roadquill1

Well, it has been some months since my last entry – mostly because we don’t “road trip” in wintertime. However, I must apologize for leaving readers hanging in my last entry last Fall. For reasons of mostly laziness, I just never finished our journey – on paper. We really did enjoy the remainder of our trip to Yellowstone and return through Idaho, and out to the Oregon coast. Five  highlights now stand out in my mind as I look back on our return trip from Yellowstone National Park:

1. Craters of the Moon in Idaho is truly spectacular bleakness of black pumice! We climbed a cinder cone and drove through the park on a brilliantly sunny day. The surprise was that this extensive devastation was volcanic activity that was barely 2000 years old!

2. Our road selection from looking at maps has become easy. I call it the “Accountant System of Travel”…Don’t go on the red – take only black! These roads, for the most part are 2-laned, travelling through beautiful countryside where you can get up close and personal with the scenery and locals. The pace is a little slower, but there is little traffic.

3. We fell in love with the downtown and Snake River frontage developments of Bend, Oregon! The City Fathers (and probably a few City Mothers!) have done a beautiful job of planning this and bringing the trail system to fruition. Nanaimo City should send a team there to research the potential!

4. As we headed west out of Bend, we (me, obviously) selected a “new” route to travel to Eugene – via a route that was marked “No RVs over 30 feet”. Since we measure only 22 feet with bikes hanging off the back – we were okay…I thought. It turns out that in addition to very tight turns, the road, though paved, was extremely narrow, and although most of the traffic that we passed consisted of motor bikes, the odd car, or worse…motor home, had us hugging a non-existent shoulder edge of a steep drop-off. Near the top, we were, once again, travelling through a very large lava bed of a long dead volcano, and, in trying to avoid a collision with another motor home on a banked curve to my right, I suddenly noticed that I had almost opened the side of the camper on a sharp protruding lava flow rock.

5. The rest of our trip continued in beautiful weather, and when we reached the Pacific, we located several beach campgrounds on the Oregon coast. At one of them, in the late afternoon, the beach in the sun was too hot to sit (95 F) so we stayed in the shade of our campsite.

The travel up through Aberdeen was fabulous, and traffic very light. We were able to squeeze onto a last minute arrival at Pt. Angeles ferry for the trip to Victoria. It was good to get home.

And that entry leads us to our newest travels. We are heading for Santa Fe, and the next 6 weeks will have entries covering our journey and thoughts!

Love and best wishes to all!

Tony (the Quill)