Once we got back to Denver, we spent two days running errands and getting everything ready for the move on Monday, moving furniture down to the storage unit and finding all the stuff we had unpacked at my mom's house. I made a run to Costco with my mom which involved buying an absurd amount of toilet paper and paper towels, and also an area rug. Costco. Always surreal.
Monday morning John picked up our truck and Punk and I met him and the movers at the storage unit. We got on the road by noon and drove the first leg of the journey to Salt Lake City through the most boring and unattractive bits of Colorado and Wyoming. Except for some really neat rock formations in Wyoming.
Spirits in the cab of Behemoth II were high!
Allegedly the part of Utah we eventually drove through was pretty, but sadly we were in the dark by then. We hit the hotel on the north side of town and passed out.
We breakfasted and mounted up the next morning and did get to see a bit of the pretty of Utah before plunging into more boring in Idaho. Except for a nifty gorge we drove over on our way to lunch. GORGE!
With a golf course in it! Before we left Colorado John had spoken to his aunt and uncle who live near Eugene and they had warned him about two things regarding eastern Oregon. One, that parts of it would look very much like Martian desert, and two, that we would eventually hit lava fields and not to be too surprised when we did. The terrain of eastern Oregon is like no other place I've ever seen. When we first crossed the border it was fairly standard hilly farmland and green fields, but then it just got weird.
Beautiful, but weird. After passing thought the Martian desert the highway descends into an area called The Great Basin, which is an enormous plain in the midst of the mountains, home to the longest, straightest road I have every driven in my life. We drove until after sunset without a curve or a turn, past farms and dirt roads that branched off left and right. Slightly surreal in a sort of David Lynch-y way.
Eventually there was a curve. We stopped for the night in Burns, Oregon, a main street town which looked very like every other main street town I've come across in the midwest. We found and checked into our motel, and walked the dog down the aforementioned main street to the only open restaurant, a Chinese place. We passed and were passed by a whole lot of pickup trucks and there were some guys with weird vibes hanging around outside the bar we walked by, and the local bank had a lot of dead animals and pelts hanging on its wall, clearly visible from the sidewalk after hours. All in all the same strange, David Lynch-y feeling from the whole nighttime town. We carried our take out back to the room and ate a whole lot of fried things while watching the most recent Die Hard movie on HBO, which was surprisingly awesome! We woke up a little late the next morning, got coffee and pastry from the main street coffee shop, full of cotton candy haired little old ladies and farming gentlemen into their third cup of coffee talking about environmental legislation, and got on the road.
Fernambo Llama enjoys his mornin' java.
The drive to John's aunt and uncle's place was more or less straight west up and over a pass in the Cascades, through National Forests. Really beautiful. Although we saw even more of the pine beetle devastation that we'd seen in Colorado. For those of you who haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth (and I would STRONGLY encourage you to do so) the pine beetle is a parasite that attacks and kills lodgepole pines. Usually it is killed off by at least two weeks of hard freeze, but we haven't had that in some time due to global warming, and so huge swaths of pine trees throughout the western United States, from Alaska to New Mexico which should look like this....
....now look like this.
We saw a staggering amount of this in Colorado, and it was sad to see it here as well. But there you have it. We also finally passed the lava fields that John had been so excited about. LAVA FIELDS!
Happy John!
We arrived in Junction City in the afternoon and John's Uncle Marty drove out to meet us and guide us down the back roads to their farm. I can't tell you how much we loved being there, all three of us (especially Punkus). It is exactly the kind of place John and I would love to have someday. Acreage enough for a big vegetable garden and pasture, apple trees and blackberry bushes and a hundred year old oak tree. Small house with room enough for company. It was like coming home. Jackie and Marty were incredibly welcoming and delighted to see us and since John hadn't seen them or their daughter Cathy for some time, busied themselves getting caught up and Punk and I played some fetch and I tried to keep her from harassing the sheep too terribly.
Cathy works for a sheep farm further north and has four sheep of her own who live with Jackie and Marty and are spoiled rotten by Marty, who feeds them lots of apples and saltine crackers. It was hilarious to watch Punk explore her biological imperative through the fence at the sheep, who initially resisted, but then realized THEIR biological imperative and ran from her. Very fast. And kind of resentfully. With lots of "meeeeeeh" sounds. Cathy also took me to the neighboring farm where her horse is boarded and I got to soak up some horse love and hand feed some apples, which made the 12 year old in me who never, ever got over her horse thing very, very happy! Next time we go down to visit Cathy has promised to take me riding and to that I say squee. SQUEEEEEEE!!
The next morning we woke up early and walked down the lane a bit with the pup and soaked up the quiet and the lovely.
After breakfast, Marty and Jackie loaded us up with veggies from their garden and zucchini bread and we traded some of our peach jam for some of Jackie's currant and raspberry and Punk said goodbye to her new sheep friends. Who were very happy to see her go. Jackie and Marty had us follow them up to Cathy's place, which was on our way north to Portland, and we got to see more family and Cathy sent us away with dried lavender and a new dog bed that she made herself. The drive up to Portland took no time at all and then we were HERE! What the hell?!??!?!
We met the movers, and it took about two hours to finally unload our stuff for good, and we called a pizza place, set up our bed, put food in our faces and then collapsed in a big pile of exhausted and finally home in our own house. Our own house!
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