This is Keats writing, Eric’s niece and intern for the summer. I had the pleasure of blogging on the Ireland trip also, so I may be a familiar narrator to those of you who followed our adventures there. Since we haven’t written in quite a while, I’ll do some “back-blogging” on our activities since our last post in May.
After returning from Ireland, Eric and JJ enjoyed a month interim period in Venice before road tripping to Idaho, my home state, in the silver studio minivan. What on earth would compel someone to travel to Idaho? Well, in its defense, Idaho is nowhere near as boring as it may sound, particularly for a photographer. The primary goal of the Idaho trip was to shoot at the College of Idaho, a private liberal arts college in rural Caldwell, 35 miles from the capital city Boise. The College was most gracious in granting us access to the campus, allowing us to shoot in any of its students in any of its buildings. We took full advantage of this and took stills and video footage of swimmers in the pools, basketball players in the gym, and “slackliners” balancing on a rope stretched taut between two trees. We also coordinated a mock movie theater shoot in the College’s Jewitt auditorium—so realistic it even included obnoxious cell phone users, boxes of “propcorn,” and a boy in the back row throwing his empty cup of soda at another boy’s head. Other unique features of Idaho, endearing in their quaintness, were the Roadway Inn and Lardo’s Restaurant in the quiet ski resort town of McCall.
After three weeks of continental breakfasts—conveyor belt muffins, carbon-footprint-costly bananas, and pancakes made from batter in Styrofoam cups—we repacked our gear into the minivan for the hundred and first time (now including my suitcase, laptop, and rollerblades for the Venice boardwalk) and set the GPS to track us back to So-Cal.
Because the drive between Boise and Venice is so long (675 miles to be exact), we made an overnight pitstop in Tahoe. There we stayed with our good friends Jeffery and Agustin, both experts at hosting travel-garbled, ravenous house guests. Jeffery cooked a fantastic dinner of grilled vegetables and chicken breast, and even made a special dinner for me, the obnoxious vegan: cashew egg noodle pasta. Turns out, though, that egg noodles have—go figure—eggs in them, so I had to be so rude as to turn that down, too. Instead, Jeffery was kind enough to candy a mixture of walnuts, cashews, cranberries, and tomatoes, spiced with rosemary and olive oil—a combination I recommend for any adventurous eaters. Despite the hospitality of Jeffery and Agustin, we left for Venice the following morning, another eight and a half hour drive. We dedicated a good eighth of that time paying our respects to Idaho—listening to the entire Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack.
