On the Oregon Trail

After I finished the blog entry for yesterday I noticed a few things about our fifty dollar room that I hadn't noticed earlier.  Several things were missing. For example, there were no face towels in the bathroom.  The was no toilet paper in the bathroom either and the power switch on the TV was broken so I turned it off by unplugging it.  I also found a piece of bacon, a green crayon, and a receipt from a convenience store on the floor.  Needless to say, the room hadn't been cleaned for a day or two, but the bed had been made - with a torn sheet!  Despite all of that we did get a good sleep and were ready for the second leg of our epic ride before 8:00 a.m.

 

It was somewhat satisfying to fire up the Harleys before the kids who had been running around screaming last night after 10 o'clock but we were out of there so we don't know if we woke anyone up.  I'm hoping we did.  We were both wondering what happened to the great weather yesterday when we saw the clouds over Moses Lake and then had some raindrops on the bikes.

 

We stopped at Safeway for a coffee, gassed up and departed Moses Lake heading south to Pasco and Kennewick, WA.  Much of the country north of Pasco and Kennewick is agricultural land with huge fields of wheat, soybeans, corn, orchards, and other crops.  At the same time much of the land seems arid, testament to the power of irrigation, I suppose.  We crossed the Columbia River in Kennewick and even this far inland the Columbia is an impressive river.  It appears to be much wider than the Fraser is at New Westminster 

 

Farm on rolling hills north of Kennewick, WA

Wheat field north of Pasco, WA

The horizon goes forever.

 

Between Pasco and Kennewick there is a maze of highways where it would be very easy to go off course and be totally lost.  However, thanks to the magic of my Garmin GPS we threaded our way through the maze and as a bonus stumbled upon the H-D dealership in Kennewick.  This dealership has one of the great H-D dealership names anywhere.  I believe that Iron Block H-D in Adams Center, NY is my favourite but Rattlesnake Mountain H-D is a very close second.  And their shirts have great logos.  As you can imagine, they include rattlesnakes.  H-D people are nothing if not literal.

 

When we parked I discovered oil on the lower part of my engine.  Immediately the thought, "Oil leak!" crossed my mind.  The service department guy had a look and determined that the oil came from the air cleaner because there had been excess oil put in at the last service.  He wiped the air cleaner down, cleaned the filter, and put everything back together.  At the end of the day there was no oil outside the engine so all is well. 

Another 'Orange Bike' at Rattlesnake Mountain H-D

 

We left the dealership and crossed into Oregon near Hermiston.  The country in this part of Oregon is again mainly agricultural with very large fields stretching to the horizon over a gently rolling landscape.  We were riding on I-84 heading to Meridian, ID, a run of about 450 kilometres from where we had crossed into Oregon.  The weather had been getting steadily better with the skies clearing and dotted with the occasional clouds. 

 

As the day went on the temperature continued to rise and as we entered Pendleton the temperature was 85F.  After stopping for gas we continued on east.  The temperature continued to rise and by about 3:00 p.m. it was in the mid 90s.  We stopped at several rest stops just for a break.  At those temperatures it is very easy to get dehydrated so it's important to continue to drink regularly or you can get a headache and become mentally sluggish.  This is not a good thing when you are riding a 900 pound bike at 110 kph.

 

Central Oregon landscapes

Climbing a mountain pass

The horizon must be 30 miles away

 

At one of the rest stops there was a swallow's nest with four fledgling swallows that were just about ready to leave the nest.  I was able to get a photo of the little guys.  Near the rest stop there was a field that had been irrigated in a circle.  The hay was cut the same way, leaving an interesting pattern.  We could also see the Elkhorn Mountains in the distance.

 

Circular hay field near Baker City, OR.  Elkhorn Mountains in the background.

Fledgling swallows at a rest stop near Baker City, OR

 

As we rolled east the landscape began to change and we began a climb to 1283 metres, the summit of the Blue Mountains.  Along the way we stopped at a beautiful arched bridge that had been built probably in the 1930s.  It was white with a single lane over the Union Pacific Railway line.  Further on we rejoined I-84 which followed the rail line and slightly later we met two trains heading west hauling mixed freights.  One of the trains had five locomotives on the head end and two pushers at the rear.  It took me almost two minutes to go by the train and considering that I was doing 65 mph and the train was doing at least 40 mph, it had to be almost three kilometres long.  I love trains so it is a real bonus to be able to photograph or video them.

 

Beautiful arched bridge in the mountains.

 

Once again I was awed by the size of the geography here.  The distances are huge and the geography is huge.  We rode across parts of Oregon where the horizon was probably 25 kilometres away and we rolled through canyons where the hills and cliffs towered more than five hundred to a thousand feet above us.   Compared to most other parts of the US, these areas are sparsely populated.  Sometimes when I see where these people settled I wonder, 'Why did the first settlers ever decide to stop and try to make a living here?'  It must have been incredibly difficult more than one hundred years ago to make a living and survive.  Even today with modern interstate highways it takes considerable time to drive from one town to the next.  In the late 1800s with rudimentary roads and trails, it would have taken a major effort to go to town and it is easily understandable why people would have gone to town only once a year.

 

Late in the afternoon we crossed into the Mountain time zone so the time was one hour later than we were used to.  At the last rest stop we decided to stop in Ontario, OR, almost at the Idaho border.  We did the last 130 kilometres in about an hour and twenty minutes.  Finding a motel was a bit of a problem but we used the GPS again and got a reasonably good rate and the motel is pretty good. 

 

Tomorrow we're going to go in to Meridian, ID and stop at the H-D shop there.  We really don't know where we'll go past that so we'll look at the map, talk to a few people and decide where to go from there.  This is an unusual way to do a trip but we have no pressure to go or be anywhere so we're enjoying the ride and looking forward to seeing new places and things.  And there's more than enough for us to see.