Road Trip

Boise, ID – Day 1: Oregon Trail In Reverse

The above image of the World’s Largest Map of the Oregon Trail is from Baker City and is the first of many (I hope) Roadside America pictures from this trip. I’ll try and find one on each day I’m travelling. We’ll see how that works out.

I got a 7:30 start and ended up at the hotel in Boise 5:30, but that is Mountain Time, so it was 4:30 on my internal clock. Google says I should have taken 6-1/2 hours to do it, but all my wandering and break taking made it a 9 hour trip. First off I managed to shoehorn in 4 Post Office pictures, a leisurely lunch in Le Grand of pizza slices and salad, a gas stop and literal walk in the park in Baker City. I also didn’t help that I tried to dodge Friday rush hour in Boise by taking some surface streets that really just delayed the inevitable loss of time.

Solo Post Office Sunday

I got up early and went downstairs at the Shilo Inn for breakfast and boy what a disappointment. The only thing I got was small pre-packaged container of Honey Nut Cheerios and an 8oz container of 2% milk. I went back to the room and ate. I wanted to get this hanging Post Office in New Pine Creek (see above photo) so I drove the 112 miles one way to get it. I stopped in Lakeview on the way back to get something really worth eating.

When I arrived back to the hotel around noon, it was just in time to watch the Red Sox lose their game against the Texas Rangers. Boston won the first game of the series last Thursday, but promptly lost the next three to Texas, so their 2025 W/L record so far is 1-3.

Also, when I got back to the hotel, I wasn’t hungry for lunch because of the homemade biscuit with egg, sausage & cheese I had at The Bottom of the Barrel Bakery was twice the size of a normal Carl’s Jr biscuit. I figured I’d get back on track with a good dinner. Never happened.

When I checked the weather for the day in Klamath Falls it mentioned that there might be some snow in the early morning hours of Monday. Hmmm, there wasn’t any mention of snow earlier in the week. Around three this afternoon I looked again, now they were saying an inch or more of accumulation at lower altitudes, but there might be several inches above 5,000 feet. That would be a problem, any route I would take from Klamath Falls to home would include at least one pass that was higher than five thousand. I was willing to stay another day, but changed my mind when snow was forecast for the next 3 days.

I stuffed all my things back into their respective bags, checked out of the hotel, threw the bags in the trunk and headed north. It was 3:30 in the afternoon. At about 5:30 I would normally be thinking about getting din-din, but by then I was long past civilization. I kept thinking I’d see something I wanted in those small towns on this side of the Cascades, but didn’t. I got on I-5 just south of Eugene and really didn’t want to get right back off, so I was going to wait until I got north of town. Then with all the traffic I missed the only exit that had food listed on the sign. I had to stop and gas in Salem and by that time it quarter after seven and too late to eat a meal. I ate the second bag of a half apple I had brought along for afternoon snack.

I figure between the Lakeview round trip and the dash home I drove over 500 miles for the day. With Saturday’s 300-ish mile drive down to K-Falls it was certainly good practice for my upcoming Jumbo Road Trip.

Sunday In The Rain

If I go for a drive tomorrow I can get nine more in about a 125 miles, or less than a half a tank of gas… And if I do, I’ll take Bucky

I did go for a drive in Bucky and did photograph nine more post offices in spite of the rain, occasionally heavy. Trouble is I only took eight of the ones I thought I would, but by luck got one more. I can’t trust a saved Google Map that has multiple stops in it. The Google to Samsung transfer hiccups and you end up with just the Start and End points. Which is really wonderful if the start and end were the same place. Also, you can’t start driving before you hit drive button on the map, because it will keep shouting at you to do a U-turn to go back to the starting point first and sometimes with this it’ll drop all the stops too.

Because I made all the Oregon post offices as a Saved Place, they show as dots on the map and I can hop from dot to dot on a loop. The problem of my missing one on the loop today was because in Hillsboro, the regular post office and the DCU1 were about a 1/4 mile apart and their dots kind of overlapped. I didn’t notice the miss until I was home and removing the photographed post offices from my saved places list.

Lucky, number nine was because there was one post office on the way home that would made an out of the way detour next time I came this way. It was in the small town of St. Paul, between OR99W and I-5. Below are today’s outtakes, AKA non post office photos.

Saturday At The Coast

Well, I did drive over to the Oregon coast today, but more time was spent getting there and back than on the coast. I drove a total of 285 miles and only about 30 of it was along US101. I did pretty much used a whole tank of gas on the day. There were a few walks in state parks, the Indian Beach Trail in Ecola State Park, to the beach at Sunset Beach State Recreation Site and climbing around defensive batteries at Fort Stevens State Park. I set out to clean up all the unvisited Post Offices in the upper left part of the state and it took pictures of a dozen of them to do it. Here are the non post office photos, those you’ll get tomorrow, maybe.

If I go for a drive tomorrow I can get nine more in about a 125 miles, or less than a half a tank of gas… And if I do, I’ll take Bucky. When I got home today the new beige seatbelts were at my doorstep instead of the expected Monday arrival. So after a 10 hour trip, I spent 2 hours in the driveway installing them.

My What A Big Cactus You Have

One of the last stops in Arizona in 1989 was the Saguaro National Park outside of Tucson. By this time in the trip I think we had both decided to move south to Aiken, but we didn’t really say it out loud until we returned home to Madison, NJ.

Recap of today’s events, film at eleven.

  1. I got up
  2. Rode the indoor bike and then showered
  3. Ate breakfast, the usual
  4. Light grocery shopping at Fred Meyer
  5. Walked across the street to Lowes
  6. To pick up the spray can of Flex Seal I ordered online last night
  7. Drove home and put away groceries
  8. Sprayed Flex Seal along the edge of the awning
  9. Walked up the the Community Center
  10. Spent an hour with my peeps drinking coffee
  11. Lunch of an Ensure
  12. Took a short drive with the top down
  13. Took a 2-hour nap
  14. Chatted with Sally on the WhatsApp
  15. Dinner of a sandwich and half an apple
  16. Put together my new computer chair, it has lights!
  17. Started this…

Grand Canyon

Continuing with more pictures of the 1989 Arizona Road Trip, theses are of the Grand Canyon. I can’t really swear to this, but I think we stayed in the Grand Canyon Lodge in the park itself. I am basing it on the large paper napkin that was in the album with the photos. For all I know we could had lunch in the dining area of the Lodge and Donna slipped the napkin in her purse.

I want to say we did the trip in a counterclockwise direction, so if that is right, the posts are kind of out of order of them being taken. Then again I just tried to link the half dozen places I have pictures of I don’t see how there was anyway to do it in a tidy loop. There had to be a lot on backtracking.

Two Parks In One

We have been to this combo park several times since 1989. Partially because it is conveniently just off of I-40 in northeastern part of Arizona. And partially because the food is excellent and inexpensive at the Visitor Center.

Petrified Forest

Painted Desert