As the afternoon drifted into the evening; the sun blazing down through and along the valley, I pulled over into the lay-by my Grandfather had once stood. Leaning back against the trunk of a car and wearing a sailors hat, he posed in front of Swallows Nest, a local landmark. This is another pilgrimage-esque spot when I come here, positioning my rental car in the same place and mimicking his pose. This must have been my third time in this spot. Afterwards, I drove to Swallows Nest Park which was just about a mile back towards town and pulled over next to Snake River. For about ten minutes I toddled around and found myself on a jetty snapping pictures of ducks and admiring (although from a distance) the elaborate weavings of web that surrounded metal bars: each with a spider perched on it that you wouldn’t find in the UK. When walking back off the jetty, a woman in the bushes of the embankment said a polite ‘Hello!’ Before telling me she was releasing a spider she’d caught to show the kids at her school. It was already big, but made even more bulky by the sack of eggs it was carrying. ‘I’m glad I got it back down here before that thing popped, otherwise I’d be dealing with hundreds of them’ Staci said. She pointed out some markings on it’s sack in the shape of a face ‘I think this is to warn off predators’. This was kind of mind-blowing to me as although I knew spiders can have similar markings on their bodies, I didn’t know they could weave them. ‘Is the spider poisonous?’ I asked; ‘Oh I’ve no idea!’. Staci let the spider out onto some grass between us and told me about how this might make the cut for one of the stories they run in the school paper. ‘The year fives run it and I give up my lunch times to help them.’ ~~~~ #usa #roadtrip #grandfather #pilgrimage