Oregon

It seems that no matter how well prepared we are, the morning of departure is a scramble.  Hand wash and dry the dishes, reset the thermostat, forward the phone, throw out or freeze any food that won’t last while we’re gone, fill up the water bottles, and so on.  Should we take an extra jacket?

I always have a hard time imagining the weather other places to be any different from where I am.  It’s hot and sunny, so the whole trip will be hot and sunny, right?  But we did bring raincoats and warm layers.

Leaving Portland through the Columbia River Gorge, we soon lost the city traffic and fell into a rhythm with the others headed east.  The Gorge can be spectacular and it can be almost impassable,  but today it was just very nice.  We saw kite boarders near Hood River and again later, farther east.

Our first stop was in The Dalles, to charge the car and get a late breakfast.  Then we stopped at a rest stop near Boardman.  It was hard to see what was in the bed of the truck parked there, but standing downwind we could tell it was full of onions.  The interstate east of there had small yellow pieces like leaves flying about in the slipstream of the cars — onion skins, no doubt.

The next charger is at the Wildhorse Casino east of Pendleton.  It’s not our favorite, partly because the casino is full of the smell of cigarette smoke.

And then up over the hill to LaGrande and south to Baker City, where we’re staying overnight.

It takes us a while to get our traveling shoes on.  Today we just drove to get here, with only a few stops.  We were starting to relax after The Dalles, but we are still driving to get somewhere, rather than relaxing into the trip. Perhaps after a night in a motel we’ll feel like we’re on the road.