Road Trip

41,000km2 of Oregon’s Outback

This is a post about a road, OR31, something the Oregon Department of Transportation and its counterpart the Department of Tourism have designated as a scenic byway. This 150 mile stretch of road runs between La Pine and Lakeview and travels through some very rugged and beautiful high desert.

We really weren’t drawn to this road because of its destination, but because we could take a 350 mile 2-day road trip and take photos of 8 more Oregon Post offices. Sunday we headed east towards our first stop, Bly and then through Lakeview, the biggest town we’d see all trip, with about 2,500 people and onto the town of Adel whose population is defined as sparse. Then back to Lakeview where we had some lunch at Burger Queen, so named because, I guess, Burger King was already taken. Three post offices down we finally got on OR31 and headed north and west. The fourth and last post office of the day was in the town of Paisley home of the annual Mosquito Festival that raises funds for vector control.

Our stopover for the night was the Lodge at Summer Lake in the “town” of the aptly name of Summer Lake, population 80. The lake itself is nothing but a wildlife refuge with some sporadic marshy areas. I think the small pond behind the Lodge has more water in it than what’s in the refuge. Because it too has a post office we were going to get a photo, but the light was wrong, so we aimed to get it in the morning on our way north.

Monday, after a very good breakfast at the Lodge, we snapped that Summer Lake post office before heading to Christmas Valley. Christmas Valley is the largest town in this part of Oregon and was named after another dried up lake. The biggest attraction in Christmas Valley are their sand dunes east of town. We were going to drive over and look at them, but following our Delorme atlas, the road that was supposed to be paved turned out to be not, so we turned around we headed for our next post office in Fort Rock. After quickly visiting the state park day use area, by looking at what is left of a extinct volcano that was in a prehistoric lake which is no longer there. Our last post office of the trip was off OR31 in the town of Silver Lake that is once again named for a lake that no longer exists. Done with the photo taking we headed home from there on a meandering 50-mile road over to US97 where we turned south to get to Klamath Falls.

Somewhere in the town of Lakeview while driving around pondering our dining options, Mini #2 surpassed the 41,000 mile mark.

Home Again For A While

We took that 4 week road trip and stayed home for just a couple of weeks before spending another week away, so we will probably be chillin’ at home for awhile. Last year for this trip up to Washington and back for a family 4th of July picnic, we stopped at the same place in downtown Bend for lunch, but this time we chose two different locations for the midday meal.

On the way up we drove right through a busy Bend and stopped at the next town north, Redmond, where we ended up at an eclectic little place called One Street Down Café. The temperature was in the middle seventies and we sat outside to eat under the trees in the side yard. I had a Cuban that was made using a savory french toast and Donna had a half and half ham & cheese sandwich and chicken tortilla soup.

On the way back we drove right through a busy Bend and stopped at the next town south, La Pine, at a place called Cinco de Mayo Mexican Restaurant. We had a hard time finding a parking spot because there was a Porsche Club event that was having lunch here too. Fortunately we were seated and order taken before everyone that was there in a P Car hadn’t arrived yet. We split some chicken fajitas that were served with delicious, made fresh on site, tortillas.

Heading Home

Day one of our 2-day return trip back to Klamath Falls. On the way up to Granite Falls we took the shorter quicker route through Washington by taking I-90 West and WA203 north, but on the way home today we abandoned that short quick version because the surface of I-90 was awful. I swear the concrete contractor took a few shortcuts because it is deteriorating badly. Of course the amount of traffic it receives is probably a whole heck of a lot more than the further north US2 too. From Monroe we used US2 this morning heading east and it was a great little drive until it got a little later in the morning and we got to the fake Bavarian town of Leavenworth, WA. Even after getting past Leavenworth, the traffic was fairly steady.

After the drive up, and now halfway back, we both think that this will be the last time we come up to visit over the 4th of July. We are going back to visiting in May when there are a lot fewer folks on the roads and practically zero RVs.

On the way up 3 days ago we crossed the Columbia river via a different bridge. We usually cross on US197 right out of The Dalles where the Holiday Inn Express is, but this time we used US97, about 20 miles further east. On the way up the hill in Washington we noticed a sign for a Stonehenge memorial and thought that maybe we should stop in on the way back. So we did.

Here is the interesting origin story of the monument.

38,000 Little YellowCones

Made it to Monroe early this afternoon, but it was too early to check-in to the AirBNB in Monroe, so we drove right through and headed one town further north, Granite Falls, to meet with the Family. We chilled with them at the town’s Sunday Farmers Market until we could check-in. Back down to Monroe for an hour or so before we headed back north about halfway to Lake Stevens to watch the two nieces and their dad in their Sunday evening tradition, play some Ultimate.

They play on a middle school’s Astroturf football field, but instead of lengthwise they set up three separate fields crosswise marked off by 38,000 little yellow cones. Depending on the amount of participants they will use all three, but today only about 20 showed up so they used just two fields and played several games with 5 on a side.

The Mini ticked past the 38,000 mile mark just before we crossed the Columbia River into Washington.

Hunting Post Offices

Taking Post Office pictures on our way to Washington state for the 4th of July.

1) Chemult – 97731 2) La Pine – 97739 3) Antelope – 97001
4) Shaniko – 97057 5) Kent – 97033 6) Grass Valley – 97029
7) Moro – 97039 8) Wasco – 97065 9) Rufus – 97050

What You Have Been Waiting For

Another one of my internet famous road trip wrap ups.

We were gone from home for a little over 2-1/4 million seconds or 26 days. This equates to 25 overnight stays of which 19 were in IHG properties. Eighteen of them were in our go to Holiday Inn Express and one that was called the Pagosa Lodge. Three nights were spent in a VRBO in Laurel, Mississippi (AKA Napierville) and the other four were at Casa de Sally in Santa Fe, NM.

The first leg of the journey was from home to Laurel and that was 10 straight days of driving with a new hotel every night. We have both decided that that is too much packing and unpacking in a row and have vowed to never do that again. The next leg was Laurel to Santa Fe and that was 6 days of a hotel every night. Which might be a day or two longer than we will be doing going forward without a two night stay in the same place. The last leg was 5 days from Santa Fe to home.

The original plan was to spend four nights over Memorial Day Weekend in Laurel, but after three days we had seen all we wanted to see so we opted to bail a day early and head down to Hammond, LA. While we were this far east we wanted get in a quick visit with Donna’s second Mom and mother to Donna’s childhood friend, the owner of Casa de Sally in Santa Fe, the nearly centenarian Adele.

Also part of the original plan was five nights with Sally in Santa Fe to help her but her first new car in 20 years. But with the combination of getting the car shopping out of the way in three days and our dread of the 450 miles of travel on I-40 plus navigating the very busy Las Vegas we opted to leave a day early and take a longer, less annoying way home.

When I plotted the route of the trip before leaving I measured the distance from town to town using Google Maps and came up with 5,480 miles in 19 days of traveling. With the 2 extra driving days and any wandering around at our stays we ended up with 6,450 for the whole trip.

The original distance estimates had the leg from Ely, NV to Green River, UT at 329 miles as the longest, but when we rearranged the return trip the stretch between Pagosa Springs, CO and Green River was supposed to be 421 miles. Usually we fill up the car either before turning in for the night or each morning before departure, but occasionally it happens mid-drive, so I can’t really tell you which day was the highest mileage drive.

The longest drive between fill ups was 364.6 miles and the shortest was 206.8 miles. The most expensive price for our required premium gas was $4.799 in Ely, NV and the least expensive was in Laurel, MS at $3.309. We spent $712.89 for the 177.303 gallons we bought for the trip making the average price paid $4.024 a gallon. Our average MPG for the trip was 36.61 and even though these are meaningless, the worst for a fill up was 30.85 and the best was 43.63 MPG.

This is getting long, tomorrow we’ll talk hotels…

37,000 Missed Hailstones

When we were about 15 miles from the Holiday Inn Express in Carson City we could see ahead of us very dark clouds and quite a few streaks of lightning. At hotel arrival I noticed a lot of white along the curbing and in all the cracks in the parking lot. Upon closer inspection I noticed that they were pea-sized white balls of ice. When I asked at the desk, “How long since it hailed?” The desk clerk said it was about 15 minutes back. Glad we missed it.

We didn’t miss a repeat of the scattered showers from yesterday though, for almost all of the second half of our drive along US-50, AKA The Loneliest Road in America, we were being rained on periodically. We had another disappointing lunch in Austin, NV because the Champs Burger truck was once again closed.

Afterwards, we were zipping east and Donna noticed on the map a notation of the geographic center of the state of Nevada not to far off US-50. The gray line meant it was dirt road, but it didn’t look too far, so what the heck. She pulled up a web page about it and it said that there was a road labeled “To Belmont” at about 26 miles from Austin. We saw no such road going south so I pulled over and looked at the map too. Where the map showed the gray line right near it was a picnic table icon. I said, “Oooh, I remember a roadside pull off with tables several miles back.” We turned around and went several miles back to that spot and sure enough there was a dirt road heading south called Monitor Valley Road. Nothing about Belmont but we headed down it. After a mile or so it was getting a bit too bumpy for our tastes, so we turned back to US-50 to continue on the Carson City. We did vow to rent an SUV for our next trip so we could go the whole 12 miles to the coordinates listed on that web page.

A few miles shy of Middlegate, Nevada the Mini crossed off another milestone on this trip, thirty seven thousand miles.