularly easy to get back on. After some backtracking, meandering, and sharp tongued comments about each other’s navigating abilities, Aaron and I were finally able to make our way to Goldy’s.
The storefront itself is relatively small and easy for the inattentive to miss. Inside, there is a main dining area with a few tables, a counter, the cashier, and the kitchen. We were in the additional tables up the stairs. The menu is massive, but the greatest opportunity for creativity is in the make-your-own combo section. There is a list of meats, potatoes, and breads which can be served with eggs, an omelet, chicken fried steak, a salmon filet and probably a few other things I can’t remember. I had two eggs over easy with Goldy’s special potatoes, sage pork sausage, and cinnamon raisin walnut toast. Aaron had an omelet with bacon, potatoes, and a pancake. The meal that comes is intimidating, even to seasoned food pros like ourselves. If you really want to clean your plate, begin training with that competitive hot dog eater from Japan, because there is no hope for us mere mortals. While all the food was delicious, the breakfast meats really stole the show. Both the pork sausage and the bacon were perfectly cooked and incredibly flavorful. A few of the online reviewers touted Goldy’s as the greatest breakfast in America. Because we still have a lot of traveling to do, I’m not willing to go that far. Not just yet.
It was amazing how quickly the city of Boise ended and the vast, open hillsides resumed. The landscape was more of the same thing we had already seen in eastern Oregon and western Idaho: vast stretches of agricultural land surrounded by mountains and covered by a massive sky.
After several hours, the landscaped changed abruptly. Suddenly, instead of rolling tan grass land, there was nothing but mounds of coal black gravel as far as the eye could see. It looked like the whole area had been burned, but in fact, this was Craters of the Moon National Monument. When I had seen this name on the map, I expected that we would drive by a large crater. Maybe there was some large crater off the road, but if I had to guess, I would say that it earned this name because it looked like a little piece of outer space landed in Idaho.
Later we passed through Arco, Idaho. From the road, Arco’s most impressive sight is a mountain that rises above the city that has numbers that appear to be the years of graduating classes on it. If this were just a year or two, it would be average graffiti, but the mountain had at least two dozen numbers easily visible from the road, the earliest I could find being 31. It was very memorable show of town history.
A few miles outside of Arco, we saw that traffic, which generally zips along at 75 miles per hour, had come to a complete stop. We were directly behind a cement truck and had no view of what was going on ahead of us. It became clear after a few minutes that we weren’t going anywhere quickly, so we opened the windows, turned off the car, and finished off the cinnamon raisin walnut toast that remained from breakfast. With the car quieted, the vast emptiness of the landscape finally set in. It made me wonder how the pioneers, making around 15 miles a day I think, survived the trek with their any of their sanity remaining. They certainly had no Christian radio (which has been absolutely dominant for the past few days) or digital cameras to entertain them and fewer landmarks to remind them that they were, in fact, making progress. It boggles the mind. Eventually, a white truck with spinning lights and a sign reading “Pilot Car-Follow Me” pulled to the head of the line of cars and lead us through a construction zone. Apparently, creating a detour was just infeasible in an area with so few roads, so they just let traffic build up in one direction and the pilot car lead one group at a time. This seems like a sensible enough solution, but it is a little scary for out-of-towners worried that they might be stranded there forever. In the construction area, they had tarred the road sprinkled a layer of gravel on it. As we got out of the construction zone, the traffic ahead of us began to pick up speed. We began to hear the pieces of gravel hitting the undercarriage of our car and being flicked at us by the cement truck. Inevitably, a large piece eventually popped up and chipped the windshield. Aaron and I smiled and high fived each other. Here’s to getting the insurance.
We pulled over in Idaho Falls to get gas and check for any other damage. We did not see any other places the gravel had dinged the car, but we were truly amazed at the biodiversity that had been splattered across the front of our car, looking like a Jackson Pollock work on the white grill. Some of the bugs that had gone to their great reward were still recognizable as a moth or a grasshopper. Most were just smudges. Out of sick fascination, we decided that we wouldn’t wash the car the entire trip, just to see how bad it got. But we would have to start cleaning off the windshield. Otherwise we might be blinded by the time we hit Iowa.
As we approached the eastern end of Idaho and Yellowstone National Park, Lodgepole Pines returned to the landscape, replacing the farmland. We stopped at Mack’s Inn, a Motel/RV/Cabin/Dinner Theater resort outside of Island Park (population 215. Home to the world’s longest Main Street at 33 miles). Although we passed a sign for the town of Mack’s Inn as we approached Mack’s Inn, it seems like the town does not include anything but the resort. Because the resort was founded over a hundred years ago, it is conceivable that creating the town of Mack’s Inn might have been a brilliant publicity trick to get the resort literally on the map (that’s how I found it). We checked in made our way to our cabin. The cabins in our area were made of logs and painted brick red. On the inside, there was a single room with a queen bed, a coffee table, a small couch, and a fridge, and a bathroom built out of brick that appears to have been added later, but probably not much later. The shower was a metal box that was bolted to the floor but not to any of exterior walls. The toilet had a little strip of paper around the closed seat that reassuringly read “Sanitized.”
After a quick walk around the campus, we went to the Mack’s Inn Dinner Theater. We got there a little early, even for our 6:15 dinner, and found a number of older couples outside and two employees chatting while one casually strummed the banjo. We entered promptly at 6:15 to find western decorated room with 40 place settings on long tables. We were seated across from a young Mormon couple from Pocatello on their honeymoon and a retired couple that lived half the year in Texas and half the year in Yukon, Idaho. We talked and joked through the simple, hearty dinner of prime rib, corn, baked beans, a potato, dinner rolls, and a salad, with ice cream and a cookie for dessert. We told our dinner companions about our cross country trip and how we had driven in from Boise. They groaned about how boring that drive must have been. We nodded in agreement, too embarassed to admit that we had been taking pictures of the landscape the whole time.
After dinner, the young people who had been our servers left the dining room and began the evening’s production of Phantom of the Grand Ole Opry. The story begins as Billy Ray Doofus, a lanky young man in a plaid shirt and a mullet, Winona Jugg, a woman in red corkscrew wig with brilliant blue eyeshadow and a pillow padded bust, and costume mistress Frau Knockwurst, a woman in a black Betty Page wig with an accent that sounded like Boris and Natasha, are preparing for a show in the Opry which has just been bought by Andrew Firim and Raoul Delacourt from New York City. Andrew Firim was a bald man in a suit with an ineffective punch and a British accent and Raoul Delacourt was a clumsy, wildly effeminate character obsessed with his long, silky wig of hair. Realizing that these caricatures were an accurate projection of how the crowd thought of people from the east coast, Aaron and I decided that it would be best not to tell anyone else that we were from Boston. Thank God the rental car has Washington plates. When Winona is threatened by the ghost that lives in the Opry, she is replaced by Christine, a young chorus girl who won first prize (the first season of HeeHaw on Dee-Vee-Dee) in the karaoke contest at the Flying J truckstop in Tupelo. Christine has developed a beautiful country singing voice under the tutelage of the Phantom, whom she knows as the Angel of Music. The Phantom goes insane with jealousy when Christine falls in love with Raoul. Hilarity ensues. The cast was very entertaining, but they were a bit upstaged by a little girl in the second row who shouted out perfectly timed quips that threw both the actors and the audience into the giggles. For example, when Frau Knockwurst, who is desperate for a solo song but cannot carry a tune in a bucket, begins to sing and the rest of the cast cringes. Frau Knockwurst protests “I have been told I have the voice of an angel.” The girl in the audience shouts “You Don’t!” The audience bursts out in laughter and the cast, stifling smiles, struggles to move on. Part of the fun was that the cast did not take the production too seriously. Early in the show, Andrew Firim received a letter from the Phantom. The mysterious letter was delivered by a plastic mechanical arm through a window in the set, accompanied by an announcement “You’ve Got Mail.” When one of the cast members asked why the letter had arrived in such a strange way, the others responded in unison “because here at Mack’s Inn, we put the special in special effects.” After the show ended, Andrew Durant, who played the Phantom and owns the theater along with his wife Julie, sincerely thanked the audience for coming and, as the owner, asked that anyone who was at all unhappy let him know how to make the experience better. He also encouraged anyone who enjoyed the show to tell all their friends about it, so here goes: The Mack’s Inn Dinner Theatre is deliriously silly family fun and a truly unique experience. As the woman from Texas told me at intermission “I betcha don’t see anything like that in Boston.”