3D in the Land of the Great Nothing

If one thing seems to be true, it is that the annual National Stereoscopic Convention tends to be held in places that are really hot (Miami, Dallas, Charleston, and so on)! Boise Idaho, though, was a entirely different sort of hot. Yes, there was a heat wave (the lows were only in the mid-90s and the daytime high went up to 104 and beyond), but Boise offered something else entirely -- nothing. In fact, large wide expanses of absolute nothing. As in, I've never seen so much nothing in my life! And grant me that I've been to a few places that specialize in nothing: South Dakota, northern Russia...but nothing, nothing quite compares to Idaho!

It was my very first trip to the state of Idaho, so I've finally had the opportunity to check that state off my list, but I can't say that it left a huge impression. It was hot, gorgeous, and largely untouched.

Some background. I flew in from Seattle on Thursday evening, straight from a week of work in Tacoma. This proved to be a pretty easy trip. Northwest couldn't take me so I was forced (as in please twist my arm!) to fly Horizon Air, which definitely won major points for service (free beer and wine for coach class and real snacks). No wonder they are so highly rated! Remind me to be forced to go to more conferences on Horizon.

As for my destination, I got my introduction to the new climate quite rudely. When we landed at 11pm, it was still 94 degrees outside, which is very strange to me. I've been in deserts, but whoever header of pitch black and still baking? Deserts at least are cool at night. So, roasting away in the midnight heat, I picked up my rental and drove into town and settled in at my hotel.

Friday

Now, if there's an image (beyond roasting desert) that sums up Idaho for me, it is this view out of my hotel window that greeted me at dawn. The theme of the state must be: We've got barren desert in the background and over-watered greenery in the foreground. But at least we have football!

Aside from that, the beginning of my day was none too memorable. A breakfast that was barely edible and cost way too much and a bit of hassle figuring out how to get out of my hotel (including an unplanned detour through Boise as I figured out how to get turned around and head back in the correct direction). Boise is one of these cities of one-way streets, so you better know where you are going, or you will be very seriously lost.

Downtown Boise is also strikingly modern as these photographs show. If you search hard enough, you will find a building or two that were built before 1980, but you'll have to search pretty hard in (at least in the central part of the city where I was). They have torn down just about any building that was built since before Reagan held the Presidency.

I'm not sure if this extensive urban redevelopment is a sign of good planning or bad. But it made it very hard to find any sign of what Boise might have looked like even a few years ago. That seems a shame to me as the new buildings lack much character. A side effect of this mad rush to rebuild everything is that there was construction everywhere as the brisk pace of development appears to be continuing.

Although having complained about Boise's urban redesign so much, I will have to admit to some exaggeration: This last picture (above) actually reveals one old building -- a really pretty old red brick affair only a few blocks from where the convention was taking place. But it is in a distinct minority!

In the end, though, none of this really matters, because I didn't come to Boise to sightsee, but rather to buy stereocards. So, heading back to the modern, here is a shot of the convention center where the show itself was hosted.

So, how was booty acquisition?

I had a very slow start (Friday mornings tend to be slow but you have to get started early anyway if you're going to get through everything and everyone). I started room hopping around 9am, but no one really opened up for another hour or so, so that I managed to traverse every floor of the hotel twice before I found anyone really open for business. In the meantime, I did have a nice chat with an older couple who were selling off cameras and got to look at some really pretty old apparatus. But it wasn't the card shopping that I had come for. And, as much as it might be fun to own a functional 150 year old camera, it really isn't what I do (and how in heck would I get it past the TSA?).

Room hopping is a very random way to shop. Until you actually walk in the door, you can't be too sure of what you'll find. I did want to catch Michael Maslan, from whom I'd bought a lot of stuff in Charleston in 2003 but had not seen since. I was lucky and managed to do so. And he referred me on to a friend (Michael Fairley) whose stuff was not as fancy but whose prices were easier on the wallet. And just when I had decided that I had spent more than enough money (I'd already cooked through $1400 in the space of the morning and early afternoon -- out of a total budget of only $2000!), I ran across a woman who was getting rid of her card collection ... and she specialized in children's view (like me). While I had a lot of her stuff already, there was plenty that was new to me and I was down another $500 when I was done that afternoon. This raised the dilemma of course of what I was supposed to do the rest of the weekend since I had only a few hundred dollars left and another day and a half to shop. But that was a problem for later.

It was already early afternoon and the merchants were closing their rooms so they could set up for the official sales days on Saturday and Sunday. It was time for me to take a breather for myself and my wallet. No more shopping until the next morning!

So, I grabbed lunch at Pizza Hut and took stock of my situation. The cheapest thing (and, in fact, the only thing to do since no one was selling anymore for the rest of the day) was to go over to the convention itself and have a look around. I would also try to find my friend Dave, with whom I'd hung out in Charleston and in Dallas. He wouldn't be doing much shopping as he's not much into the antiques, so the odds were that I'd find him at the stereo theater.

I decided to head over to the Stereo Art Gallery to check out the modern photography. Now, the modern stuff isn't really of too much interest to me. First of all, because it is modern and I'm big on the Edwardian stuff. But also because you usually cannot buy the art on display and I prefer stuff I could own.

But I did fall in love with a great skyline of New York City (see image left) and was excited to discover that it was for sale! Mind you, it cost about $2000, but hey, it original art so that wasn't bad. And for the rest of the day I pondered the idea of purchasing it (of course, it would really blow my budget!).

After the shows ended, we caught up with the guy with whom Dave was sharing hotel room and his friend (both of them from Seattle), and the four of us went to P.F. Chang's for dinner. The two guys are big modern photographers so the conversation leaned a bit more towards that topic, but we had the usual chit chat and the whole thing was really pleasant. Plus the food was pretty good (despite the fact that we have a P.F. Chang's here in Middleton, I've never gone before -- the ginger beer was particularly good). And after dinner Dave and I rushed back for the auction, which I found a bit of a disappointment as the cards for sale were mostly scenery and not very interesting to me. Dave however had a viewer that he wanted to bid on so we hung out and gabbed for a while. He didn't manage to win the viewer, but we had fun anyway.

After that, I headed back to my hotel room, counted up my purchases, and pondered whether to buy that photo of New York.

Saturday

I got up the next morning with time to kill since the Trade Fair didn't open to the general public until 9, so I had a leisurely breakfast. This time I figured that I would order a la carte since the buffet the day before had been so bad, but they messed up my order so badly that I realized I would have been better off with the buffet after all. Not the world's most successful dining experience!

Having yet more time to kill when I got to the convention site, I decided to browse the farmer's market that was just setting up. The fact that it wasn't even in full steam yet surprised me. Apparently, Idaho farmers don't start at the crack of dawn like they do here in Wisconsin. Most of the sellers hadn't even gotten ready at 8:30 when I walked through. (And note the sign advertising something they call "Idaho Cheese" -- as if!)

Before I entered the dealer's room to undertake more major buying, I went back to the gallery room to check out the NYC photo again and consider the whole purchase thing. But when I finally got a look at it again, I was disappointed to discover that the matting was water damaged and warped. A small thing perhaps, but the idea of spending over $1000 on a photo and then having to get it re-matted seemed a bit silly. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized that I just didn't want it that badly.

So, having decided to "save" myself all that money, I assured myself that my budget was now optional and I could go ahead and buy what I wanted to buy at the Trade Fair. Let the games commence!

I did my usual circuit through the room first to make sure I knew who was there and having determined that everyone normal and expected was present (and no major surprises) I worked through the usual suspects. There was the guy who yelled at his wife in Dallas (I didn't buy as much from him this year although the wife was nowhere to be seen). There were the Kamins to shop through. All the regulars.

In the early afternoon, I took my lunch break, going out for my (now traditional) sushi lunch break. Of course, it was about 2pm so most places were pretty dead. I had looked through the phone listings for Japanese restaurants the night before and come up with some likely suspects. I ended up at Koi restaurant, which I thought was a funny name since my favorite Tacoma sushi these days comes from Two Koi. Anyway, Boise's Koi was fine, but only about half as good as Two Koi.

So, now fed on fish, it was time to go back. I figured I would get a little more shopping in and find Dave since one of my other traditions is taking pictures with Dave on Saturday afternoons. The tricky part was that Dave had a date with his roommate to take some pictures of live models that evening. He wasn't terribly excited about this as he is more of a still life kind of guy, but the roommate convinced him that he needed to branch out. It was good fun teasing him about it in any case as Dave is a shy guy and the image of him trying to take pictures of some scantily glad fashion model was just too amusing of an image to muster.

So, I found Dave and we established that we'd go in about an hour or so. And meanwhile I stumbled across the Oliver Wendall Holmes Library tables. Last year, the NSA decided to shut down its research library and sell off the collection. This raised no end of screams and complaints, but once the selling started (last year) it didn't take people very long to swoop down and snatch up the stuff. By this year though they were apparently old news and selling almost everything for $3 a card. Now, there are very few cards (with people on them) that I won't buy for $3. So, I picked about about 150 of them. And since the masses had picked through everything and pulled it all out of order, the search process took forever as I had to look through 60+ boxes of cards to see what they had. I felt a bit guilty about buying all of this ex libris stuff, but it has to find a home, right?

So, now it was about 3pm and I didn't see any sign of Dave so I made my way over to Maslan's table for another round of hunting. This time, Michael's pulling out stuff he hasn't gotten around to pricing yet so I start looking through those. Dave showed up but I was already in mid-search so we agreed that we would get together at 4pm. I continued going through boxes, which took until 4:15 and led to angry glares from the management because the Trade Fair was supposed to close at 4pm.

So, I catch up with Dave and we have a little time but not much because his shoot is at 7pm and he has to meet the roommate at 6pm. So we grab Dave's car and he gives me the quickie tour of Boise. We take a spin past the capital so I can get a picture or two, and drop by some historic buildings including this assay office (above left), where they used to bring the gold. And we ended up at the Old Penitentiary, where I capture a few more shots.

Dave took a few shots too (as you can see from this exciting Dave Action Picture), although his evening plans called for a longer photo shoot out there with the live models (or whatever they called that!).

Once Dave dropped me off, I realized that I had the whole evening on my own. My initial thought was to go someplace interesting. And my initial (uneducated) thought was to go the Craters of the Moon National Monument which I figured would have some pretty eerie landscape to shoot. But the problem was that I had no idea how far away it was (my rental car map wasn't too good at showing scale). I knew it was a fair distance, but figured that I had at least 3 hours of daylight left and the speed limit is pretty high in Idaho so I ought to be able to get a bit far before dark. I figured that I would just hit the road and get a better sense of scale once I was headed out.

After going out about 30 miles and seeing the type of exciting scenery that you see here, I began to realize that it was over 200 miles away, so while I could get there before dark, it would be basically dusk It might make for some pretty shots, but I had no idea where I was going or what I would do when I got there, so it was a plain silly idea. Instead, I turned around, but I was still determined to do something interesting with the evening -- just something a bit closer to home.

As I was heading back to Boise, I noticed a brown sign for a park or something at the next exit and figured that "park" = "scenery," so I might as well take the exit and see what I could see. This turned out to be Rte 21, which heads north from Boise up into the mountains, following the Boise river. And it was an excellent choice for a sight-seeing diversion.

First, I stopped at the Diversion Dam power plant and got these nice shots of the river (above). I jumped back into my car and kept heading up river and got to this park where an even more imposing view/dam (below).

While the park is nice from the outside, I thought it might be nice to get some pictures of it up close, but that proved more difficult. I tried to drive in to the park, but there was an admit fee. I didn't see how hanging out for 20 minutes and snapping pictures would justify the cost, so I turned around and caught a few more surreptitious pics on the way out, and I headed further uphill and upriver.

As I went higher and higher, the views got more and more impressive, although I was still struck by the utter emptiness of the place. Finally, when I got to this canyon and bridge at More's Creek and the Arrowhead Dam, I decided that I had come as far as I needed to.

And oddly enough, as far as I had come, I still managed to run into this 3-D cameraman (one of the Japanese contingent that always comes out).

After this, I decided to turn around and head back to Boise. And being alone for dinner, I didn't have any good original ideas, so I ended up at Ram (simply a branch of the place I go to occasionally in Tacoma). The meal was normal enough and I ended up striking up a conversation with the bartender when I paid for my meal with my State Farm credit card (he apparently moonlights at an insurance agency and wanted to know who my agent was).

So, that was my big day in Boise!

Sunday

Sundays are always a bit anti-climactic. I usually have to leave early to catch my plane. Everyone is a bit burned out. I'm usually beyond broke (this time was, of course, no exception).

So, the day consisted of some brief shopping in the morning and then an early departure out of Boise (with a four hour lay over in Minneapolis).

Afterward

So, was it a success? I usually measure success in terms of how many cards I acquire at the show. This time, I picked up 530 cards (including about 10 cards for Kriss) and I spent about $4000 in all. That was something of a record for me, both in terms of quantity and cost (with a slightly higher average price per card, as I spent a lot of more of rarer cards).

It was a bit of a shame to not get to spend more time with Dave. But we never managed to connect before the show to plan anything and got dragged in different directions. I hope those modeling babes were fun!

Finally, there was the locale. Boise didn't impress me that much. It seemed awfully quiet and characterless -- a combination of desert with overdeveloped urban area. With so few historic building, the place seemed like a wasteland. And the climate was certainly not hospitable. Here's hoping that next year's convention in Grand Rapids will be better!