Top 5 Reasons Not to Move to Boise Idaho

Top 5 Worst Things About Idaho

Don't move to Idaho unless you can handle these 5 negatives about Idaho.

If you're looking to move to Boise and Treasure Valley area, but you need to know these Top 5 things that maybe or not so great about living here before you make the move. It might be the Promised Land, but there's still some drawbacks to it.

Top 5 Worst Things About Idaho

1. Flies

You would not believe how bad the flies get here in the summer and early part of the fall. That was a little bit of a surprise for me. I don't know why, but it was. I moved from San Diego and there were parts of San Diego where the flies would get bad too. Just kind of deal with it. And that's the same thing here.

You learn to deal with it, but they are pretty bad and they'll get inside the house and you're going to be chasing them all around the house. You got to get yourself a fly swatter, some fly traps. There's different ways to handle it, but you might end up with 20-30 flies in your house at any given time.

I think there was one day, I literally killed 25 flies in my house in one day. It was terrible. I was going crazy. I'm like, "what is with all these flies here, it's terrible", That's a big thing is you are going to have to be dealing with a lot of flies. The flies all die off on the late fall/winter so we’re grateful for the cold weather to get rid of them!

There can also be mosquitoes of course too. If you've got any kind of standing water, then there are going to be mosquitoes that are going to gather around too. There are some devices you can get like a  Thermacell that you can put up and it puts like a 15-foot protective zone around you. It’s pretty cool and works really well.

If you're out on the patio enjoying the weather then you certainly could use that and help keep the mosquitoes away. You can also spray for mosquitoes to try to keep them away too. Not a huge fan of chemicals myself. But that's an option as well to keep the mosquitoes wet.

2. Heat

It does get really hot here in the Treasure Valley area. We are high desert up here sitting around 2,700 feet elevation and since it's high desert it gets really, really hot in the summertime. Just this past summer there were over 6 weeks where every single day it was over 100° and it was about a 100°-107° any given day.

That got brutally hot and we were all ready for fall to come. We're so glad it finally came and started cooling off. That being said too, what might be a little bit different here than maybe where we're coming from is that it actually gets hotter throughout the day, not cooler. In other words, the hottest time of day is going to be around 5-7 o'clock at night before it starts to cool off and it doesn't cool off significantly in the summer months.

It's going to get to 107° and it still may be around 80° at the coolest point. So that's a bit of a drawback I feel like, like where I came from, from San Diego, yeah, it got hot in the summertime. It could be 100°, maybe more in inland, but the ocean breeze really cooled it off at night and in the afternoon it cooled down. You go outside and enjoy it.

Here, it gets really hot. It's harder to go outside and enjoy the weather because it is just brutally hot even in the afternoon. And of course, the sun is out longer of course till like 9-10 o'clock at night. You have a lot of daylight, but it's hot. But a good trick to get around that of course is to go to the river. We absolutely love going to the Boise River.

There are lots of points of entry you can get in. We love going to Reid Merrill Park for instance. You can do the Boise River float, which is a super fun float to go down and, you can drink a beer and float down the river and it's nice and cool. In the water,  you can jump in when you want to cool off or just go to the river and put your chair in the water, put your feet in and relax.

Kids can splash around. You can jump in and kind of float around. So that's a really great way to beat the heat. The river right at the water is going to be significantly cooler than the surrounding you. During the summertime, definitely going to want to hit the river quite a bit.

There also are a lot of splash pads around here, that's going to be great for the kids. My kids absolutely love the splash pads. You can go to the splash pads. There's also the huge water park here as well. You can go there as well, of course, you got to pay for that versus the splash pads being free.

There are also some community pools around indoor community pools. Those are great options from rec centers here around the valley. Those are some different ways to beat the heat.

3. Fires and Smoke

There are a fair amount of fires that occur around Idaho, Oregon, California, Washington, and that smoke just blows into the Treasure Valley area and sits here.  Kind of comes and goes but there can be times a year when there is a lot of smoke and it can get very difficult to breathe.

You really have to stay indoors a lot. If you have any kind of sensitivity to that, it can get really bad. I've heard of people that moved here and were really disappointed about that and kind of wish they hadn't. It's just part of living here and you get used to it.

But there's been times where, I've wanted to go out to do certain things and I just don't because it's too smokey. That's definitely a drawback of living here is how the smoke kind of settles in and it has a hard time blowing out. Definitely smoke is going to be one of the major drawbacks of living here in the valley.

4. Traffic

You might laugh to yourself and say, "Come on, really traffic from where I'm moving from". Yeah, I mean we complain about the traffic here, but it's nothing like what you're going to find in a major city like Los Angeles or San Diego or elsewhere. Any major metropolis. And now that being said, traffic can build up on I-84. There's a lot of folks that live in Canyon County and commute into the city.

Morning and afternoon, the traffic that can build up there and if there's an accident, then of course it just shuts down. There was one time I was driving through and man, the traffic was terrible. It turns out that it was a cattle car that had broken down and they had to get another cattle car, back it up to it and move all the cows onto the cattle car. That took a long time.

They had the freeway partially shut down for that. Traffic can build up. But there's also a lot of former farm roads, two-lane country roads that have now blown up with population around here. It's growing so rapidly in this area. And so a lot of these roads just were not built to handle the influx of people. You can come up on a stop sign and it can take a long time to get through the stop sign.

They have built a lot of roundabouts in a lot of these areas, especially like in Nampa, Caldwell and Star. They're building those, they're expanding roads, they're trying to help traffic flow better. There's a lot of work going on to expand the roads around here to handle it. But you can come up to a stop sign or even a roundabout and you can just get stuck there for a while waiting for your turn to go through.

Traffic is not anything like, probably what you're used to, but it is worse than maybe what you're expecting. Personally I just try to stay off the freeways. I try to take the back roads as much as I possibly can without adding too much time cuz I enjoy it. I enjoy driving through the country roads. I can kind of hear John Denver in my head while driving through.

Traffic can be bad, but there's workarounds.

5. Influx of People

The influx of people from places like California. I'm from California, you hear that so much. People are so frustrated that Californians are moving here. I guess I'm part of the problem. I moved here and I absolutely love it. That being said, of course there's increased traffic with that, but you might have an experience where you're here with your California plate or maybe another plate.

My my neighbor has a license plate from Louisiana. He's been worried about getting keyed or something like that cause it looks similar to a California plate. Fortunately for me, that never happened to me. I have heard of cars getting keyed because they have California plates or you get maybe run off the road.

I've heard of those stories, did not happen to me. Fortunately I got my license plates changed. I only had one incident where I had to get over. I don't think I really cut the person off, but I had to get over, I had to turn. I got over and she got really upset at me. I still had my California plates on and she zoomed around me and, you know, flipped me off and yelled at me.

That was the worst experience I had. Fortunately, I got my plates changed I think like two days later. That was the last of that. And I did get pulled over by a police officer, not really pulled over, but he pulled up to me at a traffic stop at a traffic light and asked me to roll the window down. So I did. I was like, "Can I help you officer"? And he goes, "Yeah, how do you like your truck?"

I've got a 2022 Toyota Tundra, the new model, the new style, and a really cool brown color. And he's like, "Hey, does that hide the dirt really well"? He just wanted to talk about my truck. So we just chit chatted for a while and and then that was it. He is like, "go ahead, move on". That was my experience with a police officer there.

I did get followed for a while by a police officer once too. Probably had something to do with my California plates down the I-84 for about 10 miles. Kind of zoomed in on me multiple times. I don't know what was going on that he finally let me go. Probably a California plate issue. That's the experience that I've had with California plates.

Fortunately, not an issue anymore, but that's just something to keep in mind. If you're moving here, change those plates as soon as you can and get some Idaho plates.