The vinous vistas of Boise, Idaho, may not be most wine lovers’ first thought for a travel destination, but its location in the middle of the up-and-coming Snake River Valley AVA is the ideal base from which to check out the area’s wine country. Boise’s blend of urban savvy, proximity to nature and entrepreneurial streak means the city—one of the 20 fastest-growing in the U.S.—won’t stay unsung for long.

The funky Bohemian vibe of Boise, combined with its surprising enclave of Basque immigrants, makes this active and outdoorsy mountain destination on the dessert plateau a unique place to explore. Boise is one of America's fastest-growing cities and with that, there's an exciting culinary emergence along with craft breweries and a burgeoning wine industry with a number of wineries producing excellent vintages with grapes sourced from the Yakima, Snake River and Columbia valleys.

With the largest concentration of Basque immigrants in the U.S., Boise's Spanish population has heavily contributed to the city's culinary and cultural landscape. The Basque Block in downtown is home to several restaurants, with some specializing in dishes that made the Basque region of northeast Spain famous. Don't miss the lively Bar Gernika and the cozy Leku Ona, where you can experience open-air views of the city. Then, take some time to drive to neighboring Meridian, where you'll discover Epi's Basque Restaurant. For over 16 years, Grandma Epi's treasured recipes have been lovingly prepared by her family, continuing the Basque tradition.

One of the most powerful ways to attract great workers is to provide them an affordable place to live. These 10 states certainly have that going for them. The Cost of Living category in our annual America's Top States for Business study measures all 50 states on an index of prices for basic items.

A 5-pound sack of this state's most famous product will cost you just $1.40 in Boise. The same potatoes — considerably more traveled — will cost you nearly four times that in Sarasota, Florida. Okay, you are thinking: But I bet I can get orange juice a lot cheaper in Sarasota. And you are wrong. Juice prices in Idaho are roughly the same as in Florida, maybe a little lower. Want a steak with your potatoes? You can pick up a nice T-bone for under $10. It would cost you one and a half times that in New York City. And a nice bottle of wine can be had in Idaho for around $5. In some places you'll be lucky if that buys you a fairly awful glass.

In order to determine the best- and worst-run cities in America, WalletHub’s analysts compared 150 of the most populated cities across six key categories: 1) Financial Stability, 2) Education, 3) Health, 4) Safety, 5) Economy and 6) Infrastructure & Pollution.

We evaluated those dimensions using 33 relevant metrics, which are listed below with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest quality of service.

Nampa, Idaho ranked #1 Best Run City in America, and the City of Boise came in at #3.

What if your festival experience asked you to grow as a human, to learn as an artist, as an individual? What if we stopped worrying about what everyone is wearing and who is who and we all just hung out for a weekend? I truly mean it when I say Treefort is for everyone, there is no scene, no pretense, no cool kids, or exclusionary vibe. It’s just nothing but goodness.

So, let this be a call to change festival culture and learn from these Idahoans. Let’s be a little more inclusive, and a little more loving, a little more inclined toward discovery and trying something new. Because there are podcast chats to hear, midnight Magic Sword to attend, and tacos to eat, and lambs roasting in honor of the Basque heritage, and late night breakfasts, and a million other delightfully strange things to try and see and listen to. And who knows, you just might love it.

Usually you can rely on hipster millennials to tell you what's gonna be cool before it's cool. Like, drinking uncomfortably hoppy beer, or eating Spam, or which neighborhood will be the next hip neighborhood. But for whatever reason, you rarely hear talk of the next up-and-coming travel destination (except, like, Mexico City. "I was going to Mexico City waaay before everyone else was going to Mexico City.”)

Channeling my inner cool kid, I went searching for under-the-radar cities across the US that are poised to become the new Nashvilles and Portlands -- polling travel experts around the country and looking at data trends like increased hotel construction and tourism infrastructure. And, you know, cities with the cool, calm, collected demeanor of someone who knows something you don’t yet. Here are eight cities you should go visit before they get too popular.

Boise, Idaho

If you want to see Seattle, Portland, or Denver before $14-a-drink bars discovered them, check out Boise. The creative center of Idaho is filling the beer-and-outdoors gaps these cities left when they fell to the mass popularity. Firstly, it boasts 190 miles of single-track trails that start practically in the middle of Downtown and a 30-mile Greenbelt trail that traverses the city. Second, Boise opens brewpubs like Florida builds condos, with four new ones planned for this year, including Bozeman’s White Dog. The X-Games will be hosting a qualifier at the city’s spanking-new skate park, and Bogus Basin just pumped $4 million into summer-activity improvements. Combine all of this with the walkability and affordability bigger cities lack, and you’ve got a strong case for Boise as “the new Portland.”

Approximately 1.9 million students around the country will graduate with bachelor’s degrees this year, many this month and next. A key question as they prepare to pursue their dreams: where?

The most surprising may be No. 2 Boise, Idaho, which makes the list thanks to strong job growth projections and a high percentage of adults with college degrees. Boise also ranked 13th on our list of the best places for business, in part due to its fast-growing tech sector. Government and business, however, remain the strongest sectors.

There’s a buzz in Boise, and it sounds a lot like Instagram shutters snapping from Freak Alley Gallery. This outdoor venue is all about building a creative community in the heart of Boise, and it’s playing its part in making Idaho’s capital more colorful with murals and events. Boise GreenBike makes it easy to embrace the neighborhood’s open-air way of life with convenient bike sharing. How cool is that?

Find your chill: Craving some amazing craft beer? Visit downtown Boise in early October for the annual Hoptober Freshtival, hosted by Boise Brewing.

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar—what Boise lacks in fame it makes up for in peaceful standard of living at a very reasonable price. 

In fact, next to Arlington, Boise is the least expensive place to live in our list at $942 average monthly rent. Not only is it cheap, it’s also incredibly safe: in 2006 Boise came in #1 on Farmer’s Insurance list of the most secure places to live. 

That’s not the only thing that makes Boise a great place to raise a family. Boise Town Square is the city’s biggest mall and has everything you could want, from a Build-a-Bear Workshop to a Dave and Busters. 

Zoo Boise is beautiful, educational, and fun for all ages, and Bogus Basin is a fantastic weekend ski getaway.

Idaho has a lot going for it these days. Just ask Mark Tidd, CEO of Boise-based TitleOne Corporation, with 13 locations serving 14 counties throughout the state. From affordability to lifestyle, Idaho’s allure is attracting many out-of-state homebuyers, drawn by the promise of an all-around better quality of life. In this exclusive interview, Tidd shares just why Idaho is booming, and how his firm supports the rise in homeownership by playing a key role at the closing table.

Becker's Hospital Review is pleased to release the 2017 edition of its list of "100 great hospitals in America."

The hospitals included on this list are renowned for excellence. They are industry leaders in innovation, quality patient care and clinical research, and have received recognition across various publications and accrediting organizations.

The Becker's Hospital Review editorial team selected hospitals for inclusion based on analysis of several ranking and award agencies, including U.S. News and World Report's 2016-17 Honor Roll and specialty rankings, CMS star ratings, Leapfrog grades, Truven Health Analytics top hospitals, Most Wired hospitals and Magnet accreditation.

With music festivals being at their peak of popularity – and their peak of homogenization – the search for a festival that truly offers something others don’t becomes that much more prevalent. In the saturated market that is the modern festival scene, if you see a really stacked festival that happens to be taking place far away from you, you can generally take comfort in knowing that at least three-fourths of those artists will be booked for festivals near you.

It’s for this reason that many including myself have been intrigued by the growing popularity of Boise, ID’s Treefort Music Fest, a festival that has for all intents and purposes achieved universal god-tier status as the best festival currently running regardless of location, with a community and feel unlike any other festival you’ll find. It’s easy to be skeptical – especially since Boise’s second most-popular music festival’s 2017 lineup boasts such mouth-watering headliners as Flo Rida and Austin Mahone – but to any Treefort newcomers whom were in the audience in 2017, it’s hard to shake the sensational feeling that Treefort is the most at-home you’ll feel with a modern festival.

At its foundation, Treefort is the city of Boise’s attempt at “North By Northwest,” a name and concept you’ll hear thrown around when discussing any Northwest festival that goes for the SXSW formula of having several venues all in one space, with different showcases happening at once, across a longer stretch of days than the usual two- or three-day festival. However, Treefort’s most unique selling point, besides its communal feel, is the emphasis it puts on spotlighting the unknowns of the Northwest. Out of Treefort’s five days, the main stage was only open for three, and while there were some bigger artists that played on these first two days, spreading out the popular names among these smaller venues and giving them the same showcases as Boise locals and national unknowns alike led to a more even playing field and some of these smaller bands walking away with new fans.

When you think about Idaho, the first thing that probably comes to mind is potatoes. Of course, there’s so much more to the state than what comes out of its soil. It’s a place of real natural beauty, where it’s impossible not to be in complete awe of the mountains, rivers, and parkland. Plus, breathing in all that clean air will really change your perspective on the world around you. I recently had the opportunity to spend five glorious days in Boise for Treefort Music Fest. In between all of the indie rock showcases that were spread throughout the downtown area, I had some free time to explore the heart of Treasure Valley. I was lucky enough to have had the advantage of being shown everything that this pleasant city has to offer from local residents, and now I can share that wealth of information with you. Here, then, are 17 must-see spots you need to hit when you visit the City of Trees.

To most people, the Amalgamated Sugar Company's factory in Nampa is a marker for when to turn off Interstate 84, and a place where “they store a lot of beets.” But over its 75-year history, the factory has stood as more than that to its workers and the community it serves — it is a symbol of tradition.

“We have employees who generations of their family have worked here in some capacity. Whole families have worked here,” McAnally said.

When the factory first opened, the company was producing a little more than 2,000 tons of sugar each day. It finished its first production year cutting a total of 192,970 tons of sugar beets and producing a little more than 553,000 bags of sugar weighing 100 pounds each. More than 660 growers sent their sugar beets to the Nampa facility in its first year alone.

Today, those numbers seem like small potatoes to the company that cuts more than 12,000 tons of beets a day and produces 2 million pounds of sugar every 24 hours. The sugar company now also produces beet pulp, molasses and other beet by-products for use by food and animal-feed manufacturers.

The hospital on 12th Avenue Road was named one of the nation’s top 100 hospitals by Truven Health Analytics, part of the IBM Watson Health business. This is the first time the hospital made the list.

The list is considered one of “the most comprehensive, academically driven study of its kind,” according to a Saint Alphonsus press release.

“Being recognized as one of the nation’s top hospitals is truly an honor,” Saint Alphonsus — Nampa President Karl Keeler said in a press release. “Our staff and leadership work very hard to do what’s best for our patients, the community, and each other. This award is representative of the extraordinary people and high-quality care we deliver at Saint Alphonsus in Nampa.”