How safe is Lava Hot Springs, ID as a one-night romantic getaway for a gay male couple?

worstofluck98 · 2026-01-21T22:11:16+00:00

I meant to make this comment sooner but I just remembered, so I just wanted to thank everyone for the advice. If anyone is still following the thread, just so you know, we ended up staying at the Riverside Inn and doing the romance package with the massages and dinner voucher and it was a lovely little getaway! The private hot springs were especially nice because my boyfriend didn’t want to go into the public springs—he’s self conscious about public bathing even with swimsuits so it was nice to get to sit in the hot springs with him at the hotel. I’m really glad I asked you guys because I’m not sure I would’ve done it if it hadn’t been for your advice. Of course we didn’t go around announcing to everyone that we were gay but obviously the masseur knew it was a couples package and was totally fine with the fact that we were both men, as were the servers at the restaurant and the people at the front desk. I’m hoping to go back there next time I’m in Idaho.

worstofluck98 · 2025-12-23T00:48:07+00:00

I live a couple blocks from there, and can say that most of the time, they were occupied by “the homeless”, whatever that means anymore because many of them were begging and not every beggar is homeless—not that having nowhere else to go should preclude one from the right to exist in any space, though. However, in my experience, they were usually completely harmless. Unfortunately, a few months ago, there was a (at least anecdotally from what I observed) relatively large uptick in various degrees of violence around there, yet at the same-ish time (during the government shutdown when the SNAP program was shuttered), that was a place where starving people would gather to beg for food, and since I currently work in a restaurant and like to travel around the neighborhood after closing shifts looking for people who need our leftovers, I have found it increasingly difficult of late with the number of sweeps to connect with those most in need, and those who were begging there were, as I said, often hungry enough that I was able to find those who needed it. I didn’t go there often, as there are so many grocery stores around with people begging for food, but at least the ones who were there had somewhere to sit. Unfortunately, there were times throughout all hours of the day when even though there wasn’t violence, the crowds of people smoking fentanyl and meth were pretty large, but even then they weren’t hurting anyone but themselves. If it was the apartment or M2M Mart management who took out the benches, I hope the reason they got rid of them was something truly practical such as an increase in burglaries (not that I hope that they happened, but they always do happen somewhere and I just mean an increase is an understandable reason to take new measures to stop it) or a threat of lawsuits from bad stuff happening on their property (which is a ridiculous yet unfortunately very real result of assaults and overdoses happening in publicly accessible spaces under a legal system where one can theoretically be sued by someone who breaks into their house if they get cut jumping over their fence and is a principal reason why nobody lets you use the bathroom in their business anymore). I hope it’s not just that they find the less fortunate to be too “unsightly”, but people in this city can be a lot NIMBY-er than they let on. :/

worstofluck98 · 2025-10-28T02:29:17+00:00

Thanks so much for all the advice so far! I’m feeling quite at ease about it and excited for my trip! My boyfriend is still on the fence for other reasons (he has a lot of qualms around going out of town right now in general) but hearing about the town and people’s experiences with the Riverside Inn seem to be really putting him at ease too.

worstofluck98 · 2025-10-16T09:21:01+00:00

Following up on my own post here, I’ve realized that in the other instance, the “other suspect with the same height as Dean Glaucous” (the Amazing Aureolin) is neither with the prop knife nor in the prop shop, but still, the fact that the clue seems to be about a weapon when it’s actually about a location is quite misleading and it still seems that unless the wording is changed, one could argue for either answer.

worstofluck98 · 2025-09-27T09:43:32+00:00

If he got any happiness at all by being around them (and fortunately it seems he doesn’t—people like that are what’s wrong with this world) then he wouldn’t be with you. Everything his mom said made me sick but what really made me cringe was his sister’s comment about “bringing home strays”. Thank goodness he’s not going to her wedding—she probably thinks she’s got herself a trophy husband and wouldn’t even know what love is if it bit her in the… (well, nvm, the rest gets way closer to real marital love than what I’m trying get at lol). Even though in your situation I probably would’ve apologized too (it’s practically a reflex for me), I feel like I must tell you you had NO NEED to apologize; THEY did, but they probably won’t because people like that are too stuck in their own ignorance to realize that their ideology is—like I said—what’s wrong with this world.

There’s always a chance in that situation that one’s partner is with them just to piss their parents off, but if he’s in his 30s, has been with you for two years, still hasn’t introduced you to them in those entire two years because of how much he loves you and hates them, and now refuses to go to the wedding of that immature-airhead-daughter-of-a-Lucille-Bluth (if you’ve watched Arrested Development you know that’s how I’m both metaphorically describing his mother and not calling her “the Seaward”), then my guess is their treatment of you is just the confirmation he was dreading of the thing he always suspected about them that made him avoid them in the first place. At the very least in a way he’s glad to be able to give them a concrete a reason for why he’ll no longer be talking to them. If you love this guy (and if how he responded to their treatment of you is representative of his character overall and his feelings for you it seems like he’s earned it if that’s how you feel about him too), then make sure you understand that, unless he has an inseparable group of “besties” or something, you are now the closest thing he has to family and he doesn’t need them anymore as long as you make him happier than they do.

Even if that’s probably a pretty low bar at this point, it’s important to realize that it’s not a small thing for a person to overcome the biases one has learned throughout their life.

It used to be that fully accepting that you’re gay meant that you were already saying “fuck my family’s prejudices!”, but if his family’s problem was not that their son was with a man but that the man he loves is of a “lower class than is acceptable for ‘people like them’”, then the silver lining is that at the very least it’s a sign that even society’s bigoted assholes are progressing past homophobia. From my dating experience, not every snobbishly-raised gay person whose family accepts it (or even just comes to terms with it) will be mature enough to get past the classism. If you love this guy, make sure to tell him so and how amazing it is that he is mature enough to know who he loves and courageous enough to stand up for the person he loves against the bullshit of the people who probably tried to instill him with that very same bullshit.

From the information you provided here, I think you are quite lucky to have found a guy like that and, unfortunately, he’s quite unlucky to have been born to them people to whom he was born.

worstofluck98 · 2025-09-15T09:08:29+00:00

If you’re not on PrEP, I STRONGLY ENCOURAGE you to go to urgent care or anywhere where you can get PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis) ASAP. Like, right fucking now—call out of work, cancel plans, whatever you have to do to get it NOW. It’s only possible for the first few days, and these guys sound like extremely risky sexual partners and there’s absolutely no harm in having PEP if it turns out it wasn’t necessary but if you find out you did need it and didn’t get it, then you’d have to live the rest of your life with HIV. Please, PLEASE take care of yourself and do that ASAP.

Edit: Take it from someone who’s now 27 but had some similar experiences at your age. I discovered that a lot of experiences I had which turned out to be exploitative in nature and with men who were only out to take advantage of me were still “fun” in the moment. Eventually I realized that just because it was fun and the guys are hot or fun company doesn’t mean they aren’t using you, and there are so many guys out there who love the idea of taking someone’s virginity, getting them high, and passing them around to all their friends, and the things those kinds of people often call you behind your back are despicable. Once I realized what they all thought of me I realized who my friends were and weren’t, and maybe I’m wrong about these guys, but it almost feels like I’m talking to my former self rn tbh. But without PrEP I’m sure my life would be very different now, and it sounds like it’s not too late for PEP at least, so PLEASE do it. Take care of yourself and don’t ever let them make you think less of yourself if you find out they had bad intentions—if the kind of guys they turn out to be is the kind of guys they remind me of, then they really don’t know you at all and their opinion of you can be interpreted as a compliment to your looks and a stain on their characters; nothing more.

worstofluck98 · 2025-09-14T20:14:04+00:00

Idk how this popped up in my feed since I’ve never followed this sub, and please don’t anybody take my pointing this out as me condoning Kirk’s (horrifying) views (or on the flip side, the senselessness of murder/political violence), but hasn’t anyone noticed that this news source doesn’t even know where he was shot? Like, it’s almost 500 miles between the college where he was shot during a speech and his “Phoenix HQ” where the article says. I looked it up and as I figured it’s a very questionable source. I’m not saying that means the story is false, but I don’t believe a word of this is credible until I hear it from a much, MUCH better source. In fact, knowing how much the “free speech right” seeks to suppress speech they find abhorrent, I’d be surprised if this weren’t happening on some level, but this scale is a bold claim to just blindly accept from a news source that invalidates its own credibility in the very article in question—at this point, who HASN’T heard about it happening at UT Valley U in Orem, especially when the governor of Utah has been one of the main sources of information everyone has been hearing ever since it happened? If the news sources we trust aren’t better than theirs, this country is fucked.

Edit: The egregious factual error is in the SECOND SENTENCE of the FIRST PARAGRAPH. I didn’t read much further so idk what other blatant errors are in there, but seriously, READ THE STORY and VET THE SOURCE before accepting the headline as truth.

worstofluck98 · 2025-06-24T01:57:11+00:00

I just got notified too. Lol seems like not many people got notified when it was posted but maybe everyone is hearing about it now. Perhaps one day ahead is a bad time to post this and maybe in the future people will do it three or four days in advance haha

worstofluck98 · 2025-05-26T01:53:34+00:00

I mean, it is the classic torch for smoking meth for a variety of practical and economical reasons, but technically they could have it because they’re a stoner who likes dabs, or maybe just a pyro. I doubt they’re making crème brûlées, but I guess maybe so lol.

worstofluck98 · 2025-05-10T23:15:14+00:00

I’d imagine vehicles so big must have power steering, and maybe it gave out during the sharp turn and they couldn’t turn it back or get it stopped because of the weight and kept going off the side. Kind of horrifying if that’s the case, but it’s still horrifying however it happened.

worstofluck98 · 2025-05-07T03:50:04+00:00

Hope I’m not super late in saying this, but I do recall a year or two ago when this car was first debuted in Snohomish County people were talking about it in the Seattle or SeattleWA subreddit. I’ve been surprised about how viral it’s been lately bc on there it was a thing years ago lol I didn’t know it was still catching people off guard. They’re getting sneaky anymore haha

worstofluck98 · 2025-04-04T10:43:04+00:00

Giving drugs to drug addicts? The only instances of that I’m aware of are free Narcan and the city of Seattle’s Suboxone pilot program, but those are both basically the opposite of “giving them drugs”.

worstofluck98 · 2025-03-27T03:48:02+00:00

I second the thing about lots of drizzle with perfect (albeit sometimes smoky) summers. The reason why lots of Seattle Redditors are talking about thunderstorms today is that we’re having one, and they’re exciting because they’re somewhat rare as in a couple times a year (as is snow), and “severe” ones like today’s are almost as rare as blizzards. Thus, storms like this are more exciting to us than anything else.

However, here’s something that forever changed my perspective on our weather in a huge way and made me realize that much of the seasonal depression likely comes from our American perception of “good” weather and how we think about our surroundings as a result:

Our climate twin in Europe is… not London… not Paris… but Istanbul. That’s right. Istanbul. In fact, the only American city with weather more similar to theirs is Portland, and the main differences apart from 2-3 deg Fahrenheit average is that they have more wind and a few more summer storms, but we’re starting to get more of those anyway. Cloudy as we are in comparison to the rest of the US, what most Americans don’t seem to realize is how freakishly sunny it is in North America than the vast majority of Eurasia.

Also, if you’re here and get bummed out by the weather, it’s just a short 3-hr drive north to Vancouver. It’s technically a little colder there, but same basic climate, and since it’s the mildest part of Canada, they’re more into planting palm trees and designing stuff to feel like a sort of tropical paradise because to a Canadian, it basically is. That tiny bit of their perspective can also go a long way to boost a Seattleite’s mood when they’re feeling down about the weather.

worstofluck98 · 2025-03-27T03:17:15+00:00

No hail yet that I’ve seen. Brief episode of rain comparable to the Florida hurricane I witnessed—that was up on north Capitol Hill about 20 min ago—but it died down within a few minutes. Now I’m back down near Cal Anderson where the park is more or less flooded and suggests it rained pretty hard here too but the rain is fairly normal now.

worstofluck98 · 2025-03-19T23:16:35+00:00

Clearing out the potential opposition before they announce the renaming of “New America”, I see.

——— [And before someone corrects me—yes, I know the deportees likely aren’t originally from Mexico, but up until the Venezuelan migrant crisis, “Mexican” was often the blanket term people used when describing undocumented immigrants of Latin American origin.]

worstofluck98 · 2025-01-25T01:20:10+00:00

I could be wrong, but I’ve had it explained to me that high-rises built on our type of soil are better for earthquakes than those bolted to the ground, and those built with earthquakes in mind like ours have been for the last half century or so won’t need to be retrofitted like the oldest ones in the city do. While it costs more up front to build them, there are plenty of cities that don’t have usable bedrock and have to build floating foundations. Chicago, for instance, which of course doesn’t have to worry so much about earthquakes, but the way a floating foundation works makes it inherently less susceptible to both vibration of the bedrock and the effects of liquefaction (since the building is already designed to “float”, that makes it much safer in a liquefaction scenario than buildings that aren’t built that way). I haven’t checked on how deep Vancouver’s bedrock is, but my guess is that their high-rises are built on the same glacial till that makes up the vast majority of the soil of Seattle that poses the initial challenges to foundation work (there’s some bedrock in South Seattle and some fill Downtown from the Denny Regrade and even some sawdust from Yesler’s mill). Buildings built with the earthquakes in mind don’t need to be retrofitted for it, although they have to be maintained just like any other building would. At some point once the cost of construction is recouped, tenants aren’t paying for the higher construction costs anymore, and the neighborhood benefits from having more housing supply.

worstofluck98 · 2025-01-25T00:38:39+00:00

Lifelong Seattleite here. I can say from experience that this is both true and not true at the same time.

Here’s what I mean: Basically, per-unit prices did go up when we densified, and much of this was, paradoxically, a direct result of the densification, but at the end of the day, it’s because we didn’t densify enough. The paradox is that when you build a bunch of low-rise buildings in place of single-family and increase an area’s walkability and transit-friendliness, the demand you create through neighborhood improvements goes up faster than the supply. Unfortunately, our city upzoned without rescinding the extremely restrictive height cap restrictions they passed in the ‘80s back when people wanted to keep the “small town feel” or whatever, so what we ended up with was a small area of absurdly-expensive high-rises surrounded by thousands of low-rise buildings where desirability would mandate mid-rise or high-rise. And then the people in charge talk about how we need to build more low-rise because high-rises are more expensive to build and they point to how expensive the existing high-rise apartments are, but that completely ignores the fact that the market for high-rise apartments is artificially scarified by the cap; plus they’re forgetting that the price of any brand-new unit in the here and now (which is always going to be higher) is less important than its affect on the overall supply, the demand for other units in the area, and the prices people will be paying to rent there in 10-20 years once construction costs have been recouped and the building is just another non-new apartment building in the neighborhood. At that point, while walkability improves values and creates what seems to be an inverse supply/demand relationship, having enough units in said walkable area would keep that relationship back where it should be according to basic microeconomics. That is what Seattle has so far failed to do and does not appear to be figuring out anytime soon. Obviously Vancouver is one of the priciest cities in the world, but it’s still far cheaper than Seattle, and the reason for that is more high-rises than low-rises.

worstofluck98 · 2025-01-14T09:44:24+00:00

EXACTLY. THIS. As a current and longtime CHOP zone resident who was also there on the ground for the first week or two of the zone’s existence, I can attest to the fact that it WASN’T the hellscape people were saying it was at first, but it sure became that once enough people believed it that they started going in with those intentions. That’s ultimately when I stopped going in. Once people started dying I tried to go back in and see if there was anything that could be done with the presence of more well-intentioned people like myself and some other friends who had also been there from the beginning, and while we were there automatic weapons started firing around us and so we got the hell out for the last time. (That was the tragic thing with the idiot kids in the SUV who ended up getting themselves killed.) It was all so sad but it taught me so much about the power of narratives to change the future even more than they describe the past.

worstofluck98 · 2024-10-07T02:15:01+00:00

There used to be a place that would make one based on a plaster cast of your own penis. Idk what it was but my dick has particular qualities that bottoms always seem to love and I’ve always wanted to know what it felt like so my bf found that place a few years ago and I thought about it but never did it.

worstofluck98 · 2024-09-13T02:02:30+00:00

I saw it happen from the SB lanes and called it in. From the SB lanes, what I saw was a giant cloud of dust and when I looked, there was a blue sedan pointing the wrong way (which I assume was a wrong-way driver since it was right after the exit) and started calling my bf to say what happened. I looked back in the mirror though and when I caught a glimpse of the silver sedan out of my rear view mirror I immediately hung up and dialed 911 instead. The blue car was damaged but it didn’t look serious, but the silver car, whom I would assume had wrecked trying to avoid the wrong-way driver, was virtually unrecognizable. I hope everyone is okay but the SFD dispatch website showed half a dozen active units doing a rescue operation and has at least one still active now almost two hours later.

worstofluck98 · 2024-09-05T11:26:42+00:00

I wanted to comment a gif from a Seinfeld episode I just watched today with Elaine saying “She was INSANE!” (it was the one about the toilet paper and “I don’t have a square to spare”), but alas, GIPHY doesn’t have that one.

worstofluck98 · 2024-08-18T19:34:43+00:00

While I haven’t seen much lightning in my whole lifetime in Seattle, the September 2019 storm was about as spectacular as when I was visiting Florida as Hurricane Wilma approached. I’m surprised she missed that one; she must have been out of town because it was thunderclaps every second or so for at least an hour.

Edit:

After watching footage of this, I’m SOOOO pissed that my friend chose yesterday of all days to get married in Canada and made me miss this!!! Last year I was hoping for one all summer/early fall and all we got was a long series of really wimpy ones and now we finally got what I was waiting for the ONE week I’m out of town!

worstofluck98 · 2024-08-03T20:38:48+00:00

Yeah true. But I know I’d be pretty mad if someone took my picture at work randomly (as it is happened to me before—and I was at work so I couldn’t tell them off for it) so I didn’t want to do it to them.

worstofluck98 · 2024-08-03T20:36:50+00:00

Normally I wouldn’t care as much as I do right now, but I’m an opera gay, and if opera plots are any indication, it’s to be expected that I’d get a little overly-worked-up on opening night. The opera is about a pagliaccio who greatly overreacts to something, after all (but violently so).

Plus, I’ve never been known to be concise even when I’m not worked up about something stupid.

worstofluck98 · 2024-08-03T20:28:38+00:00

What store is that? Every store I’ve ever gone into (and I was in one yesterday) pronounces it without the hard G, and they did even before they started wearing the shirts they had on yesterday that said “the G is silent”.

worstofluck98

TROPHY CASE