The Parade of Lasts for the Air Force Academy’s Class of 2025 began in earnest in May when the Class of 2024 “took the hill” and passed an important milestone for me the past few weeks.
For the past few years, my daughter has shared a portion of her time off during the summer for a little summer adventure. Whether quiet time in Ohio (including visiting the Columbus Zoo), exploring Rocky Mountain National Park with her brother (including a close encounter with a moose), or crisscrossing South Dakota, Montana, and North Dakota while marking three more states of my list of those visited. This year we zeroed in on the one state in the Lower 48 I had yet to visit – Idaho.
Side note – In addition to being part of the Parade of Lasts, this also stands as a reminder that “your experience is the right experience.” I fully realize many cadets don’t block out extended time to spend with their families, whether that’s due to other obligations (internships, etc.) or just other things they want to do. Yes, I am thankful and realize how lucky I am. I also see plenty of Facebook posts of cadets at home during break sprawled on the couch napping or just zoned out staring at the TV. I’ve also read posts about cadets stopping home for a long weekend in between their own adventures. I love all of that. Every single one of these young men and women are different – despite how they all look alike during parades and such – and that means a different experience, for them and for their parents.
As has been the case the past few years, I happily handled all the logistics (sorting through options and creating an itinerary are all part of a vacation’s joy for me) and despite a minor delay in my arrival, we both ended up in Boise around the same time.
My usual MO on trips like this is to get moving quickly and pack in as much as possible. This one would be different, though. As I was considering different scenarios, I wistfully recognized this would be an important part of the Parade of Lasts and built in more “down” time than felt natural. Our main target for the trip would be the Craters of the Moon National Monument in the eastern part of the state, a few hours from Boise and my instinct while planning was to figure we’d collect our bags, hop in the rental car, and head out that way. But this trip would be different.
We would spend the evening in Boise at a nearby hotel. Since there’s not a decent Italian restaurant in my town, I had scouted out what looked like a decent spot for pasta and that became the big event once we got settled in. As luck would have it, we found the place temporarily closed with a handmade sign indicating some sort of kitchen maintenance. Now, for many years, this would be my problem to solve but by the time I had read the sign taped to the door, my cadet had found a few other options and said, “let’s try this one.” Before I knew it, I had a decent plate of Italian in front of me for the first time in months. And, you know, a few years ago, I’m not sure she would have taken the initiative to do that.
The next day, we made our way East, first stop, “The Niagara of the West”:
My father was a point-to-point traveler. When we set out for a trip, whether it was to Point au Baril in Ontario or sunny Florida, only one thing mattered, getting there as quickly as possible. That led to some torturous trips as no matter how bad you had to relieve yourself, the one and only reason to pull over was to get gas. While I adopted this approach when I was younger, I have long since abandoned it and take great joy in detours and unplanned stops to enjoy the scenery.
The stop at Shoshone Falls was worth the extra driving. Much of Idaho is an arid desert so the stunning falls on the Snake River are an amazing contrast.
We continued to make our way east toward Craters of the Moon and beyond, as we were staying northeast of the park. Our homebase for the majority of the trip was a charming cottage nestled off a handful of gravel roads between Arco (population 879) and Mackay (439). The place was beautiful and looked practically brand new, an excellent place from which to launch our adventures. Now, where would we get our Sunday supper?
Hmm … all the restaurants in both towns are closed – even the pizza & chicken place attached to a gas station, while open, had handmade signs saying, essentially, sorry, we’re not cooking today. Well, on to the market and we’ll grab something I can whip up for dinner. Not so fast there, city slicker, the markets are closed. Poor planning on my part, apparently. So, we stopped at a gas station convenience store, grabbed a couple of packages of ramen, and went back for an admittedly less-than-gourmet dinner. I’ve come to accept these adventures don’t always go as planned.
The next day, however, Craters of the Moon did not disappoint. Now, when I say this national monument is out of the way, I mean, you’re not going to stumble upon it. About 250,000 people visit every year and while that may seem like a fair number of people, consider this – almost 13 million people visit the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and almost 3 million find their way to remote Glacier National Park in nearby Montana.
We took two days to explore practically every trail in the park, including the two caves accessible to visitors, even hiking a bit on the remote (as in, even remote for this rather remote park) Wilderness Trail. But I built our itinerary so that we’d be back in our cottage by late afternoon. This allowed for a lot of time to relax and, as we did while we were driving out, just talk. We would watch the neighborly cows amble by and take in the beautiful sunset, chatting about everything from the upcoming academic year to relationships to her post-commissioning leave to how things are going with my job at a university.
In short, it was exactly what I hoped for on this stop on the Parade of Lasts. So much of life as a military academy parent is compressed – calls squeezed in between a SAMI and studying for an exam, visits cut short by military duties, that relaxed conversations, talking in detail about, well, just about anything, is next to impossible. Here, in Idaho’s Lost Valley, we had that opportunity.
We took a shot at Idaho’s tallest mountain our last day in the area, not expecting to summit. And we didn’t. Mount Borah may be on some hikers’ bucket lists, but I can confidently say I hiked part of it and want no more. It’s almost all incline, the trail is a combination of dust and rocks, and the scenery, while nice, certainly wasn’t the most rewarding I’ve had in my years on the trail.
We took the northern route back toward Boise, making our way to a tiny home resort in Idaho City. We had both wanted to check out the tiny home experience and this worked out perfectly. We had a decent meal, played cornhole (yes, Dad won), and talked with some of the locals with conversations ranging from the heat wave punishing the Boise area and the crazy real estate market.
And it’s here where if you think I lived some sort of charmed life where it’s all unicorns and rainbows, you will see that is not the case.
As we packed up for the trip to the airport, we got word our Delta flight to Minneapolis, where we would get our connecting flight home, had been cancelled. It would be hours before we came to understand that a global IT outage was snarling just about everything.
Undaunted, Cate calmly found a hotel near the airport. Delta proved useless in finding a next-day flight, so I found two seats with another airline on a flight to Las Vegas that would allow us then to get back to Detroit. We’ll just chill for the day, Cate suggested. We dropped the rental car, hopped in a shuttle to the airport, and, well, we just chilled. We had a pizza delivered and sat in the hotel lounge munching happily while watching reruns of The Office.
The next morning, we learned the flight to Vegas had been cancelled, too. Now we had a problem. She was due on the East Coast in just about two days and Boise is a long way from there. After a short discussion, I came to the conclusion that we had two options – we could wait until the airlines recovered from this IT outage or we could drive. Painfully, it became clear that the latter was our best option.
We hopped back in the hotel shuttle, made our way to the airport where we packed up another rental car and drove. And drove. And drove. it would be 2,000 miles in much the manner my father traveled during my childhood. In just a shade more than 28 hours, we crossed multiple states and time zones, ate our meals at 80 mph, and watched the sun rise over Brooklyn, Iowa.
The cherry on the sundae would be arriving home to learn Cate’s flight to the East Coast had also been cancelled, though I was able to secure a seat on a different airline to get her back there just an hour later than scheduled.
She’s been gone a week already, on to other adventures I will not be a part of and I’m back in my groove, having finished all the laundry, cleaned up the house, and completed important tasks at work. Yet, I haven’t been able to bring myself to straighten up her room. The bed remains unmade with several stuffed animals strewn across it, including Eevee, the Pokémon that had traveled all the way from Colorado Springs on this particular adventure. The Parade of Lasts made its stop here, but it will take me a moment to move on.
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My Kid The Cadet 