(written on the 30th and Oct. 1st)
I think it was another challenging night, pain and discomfort wise.
Boy am I regretting having done those things to try and aggravate the nerves issues prior to the MRIs. It didn’t work in time, and now I’m just… miserable.
Ugh.
After getting up and getting squared away for the morning, we headed over to grocery outlet. My mom was on an important phone call, so I headed in to go shopping. What I found was just about the opposite of what We enjoyed during last year’s road trip.
Grocery outlet had gone from this big open Warehouse type store to A regular grocery store, and not just a regular grocery store, but an expensive grocery store– At least, compared to what I’m used to.
The only things that I found were cheaper than at Walmart was the cold cereal options. So I bought a couple of boxes of tasty-looking cold cereal, headed right back out of the store, and headed to Walmart.
At Walmart, we did some shopping, buying additional groceries that we didn’t buy at Grocery Outlet–everything we needed except for ice, which was so expensive that we drove right back across the street to Grocery Outlet. 😆
I don’t necessarily like giving Walmart my money, but… It’s just so nice to be able to stay with something quick and familiar when my brain has too many inputs.
🧠
And my brain is just overloaded with inputs these days. Or maybe it’s more likely that the available space the inputs fill is much smaller than it used to be.
That’s probably it.
Anyway, from Grocery outlet, we headed West on highway 20, passing field after field of crops of different kinds. Something that maybe was kale? Onions galore, alfalfa, corn, and probably other things as well.
On and on and on the fields went, surround by rolling hills. It was kind of beautiful in its own way. The green fields surrounded by a backdrop of desert hills.
We split off from highway 20 onto highway 26 and continued Westward. Over time, the desert hills began to give way to more forested hills, and the landscape started to get really pretty as we went further and further west through Oregon.
The landscape started getting more attractive (to my taste) somewhere around John Day or Dayville or wherever that was. I meant to write it down as a consideration for the future, but… I didn’t 😅.
Started taking pictures of the beautiful trees again. Stopped at the entrance to a rocky canyon, where the river entered the canyon–reminded me of Devil’s Gate in Wyoming.
The landscape was gorgeous in that canyon area. Rock layers were multicolored in places, there were large collections of basalt columns.
We tried to go to John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, but it was a no go, as they are only open certain days of the week, and today wasn’t one of them.
We passed at last two firefighter encampments. There’s something like 161,000 acre fire that’s not very well contained right now burning I think burning in the hills north of the river.
And at one point, while we were taking in the view and taking pictures just before the entrance to the the canyon, there was a mini microburst that probably had maybe 40 to 60 mph winds? I’m totally guessing, but I did hear later that a town that we stopped in, prineville, had 60 mph winds during the day, and we had that brief spat of a super heavy wind.
Anyway, we stopped in prineville at the AutoZone to get some windshield wipers because At least the driver side wiper was literally falling apart as it was wiping.
Changing out the wipers turned out to be a much bigger ordeal than I ever would have expected. They were just j-hook wipers, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get them to fasten on in a way that I was happy with. They never clicked in place, and I could just pull them right off.
After probably 30 to 45 minutes of trying and completely losing my cool, I finally went inside and asked for the assistance of the manager on duty. He came out and tried as well, but concluded relatively quickly that even though it was a set with universal adapters, and specifically designed out of the package for j-hook designs, it… wasn’t going to work.
Fortunately, he had the idea of trying to swap over the latching piece from the old wipers on to the new ones, and gratefully, that worked. It required disassembling both the new and the old wipers and then reassembling, but we were able to get everything together.
From the AutoZone in Prineville, We again headed Northwest up highway 26 toward Mount Hood. We had already stopped for gas in dayville, I think it was, but we stopped for gas again at another little town just before entering the national Forest that surrounds Mount Hood, as we didn’t want to worry about having to find a gas station if we decided to poke around all over the place, using up all of our gas.
In the forest surrounding Mount Hood, we looked for a campground to stay at, but they were super expensive. So then we drove all along a dirt road in the middle of the forest looking for a decent little pull out next to the river, but again we were stymied.
We went back to the main road and drove up a bit further to yet another River in the hopes that there might be a little spot we could stop off and sleep where we could hear the river in the morning, But yet again… stymied.
Gratefully, there was a little pull out right over by where we had been hoping we could park next to the river, and being relatively self-contained, And the pull out being on a little side road off the main highway, we parked there and bed down for the night.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 