Going Home Again - Part Four

Now Playing -  Say Goodbye by Norah Jones

 

Life -  

 When we were headed back to Idaho, I had actually been concerned that the thinner mountain air would cause some difficulty for me. I've never been the best when it comes to breathing - I always feel stuffy, but I'd read that many people have trouble making the switch back after being gone for a while. I did not have that problem. In fact, I loved the thin, sweet mountain air. I'd missed it.

What I had forgotten was how incredibly dry the air is in Idaho. I felt like a sponge on a hot sidewalk as the days passed. My skin dried up, my lips cracked, my nose bled more frequently. Even my hair seemed more brittle. My heel cracked up the back and started bleeding. Now, some of this was my fault. We were spending hours a day in sheds and garages, shuffling through boxes and papers and it was in the mid to high eighties the whole time, as opposed to the sixties and seventies we'd been having in Maine and I wasn't drinking as much as I should have been.

The last few days of our trip were better. Yard sale over, we were still very busy, but it was with visits and friends, barbecues and reminiscing, the good stuff. We had a smaller BBQ at Rich's for closer friends and family and a large picnic at a park for extended family, where I was blessed to see my uncle Maynard (Isn't that a great Western name?) who has been battling illness for a long time - his doctor wrote him off and he keeps on fighting, even growing an enviably wavy head of hair back.My crazy and hilarious Aunt Carroll came too, which was great - She's the second greatest influence on my interest in reading and writing after my mom. And the ever increasingly large Marley Clan sent their representatives. Not everyone - just the cool ones. haha

After the park, on the last night in Pocatello, we got together with some friends and family and went to a late night 3D showing of Avengers, which was spectacular, stopped by my old Walgreens to say hi to Mr. Wizard and stumbled to bed at 2am.

We didn't get out of town the next day until after 11 - had a leisurely breakfast at Butterburr's, loaded a few last things into the dumpster and then slept in the car most of the way to Salt Lake City. We didn't fly out until midnight, but we'd promised Lindsay's brother that we'd spend the day with him and his family. This turned out to be a fantastic idea. We had a low key, laid back evening grilling burgers and playing with a freaky little bunny and headed to the airport.

I love Red-Eye flights - There's something very apocalyptic when you are flying over the lights of a city at 3am and usually, you're one of just three or four people awake on the plane. The problem with them is that I can't sleep during them at all - I have an easier time sleeping during day flights so my next day is a little rough. The flight itself was a typically squalid affair - Delta again - crappy snacks, pokey armrests with the added inconvenience of inconsiderate people in front of you reclining their seats. The thing goes back 3 inches, tops for the person sitting in the chair, yet somehow reduces the amount of space the person behind has by half. I despise it.

When we touched down in Bangor (After a flight in a humorously tiny plane) the difference in humidity on our skin was immediate and jarring. My fingers felt pruny. It was a fine trip and we were very glad we did it, but man, it was good to get home - see our kids and sleep in our own bed again.

Was it all it could be? It was worth doing - we loved seeing family and it was incredibly reassuring to re-pack and go through our shed, but it was no vacation. Next time, we plan to fly right over Idaho - rent a house on the Oregon coast and let any family that wants to see us drive a few hours and hang out on the beach in front of the Pacific with us. That's a vacation. 

The ROUS FAMILY -   

 

 

 

 

Summer "Vacation"

This summer has been incredibly full, overflowing, really. I'd planned to keep things scheduled out on my various blogs and merely have them post as they came along, keeping every one up to date and fresh. Then we started spending every day off in Bangor, trying to find a place to live. We found a place and then had to find a place to put it. But now, finally, we own a nice little used trailer and it's installed on a pretty plot of land in the country.

That's when our company arrived. We have a new home 3 hours north of here, but we haven't seen it, we've had my brother-in-law, his wife and their 12-year-old son out here for the last 8 days. It's been fun, and more on it when I get a chance, but it also means nothing has been done about my online duties, my writing or my moving. So they're gone now and we can dive into the nitty-gritty - getting packed, cleaned and moved ASAP. And then my mom may come out to visit in early July, which will be awesome, but if that happens, don't expect to hear much from me on this front until after that too.

So consider this my summer vacation, I suppose - We'll see ya in a few weeks or so!

The ROUS FAMILY -   

 

 

 

 

West Meets East - Part Two

Now Playing -  
One Day by Chris Isaak

Life - 

We chose the ideal way to start off our vacation with Lindsay's parents on Monday morning. Rich has always prided himself on his backyard. It's fenced in and private, with plenty of shade trees and a lush little garden, plenty of decks and places to relax. And in recent years, he's started feedinging and watching birds. He gets a huge number in his yard everyday, and delights in identifying them, and catering the feed to their liking. So when we were planning the trip and noticed that there was an Audubon sanctuary nearby, we immediately added it. 

Having never been there, it may have been risky, but it paid off extremely well.

 

Tucked off of the road near West Bath, the Hamilton Audubon Sanctuary is phenomenal. It has a two-mile trail through pines and oaks that skirts the edge of the bay, swampland and old-growth forests.

We spent a long time leisurely wandering the path, spotting birds, peeking under mushrooms for fairies, examining fishermen's buckets of bloodworms, and taking in the amazing scent of the pine forest. This was probably the highlight of my trip. I was still fresh and hadn't tired of driving everywhere and it was a joy to wind my way through root lined paths in the middle of nowhere.

Afterwards, we drove for a bit, ending up on Popham Beach. In the summer, this place is insanely busy. They have a pretty substantial parking area and when we went by in July, it was full and folks were parking along the highway. On a windy, rainy day in October however, it was just us. My in-laws surprised me by being remarkably game for this, and we spent some time there, dodging the surf and watching the Atlantic. 

Fort Popham was a logical next stop. Built in 1869, this crescent shaped granite Battery saw a little action before the nearby Fort Baldwin made it obsolete. Nowadays, the place is open to the public during the summer months and it's very impressive to wander around in. You can still see the mounting brackets for the cannons and the spray painted tags of the soldiers stationed here. I had a hard time deciding whether the fort would make a better backdrop for wedding photos or as a stronghold for the zombie apocalypse. 

We ate at a nearby restaurant, Smitty's, or something, where Rich had his first Maine Lobster. He was quite shocked by the small amount of meat you get for the work, though the flavor was as amazing as ever. I had a serviceable cheesesteak. Overall, it was pretty unremarkable restaurant, but it did have great waterfront views. We rolled on home after that. Lindsay watched a little bit of TV with her parents and learned that you can describe the entire plot of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind to some people and they still wont realize that they've seen it until the DVD menu comes up.

 

Reviews Of Unusual Size  

Television



NIKITA
Thursdays, The CW
 

Re: Yet another remake of the Luc Besson story, this hour-long drama follows the adventures of a woman named Nikita. (Maggie Q) Trained by an underground governmental group, Nikita was burned and escaped. Now she's gone rogue and will stop at nothing to bring the organization down.

Outstanding: I've always liked spy shows, and I got a kick out of the 1997 series. 

Unacceptable: Too bad this show was so horrible. The acting was atrocious, the writing even worse, and I think Maggie Q is totally and completely unbelievable as a trained assassin. She's so skinny and gangly that the weapons she's holding look like Rob Liefeld cartoon guns, and her angry face is that of a model concentrating on the catwalk. Which is too bad, because I've liked Maggie Q in some other stuff. And that would be forgivable if the other characters weren't just as bad. None of them look like the clichéd stereotypes they're meant to play. The bad ass controller has a pretty boy face with a neatly groomed douchestache, and the computer nerd looks like a surfer. 

Summary: I will not be watching this again. I suffered through the first two episodes and actually found myself looking forward to paying bills afterward.

1/5     

West Meets East - Part One

Now Playing -
 Metropolitan Glide
by Tom Waits

Life - 

For the last week and a half, we've had a virtual parade of visitors here. First, our friend Jen for a few days, visiting us on a side trip while she was in Cape Cod with her aunt. Before we'd even put the cushions back on the couch, Lindsay's parents arrived from Idaho for a week, and halfway through that, her sister Marissa joined us. I had planned on making little updates of their visit each day, leisurely editing photos and relaxing on the porch in the evening after our adventures. SO naturally, we ran out of time each day and by the time I got home from driving around every day, all I wanted to do was turn my brain off and unwind.

So here is my mega-post of the week, part one, covering Jen's visit and my in-laws' arrival.

Jen was an interesting challenge. She's an awesome lady and really fun to hang out with, and she's been my wife's best friend for years, but she's also different from us in a lot of ways, which made showing her Maine a bit hard. We knew what my In-Laws liked and anticipated that, but how does someone show off a state to someone in just a day or two? She also arrived with short notice right before our family's planned trips, so we couldn't take any time off work, which left Linz to entertain them while I worked. So I missed out on the lobster dinner and the lighthouse, but I caught up with them in the evening on Thursday. It had been a long day already. Portland looks like it has a fairly small Old Port area, but once you start walking around, it gets big pretty quick, and she was tired of walking by the time I joined them. So we kept things simple, just a visit to the nearly abandoned Old Orchard Beach for some Beal's ice cream and an order of Pier Fries. 

 

That night she crashed on our couch and the next morning, we headed North. We drove around Bath a bit, doing a few of the things that we had initially planned to do with Rich and Sue (Linz's parents) before heading to Red's Eats for lunch. None of us had ever eaten there before, but I'd heard good things. The line was long, but the food was swell (You can read my review of Red's here) and we had a really nice time. We also stopped at a few cemeteries along the way. Jen, a forensic anthropologist by training, was a lot more into our obsession with cemeteries than Lindsay's parents are, so we took advantage of that.

Unfortunately, after lunch, Jen had to head back South to meet up with her aunt, so we bid her a fond farewell. We had one day of work before my in-laws arrived on Sunday night, and a bit of prep work in the house before they arrived, but it was too bad to see her go all the same.

Sunday, Rich and Sue's plane got in pretty late, around 7pm, so all we really did was eat some pizza at the Pizza Villa, which was also the first place in Portland that Lindsay and I ate back in January. We got to our house around 9, played with the dogs and they were asleep by 10, with Linz joining them soon after. I sat in a corner of the bedroom with a book for another 3 hours, quietly reading, something that would quickly become a pattern...

Reviews Of Unusual Size

Television

NO ORDINARY FAMILY
Tuesdays, ABC

Re: This new series is an hour-long drama about a family that finds themselves in possession of super-powers after a plane wreck. The father (Michael Chiklis) ends up with strength and some amount of invulnerability, the mother (Julie Benz) is super-fast, the daughter (Kay Panabaker) can read minds and the son (Jimmy Bennet) ends up being able to do something relating to math that never really got explained.

Outstanding: I'll watch anything with Michael Chiklis, and he does great here as a somewhat disgruntled father who feels like he's lost his family to everyday life. The effects are pretty decent here too, especially the fight scene in the garage. The father's friend is really fun too.

Unacceptable: Nothing much happens in the first episode, just the typical discovery of their powers, which let's be honest, is a pretty clichéd origin. The mother's abilities are kind of goofy looking, and her method of proving that she's fast (Remember that thing? WHOOSH Here it is!) is silly as hell.

Summary: Despite the extremely tired premise, I'll keep watching. The show has a great cast and I'm curious to see where they decide to go with things - Sappy family drama, over the top sitcom super heroes, ridiculous villain of the week antics or something unique and cool... Time will tell.

2/5

The Bone-Breaking Leavenworth Trip of 2009 Part IV

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Take a look at that picture up there. Sheesh.  My second Honda Element, totalled. My second accident I walked away from with only minor injuries (though granted, my injuries are less minor this time) Both times, things could have been much worse. Much, much.

Instead, I woke up and got to deal with what comes after a wreck like this, trying to sort crap out and deal with the inevitable aches and pains.

Here's what we have on the morning of December 15th, 2009. No car, ipso facto, no transportation home. Some strong pain pills but not strong enough to prevent the pain, not really. An insurance company that takes things easy around the holiday. No coverage for rentals but thats okay, there are none for a hundred miles and will be none for at least three days, not unless we want to drive to Seattle. I have no coat, and only one glove. Despondant  or just plain pissy members of the party be ready to mutiny. My best friends still need wed. We don't really have a place to sleep tonight.

Did I mention that we were utterly and completely stranded 700 miles from home? Four people, my wife forgot her ID, low on funds and with my busted arm, comfort and fear of blood clots are very real concerns.

Bah. First thing's first, essentials out of my battered vehicle, then a coat that doesn't look like like a child's cape on my shoulder like the borrowed one I'm packing.

The guy at the wreckers was a doof. Let us in, let us take crap and leave without ever having us sign a few very important papers, I mentioned this to him, but he seemed okay with things. Strontium, poor Strontium was a wreck, his front tire and part of the axle in the back seat, everything cracked and shattered.

But you should see the other guy.... right here!

Dude knows how to bounce off us and hit a tree, I'll give him that!

Apart from the wrecker, who, lets face it are generally a scummy bunch, everyone in Leavenworth was incredibly, ridiculously, over the top nice. All of them. Nice, sweet, caring, friendly.

The ladies at the Aussie shop there especially, they took me under their wing, so to speak and made it thier mission to find me a coat. They had a few there, but mostly out of my range, so they sent us around town looking for cheaper/free coats. No luck, but the town was PRETTY. Snowy and gorgeous.

After our search we hit the Australian store again and The Ridiculously Nice Clerks From Heaven/Australia sold me a pretty nice coat that was on clearance.  After that, we headed back to the house and tried to hash out how the crap we were gonna get home.

Lindsay couldn't fly or bus or train, no ID. No rentals available. Finally, we decided that Devon and Lindsay would cram themselves and most of our luggage into the back seat of Derek's sports car and ride back with him the next morning. Ben and I would mail whatever we couldn't fit or take with us, and we would ride the Amtrac to Whitefish, MT.

Derek would drop Lindsay off in Missoula that day and we would meet her the next morning, after getting a ride from my awesome aunt Jo from Whitefish to Missoula. From there, Rich, my father in law, drove up and would fetch us in Missoula and finally, bring us home.

That settled, we dove into the far more pleasurable task of marrying my friends. No Santa suit, but aside from that and some grogginess on the part of the groom and I, everything went beautifully. All things considered, it was a nice wedding, though I was in and out of consciousness for a good chunk of it.

Lindsay and Devon left the next morning. We spent the day in Leavenworth, wandering around and mailing our excess baggage (Again, ridiculously nice folks...) and left on the train that night.

I'd never ridden on a train before and it was a LOT of fun. Roomy, novel, comfy, if it had been light outside so that I could see the world beyond the glass, it would have been immensely enjoyable! Hooray for Amtrac!

The rest of the trip home was uneventful, though I became increasingly uncomfortable as  the agony in my arm asserted itself. Over the following week, I started suffering from claustrophobia and weird pains, as well as the unsettling feeling of bones shifting around in my flesh. It's healing well now, and they hope to avoid surgery.

While our inaugural trip out was not the best intro to the city, I did really enjoy Leavenworth. It's touristy and crowded but never feels like it, it somehow keeps the quaint Bavarian village feel throughout. I have to give huge thank yous to the ladies at the Australian Store, Corey and Lisa and the rest of Brooke's family, the conductor n the train that sorted our rates out, Aunt Jo and Rich for getting us home, and the lovely women in my life, my wife and Brooke, who managed to not lose it when their men got banged up. Love you guys.

 

Speaking of which, here's my initial xray from the accident!

The Bone-Breaking Leavenworth Trip of 2009 Part II

The next morning, we decided to loiter in Wenatchee for a while. We hit up a most excellent Old-tyme soda fountain, went on a goose chase for a giant pig that ended up being a sad coyote, then headed up the mountains to Leavenworth.

In the daylight, not surrounded by tourists, the town is a wonder. Cute, goofy, quaint and stylish, the entire town proper is stylized and designed with a bavarian theme, everything from the Kris Kringle store to the Mcdonalds. I totally dig it.

There's a slight feel of the artificial, but enough fun to go along with it that it feels more like a Disney theme city with added brats and beer. We didin't have a lot of time to visit the first day, the wedding was the next afternoon, and we needed to get the logistics figured out, so we caught up with Rob and Brooke and Rob's brother, Derek, who had driven up with his wife in a two wheel-drive sports car, taking the Pendleton pass route rather than heading through Missoula, as I'd suggested. As a result, he was a bit tired and frazzled from the drive.

We snagged some brats and headed to the Big Bear Lodge, where Brooke's family was staying, with the goal of returning in time for the lighting ceremony that evening.

The rehearsal went well; Brooke's family is very laid back and friendly, and it was a pleasure meeting them and running through the wedding quickly.

The lighting ceremony was a lot of fun, characters in costumes, hot wassail, (Though we were bummed to see that the roasted chestnut guys didn't come that week), they have a charming little parade and lighting ceremony and everyone oohs and ahhs as the village is lit in a rainbow of colors.

After the ceremony, we retreated to the Bear Lodge and ate some dinner and relaxed, playing with some wedding prep stuff, decorating, combing my Santa beard, the usual. Then us boys (and Lindsay, who was heading to bed) left to our lodge for the bachelor party. We'd rented a place called the Icicle Meadow Lodge, and though we didn't know it at the time, it was just down the driveway and across the street from the Bear Mountain Lodge; perfect!

We spent the evening goofing off, generally, nothing too wild. We played pool, drank some frosty beverages, lit a fire, played some Scrabble, wore plague masks, played the accordion, the usual stuff.

Finally, around 3am, we headed to bed, with plans to get up the next morning and grab a few things in town and eat some waffles at Sandy's.

Ahh, the best laid plans.....

The Bone-Breaking Leavenworth Trip of 2009 Part I

It all started out so well.

December Eleventh, around 9:30, my brother Ben, our friend Devon, my wife Lindsay and I left Pocatello, ID and set out for Leavenworth, WA. My friends Rob and Brooke were getting married there on the Fourteenth and we planned to spend a few days getting up there, I was to perform the ceremony in full Santa Claus regalia, we'd spend a few days enjoying the Bavarian style village there, then work our way back home.

Like I said, it started out really well. We piled into Strontium, loading him full of clothes, bedding and tuxes and hit the road. We all get along quite well, and it was a great trip up. we stopped at graveyards, posed with giant stone animals, visited breweries, laughed a lot and made pretty good time. We found ourselves enchanted with Ellensburg, a small town with a great brewery, excellent pasta place and we managed to breeze into their downtown just in time to catch a free showing of the Muppet Christmas Carol! I really have no idea how you could hope to beat that, frankly.

I'll keep it pretty short here, typing is really difficult and I do want to get caught up with my blog, but suffice to say, it was a really fun road trip. I'd traveled with Devon before, we took a greyhound bus to California together for Muppet Fest, and between him and my brother, entertainment was in copious supply.

We arrived in Leavenworth late, after dark. Every weekend around Christmas, the town does a big lighting ceremony and we caught the tail end of that. We were shocked at the sheer number of vehichles pouring from that little village. We'd kind of assumed that the place was just a goofy, little tourist town, mostly unnoticed by people at large. Instead we were surrounded by cars, trucks, tour busses, any type of mototrized you could imagine.

We quickly retreated to the nearby town of Wenatchee for the night and spent the evening wandering around downtown in the cold winter air. The next day we'd meet with Rob and Brooke and her family, and spend some time in Leavenworth.

Autumn In The Northwest - Day Four and Five

It took me longer to get this posted than I'd planned, so I decided to lump the last two and a half days of our vacation into one post. It appears that I took virtually zero pictures of the last day in Oregon...



DAY FOUR

Sunday morning dawned gray, drizzly and gloomy, just the way we like it. We got up and out of the hotel pretty quickly, hitting the road just before 7:30. Our plan for the day was to head up to Astoria, spend a bit of time there admiring the quirky buildings there, possibly eating lunch, before heading along the coast.
   
We stuck pretty close to that, Though we were in Astoria pretty darned early, so we left quickly, just stopping to get lost amongst the rambling three story houses that are everywhere in that town. If we ever made enough money and could be convinced to forgo the beach, Astoria would quickly rise to the top of the list of places we would want to live.

After Astoria, we cut along the coast with a brief detour when I took the wrong road and got lost in the forest for a bit until we reached Rockaway Beach. Just out of curiosity, we drove around the coastal homes there for a while, scoping out prices of the houses for sale, of which there were a lot. It was a truly mixed bag in that crazy town. We found a 17,000 square foot place with three bedrooms and views of the ocean from the second and third floors for over two hundred thousand dollars less than a house less than a block away and twenty feet closer to the surf with unobstructed views that had less than 500 square feet.

 

The beach was great that day, and we wandered for the better part of an hour, prodding jellyfish and other mysterious things in the sand with my shoe and watching the seagulls play. The surf was especially dramatic, with high, beautiful waves and lots of different colors. If we could have, we would have set up shop right there and never left. Apart from the crappy food in Rockaway, that is... We talked on the phone to my sister in law, Marissa for a bit, sent her a phone picture of the ocean, then left for inland central Oregon, an area mysterious to us.

From Tillamook, we cut south and east, through the Suislaw National forest and towards a small town below Portland called McMinnville. Which, as we discovered is notable only for it's vaguely hard to navigate streets, another Walgreens, an extremely unremarkable and unsatisfying Mexican place and a very picturesque little college campus.

Once I figured out how to get out of town, we dropped further south, towards the towns of Dallas and Salem, Oregon, first stopping in the very charming little town of Amity. From it's very outskirts we liked Amity. The streets were quiet and clean, the air was crisp and smelled like autumn should smell. Cool and dry, slightly musty and fruity, like walking through a field of leaves. We stopped at a farmer's market there and marveled at the dozens fall colors displayed, buying a bag of homemade Hazelnut Brittle, which was made by a local with nuts from her own tree. It was great - buttery and sweet, with just enough heft to be crunchy but not impossible to bite.

Beyond Amity, we rolled through broad fields that seemed to alternate between groves of nut trees and rows of grapevines. It's obvious that a lot of the farmers there have decided that it's easier and swankier to open their own little winery rather than their old farms, but we thought that both had their charms. There was a nice balance between the posh wine cellars and traditional farmhouses and even the wine places have a spunky, young upstart feel to 'em.

We had high hopes for Dallas, Oregon. It's situated just far enough away from Salem to be realistic for me to commute and is large enough that Lindsay could possibly find a job locally and not have to commute. They also have a lot of pretty reasonably priced housing and a few good restaurants. If anything, the town managed to exceed our expectations, being closer to Salem than I'd thought, only around ten minutes, and having much more of a quaint rural village feel than anything that close to Salem has any right to have. We saw a lot of gorgeous old houses, many with three or more stories and a few that were for sale and in need of some love, maybe a few big dogs too. The biggest surprise of the evening however, were the kids.

They were everywhere! In the parks, on the basketball courts, walking along the street, sitting on park benches... and this was around three on a Sunday afternoon. I know what you're thinking and no, they didn't bring their tvs out to the park with them or have wireless game controllers with good ranges, these kids were actually playing outside. Some were even talking and laughing with each other. Clearly something has taken over the youth of Dallas. Pod-People perhaps, trained to act human based off of 1950's footage. This is a mystery I will have to investigate further if we move there.

Before hitting up Salem, we took a detour to a town called Falls City, which ended up being out too far to be realistic and not nearly as cheap as we'd hoped. Cutting back through Dallas, we headed to Salem itself, a city of around 175,000 with six Walgreens. I'm always leery of larger cities. I'm a good driver, but I have a tendency to get lost or distracted easily and big cities bring out the worst in me. (That and country roads, for that matter...)

I'm happy to say that Salem is not only easy to navigate, but it never once felt as large as it is. I suppose a large part of it is that a good chunk of the population commutes to Portland for work every day, but even on a Sunday evening, the streets moved well and people were considerate drivers. The city is laid out well, we were able to get around using a tiny map on the back of our Oregon map for the most part. We stopped at a good chunk of the Walgreens stores in Salem over the two days we were there, some were nice and new, some were nice and old and one was old, trashy and across the street from a couple of adult shops. With my luck, that'll be the one I get a transfer to.

After driving long enough that we felt we had a pretty decent handle on Salem, we decided to find a hotel for the night. We checked into a couple of Best Westerns in town, hoping to use Lindsay's negligible employee discount, but all of them, even the one that was technically a Motel and looked trashy and empty wanted more than twenty dollars more than the one in Dallas. So once again, we drove the ten minutes and stayed in a tiny, set-back Best Western, manned by an extremely bored but very friendly desk clerk who was also named Lindsay.
   
She had moved from Portland to Dallas to help out her mom and found herself staying. She said the town was pretty safe and clean, but boring. That's pretty much what we were hoping for, frankly. She directed us to Murphy's Grill for dinner, a small chain-esque restaurant that was kind of an Applebees with fishing decor. We split a Mushroom Cheeseburger and headed to bed.


DAY FIVE

Our last day of vacation, like most of our trips was more an exercise in endurance than a vacation. We woke up at seven that morning and in less than 22 hours, we'd be back in Pocatello. Most people, when travelling between Salem and Idaho, head up to Portland, then take the interstate along the Columbia River Gorge, before cutting along it to Pendleton and the Idaho border. We've driven that route a lot. Something like 13 times in the last year or so, so we decided to take an alternate route, over the Cascades and through mid-eastern Oregon, and area that neither of us had ever seen.

The drive started promisingly, cruising through lush fields of grapes and spotted with farmhouses. Eventually agriculture gave way to thick autumn forests as the road got curvier and the elevation rose. The road over the Cascades is a gorgeous one, and I highly recommend that everyone take it at least once, but I can say this; It's much, much longer and not a good idea to burn through if you're in a hurry.

I stopped a lot, just to stand on the side of the car and admire the natural beauty of the area, though the obviously invected, bright yellow pine trees were an unusual curiosity. They're obviously sufferring from a blight of some sort, something that turns their needles fall colors before shrivelling and blackening. Eventually, after the road turned to dirt and back to pavement, after some rugged signs of humanity started trickling in, we left the Cascade region behind, first stopping at a funky little service station where we bought a bottle of barbecue sauce from a hippy couple named Something (I forget his name right now..) and Sue.

A shoe tree. Located somewhere in the middle of Oregon...

Beyond that, there isn't a lot to Oregon, likely one reason that no one really considers half of the state when thinking about it - Most of the state is desert. Covered in sagebrush, scrubby pines and jagged rocks, the desert region of Oregon still has more appeal that a lot of Idaho, but after the beauty of the last few days, it was a bit of a downer to drive.

We stopped in Sisters for lunch, eating at a small deli that served up fresh, large sandwiches and excellent homemade soups and rolls. Leaving town, we noticed a shabby clabboard sign on a corner with big red letters spelling out "JERKY" and an arrow pointing to the left. We are not the kind of people that will ever pass up the chance to buy possibly questionable slabs of dried meat in a strange town, so we followed that sign. It led us to a dead end street in the middle of a vaguely industrial area. Thinking we'd been led astray somehow, we circled back and tried again, finding nothing. Finally, I stopped and asked directions at a car detailing place. Turns out, the simple red arrow failed to elaborate that you then wanted to turn left, head two blocks, turn right, then left, and it would be right in front of you. Naturally.

Totally worth it though. You know it's a good jerky place when they're loading half of an unidentified, skinned animal from the back of a truck by giant metal hooks. Meat is so much sexier when it's not connected to other meat, forming a vaguely identifiable shape. Anyway, the jerky was great. We bought some teryaki, brown sugar, original and a tiny piece of their sweet jalapeno. Then, fortified with provisions in case of a treacherous pass, we left again, a straight out burn to Pocatello.

Not much to say after that. We stopped in Durkee again around 8pm and shared a Bo's Burger, which had two patties, ham, bacon, couple of cheeses, veggies, a greasy grilled bun and a side of fries, followed up with a slice of coconut creme pie.

Just over the border of Idaho, we made the bed and slept for a few hours, waking around 12:30am. I stopped in a gas station just outside of Boise to buy a Rockstar, in the hopes of  staving off sleep for another few hours, where the clerk did something strange and vaguely annoying. My change came to $2.83 and when he handed it to me, he handed me the $2.80 first, then dug out the pennies. Instead of handing them to me, he hovered them about a half inch over the "need a penny take a penny" container, and said "You don't need these, do ya?" then he dropped them in the pile.

I didn't need them, frankly, I had probably four dollars in pennies in various pockets and containers in my car, but the way he did it stuck in my craw. I can't help but assume that he turns that penny jar into a tidy little supplemental tip over the course of an evening, there was well over a dollar in pennies already, peppered with some silver too. Bah to you, Shady Graveyard Shift Chevron Guy!

We got home around 5am Tuesday morning, sixteen hours before we had to be at work again to a couple of extremely giddy dogs and some slightly interested in saying hi cats.

All said, it was a pretty great trip. We saw some beautiful areas, many new to us and it was the first time we'd ever been to either state in the Autumn. We decided that there were enough possibilites for transfers that we don't have to be as picky as we'd feared. We drove over 2,100 miles in just over five days, averaged 22mpg, and saw desert, prairie, farmlands, the Pacific Ocean, forests and towns in every shape and size. Pretty cool.

Now we just have to find a way to get out there permanently, sell our books, open a motel, become successful and go on to live our dreams. Easy enough, right?