Wednesday (Sep 7)
I woke up in the middle of the night having the feeling of an incipient cold. Kinda sneezy and chilly. This bummed me out. Perhaps that final nighttime soak in the big pool was one soak too many for my body in the last few days. But I woke up in the morning, that feeling was was gone! I felt just fine … or normal anyway. So woo-hoo on dodging a sickness bullet!
I cut short my hanging out time a little bit to head down to the pool office where there is wifi. I take the calm moment to fire off the complaint letter I crafted last night about the intrusive host dude four nights ago. It felt great to send it! The injustice of it all has been chewing on me for days, so it was cathartic to actually go on record about it.
I do all my wifi stuff, then leave. I stick to the country roads as long as I can, until my little river side road merges back into Route 30, where I am soon driving past what’s left of the Thousand Springs. Actually on closer inspection they don’t appear to be springs at all any more. Rather they appear to be overflow from an irrigation canal running along the edge of the bluffs.
I ate in what I think is the same place I ate in three years ago – not many choices in Buhl. It was a party this time! The waitress was a real pistol. The lunch rush was finishing up, and soon she had no one to focus her energy on but me. I had to walk through the bar to get tothe bathroom, and somehow that led to an impromptu wine tasting. She talked me into a glass of wine with lunch, which is very much against my risk-management principles, but she gets her way a lot I’ll bet.. From her stories she has the old dudes in this area in quite a dither over her. I can believe it. If I lived around here I would probably be in a dither too. But I tear myself away and head on to Boise.
US 30 eventually merges with I-84, so I interstate it the rest of the way to a return engagement at Elton’s apartment in Boise. I meet his nice, hardworking roommate, then we go out for Italian food and a beer at yet another a hipster bar in the edge of downtown.
Thursday
District Coffee for me again. I quite like that place, although parking is pretty awful in that part of downtown. Parallel parking the van isn’t easy, and on a busy street I get performance anxiety about making the people behind me wait while I take my time to do it right. But after a loop around the block I luck into a great spot and enjoy my time there again.
On the way home I decide it’s as good a time as any to get my tires rotated at the always welcoming Les Schwab. I’ve got an hour till E gets off work, so why not? Now I head “home” with that pleasant feeling of accomplishment.
Elton has joined the local version of what in Reno is called The Collective. Here it’s called Trailhead – a networking and co-working space for webby people, developers and designers and marketers. Trailhead is quite nice – a large converted warehouse kind of space. Our agenda for this evening is to drop by the downtown library then go there. The library is bigger and better than my familiar Washoe County libraries, at least it has a way better technical book section. After that we go to to Trailhead for some work, then food and beer. To my surprise we had Trailhead to ourselves from 6 to 8. Boise techies must be a 9 to 5 lot :) We actually got a lot done on our Whufu planning.
It’s a little too far to walk to our restaurant, and besides we should get his car out of the library parking lot. So we find ourselves doing the the downtown parking search again, a pain in the as as always. However, the end result is great – a very pleasant bar and grill (whose name I cannot remember) in the heart of Boise’s hip downtown. Turns out Elton knows a shitload of people for being here only eight months. Sitting at an outdoor table two different couples stop to chat..
Friday
His new thing is to not work his golf course job Mondays and Fridays to free up time to make progress on what he really wants to do, which (I think) is some combination of his own creative work and learning enough website skills to make a living at it. Anyway, that means we can hang all day … until I leave to start my a long drive into the interior of Oregon.
Breakfast involved the usual downtown traffic snarl followed by the usual downtown parking search, then a cool place that served gigantic portions of food. Back to Trailhead for a couple of more hours of techifying, then time for me to go if I am to get to the faraway campground I am aiming for tonight.
I’ve dawdled so long that I am in the beginning of the Boise Friday night rush hour, so as soon as I can I get off the interstate and head off into the western hinterlands. Because there’s really nothing out here but farms and lava fields I end up passing through the same town, and stopping in the same restaurant that I did on the way out – the Starlite Diner in Vale ID. The place doesn’t look like much, and the denizens are straight-up country folks who look at me very suspiciously, but the waitresses are real nice and they make great pies and they have wifi, so they got my business again!
The only cheap campground between here and Bend is a couple hundred miles away, which is a lot of driving by my spoiled standards. I do gain an hour in the time zone change. The fact that it’s suddenly 6:15 instead of 7:15 is small consolation when the sun is still in the same place, low on the horizon, glaring in my face. Glad it’s not a busy road, because the glare is serious. After a couple of hours of driving I get to Burns OR, which seemed like a nice enough place. It was in the news last spring as the dateline on stories about those dorks who occupied Malheur Wildlife Refuge. It’s 30-ish miles south of here. Looking back I wonder why I didn’t go there, but didn’t give it much thought at the time.
My only other camping option is a $40/night RV campground here in Burns. I’m tired and it would be pretty awesome to be able to stop now and hang out at a picnic table on wellwatered green grass, but that’s not my style. I press on into the sunset glare another 20 miles. Thank god I got phone bars out here, because with the sun in my face and without Maps I would have totally missed my turnoff to:
WHUFU page for: Chickahominy Campground
What a welcome place!
There is a lot of nothing between Boise and Bend. I saw some RVs just pulled off at the side of the road, and a couple at the rest stop, but there's no real place to stop for 100 miles except a couple of high-end RV palaces in Burns. So thank goodness for this pleasant stop.
Not a very charming place, but gets the job done very nicely tonight, The campground is quite a ways from the reservoir, up on the flat nothingness of the high desert plains. I don’t think it would be a great place to spend the day, but was very, very pretty in the evening.
Saturday
It got down to 31 last night, but warmed up quickly when the sun came up. A coupla hundred yards away on the little BLM road around the lake a couple of fledgling hunters, teenager boys it looked to me, were parked and scanning the horizon with their camo binoculars in their camo outfits, being very serious. I have no idea what they were looking for – deer?, chukkars? – but whatever it is better look out!
When I’m closer to civilization (even Oklahoma!) I usually have nothing but water in the morning and head off to the nearest town for coffee and some kind of nourishment. I can do 1/2 hour no problem, 40 minutes is ok, but getting up to an hour I start seriously degrading. Today there appears to be literally nothing between here and Bend, 100 miles away, so I crank up the stove and have black tea and oatmeal and yogurt and all kinds of stuff. Kinda fun really, I should do it more often.
Then comes Bend, whose traffic and self-important busy-ness is a bit of a shock after all those miles of emptiness. I have a bad attitude about Bend. I think it’s that ski resort thing where folks are just so fucking pleased with themselves for being so cool you just want to smack ’em. My problem, not Bend’s, Bend is cool.
Anyway, the really cool place I wanted to go to in Bend today is closed from 2 to 4 – really? So I had to venture into the downtown craziness, but it worked out very nicely. I found a shady parking spot on the one-way heading south, took my laptop and cut through a parking lot over to the one-way heading north to Deschutes Brewery and had a burger and my first coffee of the day. It was quite busy, lots of bros watching college football (it’s Saturday!), but I ate in the dining room and had a peaceful enough time, the coffee and wifi were good.
Sitting there planning the rest of my day I got quite frustrated with Google Maps, it simply would NOT give me a straightforward route to the campground I wanted. That does happen, they do have glitches sometimes, but it turns out that today was not a glitch, Maps really was trying to tell me that the bridge was out!
I found this out an hour or so out of Bend, at the junction of US 20 and OR 22. I wanted to continue west on US 20 but there were giant signs saying a bridge was out ahead and the route was closed, Boom, change of plans! I did have phone bars, so was able to consult Allstays for a campground on 22, and found quite a nice place:
WHUFU page for: Marion Forks Campground
Glad I stopped here, really nice campground at a cool place, behind a State of Oregon trout hatchery. The campground is pretty deluxe, there are heavy wooden fences lining the roadway and each campsite, I guess to clearly delimit where people should walk and where they shouldn't. So the forest ares are pretty pristine.
The campground is either new or recently renovated. The hatchery has been around for a while.
tonight:
Glad I stopped here, really nice campground at a cool place, behind a State of Oregon trout hatchery. The campground is pretty deluxe, there are heavy wooden fences lining the roadway and each campsite, I guess to clearly delimit where people should walk and where they shouldn't. So the forest ares are pretty pristine.
The campground is either new or recently renovated. The hatchery has been around for a while.
It’s been a long day. I started in the treeless, empty high desert, had lunch in the urban excitement of Bend. Now I am finally at rest in the peaceful gloom of Oregon’s big pine forest. Quiet to quiet, with some noise in the middle. I have my traditional end-of-drive beer and blog for a while in in my tidy (swept this morning looks like!) fenced-in enclosure, then head out to explore the area.
Not much to see in the campground. To the north of the access road is a nice picnic area and a stream. To the south is the Hatchery, and to the south of that is another stream, this one with water barriers at the top and bottom to keep in some simply huge trout – 2 to 4′ long, really! It was a fun place to walk around. Not much exercise really, but cool.