A Side Trip

After a bit more than two days, we have settled into our travel mode, which consists mainly of watching the world unfold as we go down the road, discovering new roads and new areas, talking to the people we find along the way, and having our assumptions challenged.

Yesterday we headed east out of The Dalles under clear skies, but by Pendleton the smoke was building up. The Blue Mountains were smoky, and coming down into La Grande the air was worse – the Wallowa Mountains were just barely visible in the distance. Still, the air wasn’t as bad as what they were dealing with in Canada, or even in Bend. It all began clearing as we headed south to Baker City.

In Baker City, we sat in the McDonalds parking lot to use their wifi so that we could Zoom with friends of friends who were showing our movie – “Strictly for the Birds” – to a small group of students from their “Queer History of Portland” class at PSU. Although it was a bit awkward sitting in the car with a phone propped up on our dashboard, it was fun to tell the group a little about how we came to make the movie and to answer their questions. We spent about an hour sitting under the golden arches and needed to walk around a little afterward.

The air continued to clear as we headed south, and some areas were surprisingly green for late August. (The gorge and the area around Pendleton are very dry, very brown.) We stayed overnight in Ontario, Oregon, on the Snake River and the border with Idaho. 

Dinner was in town at Mackey’s Irish Pub. I had one of the best shepherds pies I’ve ever had. It was probably especially good because for lunch we’d had something we’d picked up off the shelf at a truck stop. We’ll have to go back to see if the pleasure of the shepherds pie was just situational. (But I think not – it really was special.)

By this morning we’d convinced ourselves that it would be fun to add a small side trip to Winnemucca. The town holds a special place in our hearts because it is the first one mentioned in Johnny Cash’s song “I’ve Been Everywhere” and was one of the first ones we went to when we were collecting pictures of us in all 92 locations in the song. After all, the side trip would take us on a road we hadn’t yet been on and would only add 140 miles to the day’s drive. Plus, we’d get to collect Tesla supercharger number 452 in McDermitt on the Oregon/Nevada border.

The road south starts off in the southwest corner of Idaho and then carries on down through the southeast corner of Oregon. The Idaho portion is through the Treasure Valley, much of which is farmed. We drove through miles of hop farms, passed large fields of sorghum, and saw some other crops that we city girls couldn’t identify.

By the time the road rose up from the valley, it went through country that is more open and very sparsely populated. As we drove, we went through sagebrush country to grassland to cropland and back to sagebrush, again and again. We saw almost no irrigation after leaving the Treasure Valley, so some areas must get moisture during the year in order to grow crops, while other areas are so dry that only sagebrush grows. And it is high country, much of it above 5,000 feet.

Along one long section out in the middle of nowhere the surrounding area was mostly brown, but there was a green strip along each side of the road, evidently planted by the highway department along the shoulder that had been disturbed during road construction.

We had lunch at a little Mexican restaurant in Winnemucca as we charged our car. One problem with Nevada is that in order to get to a non-smoking restaurant, all too often you have to go through a smoke-filled casino.

Heading east on the Interstate, we drove under and out of little sometimes heavy rain squalls. We finally stopped for the night in Wells, Nevada, population 1,200, tired but happy.