Summer Adventures

Casey and I pulled into our driveway just before 2 pm today. Gus came from the backyard when called.

And some final stats:

Eastbound:  3,996 miles in 8 days

Westbound: 3,661 miles in 8 days

I’m sure my Oregon-based friends know the state song:

Yep – me neither…

We’re back in the land of micro-brews (though there was almost always some locally crafted brews in our travels) and no-pumping-your-own-gas. The route took us through the very dry and tree-less section of eastern Washington, to the first of two crossings of the Columbia River. It makes a huge horseshoe near Kennewicke, and we found the same, great city park on the banks of the river that we had visited a couple of years ago. Casey took a real swim, then rolled in the nice grass – again and again.

I really enjoy the drive west approaching and along the Columbia Gorge. It starts with barren, dry hills and gradually turns to forests and waterfalls as you get closer to Portland.

Tomorrow we have an easy 5 hour drive to Ashland.

On the Going to the Sun highway

When Betsy and Philip visited Crater Lake National Park, and stood on the edge in slack-jawed awe, one of them said, “There’s a reason they are national parks.”  (or something close to that.) There’s a reason Glacier NP is in the system, added under President Taft, of course after being pretty much stolen from the Blackfeet tribe earlier.  We retraced our steps from our overnight stay in Kalispell and entered the park on the western side and drove the “Going to the Sun” highway over Logan Pass. I think the highway was completed in the 1930s, and it twists and turns and hugs big rock walls pretty much the whole way, with large glacial lakes as bookends. Terrific scenery, but only enjoyed in various parking turnouts since the NPS doesn’t allow dogs anywhere where cars can’t go. We had gorgeous, sunny weather.

After the drive through the park we looped back around the southern edge and headed back to Kalispell and on to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Just two easy days of driving left and then we’ll be in Ashland.

Oh, and a good-bye, today, to US 2. We first joined it just north of the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan, and left it today on our way out of Kalispell. We spent a total of 1,866 miles on that highway. I like it still.

Montana is a big enough state that I never left it today. Casey and I traveled 400 miles and there is still some of the state left to our west. I learned that we’ve been traveling through the Montana Hi-Line. There’s a good introduction and write-up about this region here.  The author defines the Hi-Line as US Route 2 and north to the Canadian border.

[It has ] rolling prairie, endless fields of wheat, large herds of cattle, towering mountains in the distance and remoteness – all tucked under the beautiful “Big Sky” that Montana is singularly famous for.

Our big goal for the week

We skittered and swerved from cloud bank to sunny sky to rain and back again today. True to his mountain dog heritage Casey woke up from his Zen trance when we hit the forests, mountains, and rivers near Glacier National Park. Glacier has been a goal this week, though Casey is only allowed where cars can go. Still, we spent a bit of time inside the park today and tomorrow will do the big drive over the pass.

First (and only?) ding for the car today – a pit in the windshield from a dirty roadway.

The headline actually poses a good question, in addition to a double rhyme. Each spring and early summer several towns in the Midwest get overrun by floods and I confess to glazing over the names of those unfortunate cities. This year Minot was among the cursed – over 3,000 homes lost or damaged June 24-25. Driving through the town the evidence was everywhere. A row of frame houses across the street from Minot State Univ. had water stain marks about 3 feet up from the foundation. Clearly some debris had been hauled away but for those who cleaned out their houses later, their torn up carpets and wall board were stacked near the curb. A huge, presumably temporary berm/dike was being dismantled not far away. The cashier at the downtown cafe said she lost her house, and lacking flood insurance, could get very little in the way of compensation. She spent a month in a motel, and got a little bit of money from FEMA. The morbid joke among her friends is that they’ll have to work until they’re 101 to recoup their losses.

Geographic Center of North America

On a happier note, Betsy, Casey, and I visited a monument in Kansas on our way east at the end of June, which marked the geographic center of the lower 48 states. Not to be outdone, the state of North Dakota has a rock cairn/monument marking the geographic center of North America. All these little gems come courtesy of Road Trip USA – a great book detailing 11 different cross country (east-west or north-south) driving trips that avoid Interstate highways. Our greatest find from this book came last summer – the Tinkertown Museum between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. The tips on history and sites are great. As an interesting commentary on the food service industry, the restaurant tips often are out of date – many being closed, even with the recommendations from the book.

And the economist in me couldn’t help noticing the goings on in North Dakota. The Road Trip USA book, describes the drive in ND thus, “It hems and rolls and yawns forever.” True. But it has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country – 3.3%. Huge grain fields – gotta be corporate farms, there were very few farmhouses left, and oil or gas wells everywhere, with flares burning off the excess methane. We stopped briefly in the little town of Ray, and there must have been 50 or more trucks plowing through the little intersection – either tanker trucks or hauling trucks, not your typical highway freight trucks. Drilling in process meant a facility with 5-6 trailers or RVs for the crew, and at least twice I saw temporary villages put up by some logistics firm that must also contract with DoD in the Middle East – long, long rows of prefab housing/offices – just like the descriptions of big military bases. Then, driving east to west, almost as soon as we crossed into Montana the land turned from grain to pasture, and the oil wells are more sparse.

Floodwood, MN

The Road Trip guidebook calls Floodwood the Plains to Pines town – where the grain growing plains of the northern midwest morph into forests and lakes in eastern Minnesota and Wisconsin. I prefer the self-proclaimed, “Catfish Capital of the World.”

Cool, overcast, with drizzle at times. Not an inspiring day. Still the travels along US 2 are sufficiently interesting and typical for the region. We’re in Grand Forks, North Dakota – couldn’t go further west and still find lodging. Grand Forks is a big, bustling town.

Residents of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula refer to themselves as Yoopers. Today, Casey and I drove up the mitt of the lower peninsula, crossed the Mackinac (rhymes with ‘saw’) Bridge, and headed west along the northern shore of Lake Michigan.

We'll follow this all the way to western Montana

As soon as we left the bridge we joined US Highway 2 – which we will follow for the next several days and 1,000+ miles. The UP is pretty much deserted and the trees very dense. Lots of iron mining in the area we drove through this afternoon, and in fact we’re staying in Iron River tonight. (not quite the same cachet as Palm Beach or Orcas Island…)

The UP is famous for smoked fish and pasties (pronounced pass’-tees…pay’stees are something else…) which have meat, veggies, potatoes, and some spices in a baked pastry.

Say Pass-tees

What a pleasure to drive into my hometown of Midland, Michigan today. The drive through Ontario was easy enough, once we shook all the traffic around Toronto. Re-entry into the U.S. was through Sarnia. I arrived in Midland with enough time to walk around downtown, and then drive by each of my childhood homes.

First house, not counting one my parents rented when they first moved to town.

Lived here from age 10 - until off to college

A few other memory photos on Facebook at this link.

We’re back on the road again. This time it is just Casey and Doug. Betsy is staying an extra week at Fenacres to get a jump start on closing the camp. She’ll drive down to Philadelphia in a week to return our grandcat, and then fly to Oregon on Labor Day.

Saturday was spent packing for the trip and buttoning down the hatches in camp for the arrival of Irene. I’ll find out later tonight how things went – Betsy posted a Facebook status earlier in the day that they had a lot of rain and some increasing winds. The electrical power is the most fragile system up there, so we’ll see how it worked out.

Casey and I drove west, and as the morning progressed the rain lessened, though not the wind. After crossing the St. Lawrence into Ontario we generally followed the lakeshore to our first night’s stay – just west of Toronto. It’s tough to see in this photo but the Toronto skyline is in the distance. A lovely green space maintained by local government not far from our hotel, with a trail along the shore.

We’ve been at Camp for just about 24 hours now, and then we’re still unpacking and getting squared away, the road dust is washing off.

This travelogue will be on hiatus until sometime in late August, when we start the journey back to Ashland, Oregon.

I’ll post interesting summer adventures in Facebook.