One Year on the Road!

Map of our first year on the road. Click this link to open the map

It's hard to believe it's been a full year since we pulled out of our driveway for the last time. We have managed to find some fun and interesting things to see and do along the way. We didn't have any firm goals for the first year so it would be tough to do a performance appraisal for the year. When I was still working, I never really enjoyed having to put together my performance commitments for the upcoming year. Especially when the goals needed to be quantifiable. So it's not too surprising we didn't make anything that concrete for this stage of our life. 

The only thing we hoped to do was to slow down the pace and enjoy what an area has to offer. We might still be underperforming in that regard. I think we told people that we hoped to stay in places for a month at a time instead of days at a time. We did manage to average about 7 nights per stop once you eliminate the dozen or so one night stops we had over the course of the year. A one night stop is simply an indication that the distance between where we are and where we want to be next is too great for us to drive it in one day.

We did manage to camp in 22 states which sort of surprised us. Chris saw my tally as I was putting together info for this blog post and she was skeptical I had the right count. I guess that is why we keep a spreadsheet of all our travels and stops. It helps to keep us honest. We also visited 5 National Parks (Big Bend, Saguaro, Zion, Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef) as well as 21 National Monuments, Historic Parks, etc. Chris has done a pretty good job of stamping her National Park Passport of the places we have visited.

Where We've Stayed and How Long

 Many people that live this lifestyle talk about moving around the country trying to maintain some magic temperature - maybe 70 degrees. Well if that was our goal, we were not very successful in achieving it. We did not keep track of that info (although I suppose I could go back and figure that out), but suffice it to say we had dozens of days in the mid to upper 90's and several nights in the mid 20's. We even had snow twice. Once while camping in Davis Mountain State Park in west Texas and again while driving at 9000 feet near Bryce Utah. Experiencing unintended snowfall definitely drops our performance rating in the weather category. 

 In terms of cost, I think we have done reasonably well. Our average camping cost per night was about $27. Our property and school taxes on our old place was roughly $28 a day and we had joked that we could probably camp for about that price. Turns out we were darn close. The most expensive place was just outside of Washington DC at $61 a night. Out cheapest was boondocking in Quartzsite for free although once you factor in the fuel for the generator, it was closer to $3.50 a day. When given the option in an area, we typically will pick a less expensive campground because we generally don't use the amenities that higher priced ones offer. So if your ideal campground is the resort style with pools, spas, exercise room, shuffleboard courts and other things like that, we probably aren't the ones to ask for advice. 

 Fuel costs for the motorhome were just about $2700 for the year. Of course that is directly proportional to the miles driven. We drove just about 9000 miles this year which works out to about 30 cents a mile. Some people might see that cost per mile and flinch. I like to look at it this way. My home will cruise down the road at 65 miles per hour quite nicely, how far can you drive your home!

One other way I have started to "measure" the pace of our travels is to calculate miles traveled per day. There are two ways I look at this. One is to find out how many miles we drive on the days we drive the motorhome. We know of other RVers that talk about the "330 rule" - no more that 330 miles per day or off the road by 3:30 PM, whichever comes first. For planning purposes, we opt for a much lower upper limit. We use 200 miles as our max limit for a travel day. Our longest travel day was 250 miles which is a completely manageable distance for me to drive depending on road, traffic and weather conditions. 

 The other way I have started to look use to understand our "pace" is miles per day whether we travel or not. Calculating it this way factors in both the distance traveled on travel days as well as the length of stay at a place without traveling. Our number works out to be about 25 miles per day. Having never looked at the data this way before, I went back to our earlier years starting with our travel trailer we had in 2010. In those six prior years, generally we were traveling 50 to 80 miles per night camped. This much higher number is simply a fact that we would do long weekend trips, driving 100 to 200 miles to a campground but only staying a few nights before putting on the same distance back home. We are now at a value about one half to one third as much and the sense we get is we are at a much more leisurely pace. 

One last category to mention is how far we have driven the Jeep in our first full year. We came close to 17,000 miles and spent about $1600 in gas. While we were in Arizona for the winter, the Jeep miles were down from average simply because we would move our home to many locations in the state so we never really needed to drive to some distant place. We would just move our home to a closer spot if there was an area we wanted to explore. In the last 3 months coming to the Pacific Northwest, we have done a bit more driving with the Jeep. Some of that was that we were camped well outside of both Zion and Capitol Reef National Parks, so there were longer drives just to get to the spots we wanted to see. 

So what have we learned in this first year on the road? We are able to live comfortably with significantly much less stuff than we used to have in our sticks and bricks home. We were in a 2200 square foot home on 50 acres in western New York and had lived in the general area for over 30 years. We had accumulated a lot of stuff and I can tell you it was stuff we "needed" not just "wanted". It was a huge adjustment to sell off the bulk of our possessions. While we were in the process of downsizing, there were some things we just had to keep. I suspect it was more of a psychological thing. Had we started to downsize earlier, we would have been able to do it at a much more leisurely pace. I wouldn't have felt that I was getting rid of too much too fast and likely would have been able to pare things down more. 

I suppose it could also be a matter of "you don't know, what you don't know." We were heading into the unknown and maybe it was a little bit scary. By keeping some of our prized things, we could have something familiar with us. Well, whatever the reason, we have determined we have brought along much more than we really needed. And now that a full year has passed, it won't be as big of deal to do a little bit of additional downsizing. We had consciously decided to trade in stuff for experiences, maybe if we lose some more stuff, there will be room for more experiences. 

We know of people that full time in rigs smaller than ours, some significantly smaller. But I would suspect that the majority of people are in rigs bigger than ours. Our rig is 38 foot long and it was extremely tough to find a used rig this "short". A 40, 42 or 45 foot used rig would have been significantly easier to come by. We probably would have looked for a shorter rig than we got but the manufacturers don't make them that short in the higher end diesel pushers. Well apparently Newmar has been listening to us and many others because they have just announced a new model that has many of the chassis features and amenities we were wanting but in a 34 foot length. I wouldn't say we are sold on them yet and probably won't be in the market for a new rig, but it is definitely something we will be keeping an eye on and possibly get to see in person later this year when they start making it to dealers.

The other thing we are learning is that it is difficult to travel completely by serendipity. I suppose if we had a magic pass that would allow us to pull into a campground unannounced and have a spot large enough for our rig and the ability to stay there as long (or short) as we desired, we would be able to travel much more freely. But with the volume of people out camping, it can be tough to find a place to stay without some planning. This is definitely true if there is a specific location you want to be close to or if it is a holiday weekend. Some of the state parks in Arizona in the winter required us to reserve a couple months in advance. Now that's not to say we couldn't  find spots to stay that are off the beaten path, but if you want to do Yellowstone or Zion or Yosemite, you should really plan ahead.

Geocaching is a big part of our current lifestyle. When we started our full time travels, we found that we were caching every day. During an initial visit with family in Cincinnati, we skipped caching one day but shortly after that we found we were finding at least one cache per day. Previously we had a caching streak of 124 days, but now it was a bit easier to find a cache a day. Typically we were in a new area with lots of caches and the weather was typically nice. Admittedly there were times where we didn't feel like continuing our caching streak. Or when we were in very remote areas with few caches and we needed to ration our finding rate in order to keep it going. But we kept it going and as of our anniversary date, we have our streak at 358 straight days. 

I thought it would be interesting to try to show our first year of travels in the form of a geocaching "movie" of sorts. Every half second, the image changes to include the found geocaches for that day. In the upper left corner, the date is displayed. We have found 1850 caches in our year on the road. Although the scale of the map doesn't do a good job of showing them all. I'm still trying to figure out how to zoom in on the map on Google Earth and then smoothly pan as we travel around the country. For now this is my best option.

So in conclusion. Do we regret selling all our house and all our stuff and hitting the road? Not at all. How much longer do we think we will do this? We don't really see an end date at this point. As long as our health holds out and we are enjoying ourselves, we don't see any reason to come off the road. Plus we haven't found the perfect place to settle down. We really enjoyed the Tucson area this winter, but they have been experiencing over 110 degree heat recently. Definitely not something we would want to deal with. That might be the only downside of exploring new areas. We will often be visiting during the best weather months. If we ever feel the desire to plant our feet, we will need to do a bit more thorough "testing" of the area during other seasons.

10 Nights in the Tri-Cities

Map of this blog's locations click this link to open the map

I should probably explain that there are four cities in the Tri-Cities region of southeastern Washington state. Kennewick, Richland, Pasco and West Richland. It wasn't perfectly clear why they don't call it the Quad-Cities, but it sounds like West Richland was incorporated later and is now part of the region that was called the Tri-Cities and they decided not to change the Tri to Quad. 

And why are we headed to the Tri-Cities? The main reason is there will be a geocaching Mega-Event so we worked this place and that event into our travel plans. More on the event later. The drive from the Emigrant Springs in Oregon was exactly 100 miles. Other than we were starting out in a little bit of rain, the drive went smoothly. Even going down the twisty section of Interstate 82, that I posted about in our last blog, wasn't too bad. I definitely prefer having the exhaust brake in our Dutch Star over the downshifting and braking (and praying) of our previous motorhome. I had scoped out a truck and RV friendly fuel stop along the way that included truck filling lanes. The only problem was that in order to use the truck pumps, you needed to have a couple different Oregon registration IDs. Oh well, it turned out the passenger vehicle pumps had adequate room to navigate this thing through without issue. 

Our destination for our 10 nights is the Corps of Engineering (COE) run Hood Park, technically in the little town of Burbank Washington just across the Snake River from Pasco only a couple miles from the state park where the event will be held. The area is where the Snake River joins the Columbia River. It wasn't perfectly clear why this COE park was here since there wasn't a dam or lake here. But it turned out to be like most other COE parks we have camped at - well maintained with pretty nice sites for a good price at just over $19 per night. The sites are electric only but include 50 amp. They are pretty thorough in their watering of the grass in the campsites. Each morning, one of the workers would drive around the campgrounds and determine which site he could water and then set up the sprinkler and let it run most of the time until mid afternoon. By staying here ten nights, we were probably messing with their watering routine.

It was a good thing we had reserved our spot months ago since the campground was full for the two weekends we were here. Lots of real "campers" in tents and small travel trailers and the occasional big motorhome and a few huge toy hauler fifth wheels. It seemed like oftentimes two or more of the sites were people that were camping together. They would have the cornhole and other games in one person's site and the picnic tables concentrated on the other site. 

There were nice views from many of the sites. One side of the park was adjacent to the Snake River, the other side was overlooking some small ponds. While our spot was next to a neighboring field with a couple cows and several horses. It turned out to be a nice place to relax most of the time. And we did find ourselves taking it pretty easy on most of the days.

Pond View

Our Cows Say Hi

We headed over to Walla Walla for the Sweet Onion Festival. It is just over 40 miles from our campsite. We weren't quite sure what to expect but it did seem a bit smaller than we were imagining. There were a few dozen vendors but only a couple of them had onion based themes. When it comes down to it, I suppose there are really only so many things you can do with onions. We tried the vendor selling onion rings which were good. It didn't take much more than an hour to peruse the whole place so we decided to walk through the downtown area that had quite a few nice little shops. We walked to the far side of town to see Whitman College. The webcam cache we had hoped to complete was offline so we just headed back to the car.

Tractors Put to Use

Crowd of People at Festival

Interesting Wall in Town

This area of Washington state has quite a few wineries. We picked one that is actually associated with the local community college. When we entered the tasting room, there were probably 15 people there. We had one of the recent graduates pour us our samples and explain the wines to us. Before we were even halfway done, we were the only ones still there so we had a nice chat with the recent graduate, plus an incoming student just starting the program. Apparently even 18 year olds are permitted to be in the program and taste the wine they are working on even with a drinking age of 21. The rule is they taste the wine, but must spit it out.

We had ordered a Weboost Cellular Signal Booster when we were in Salt Lake City, but I hadn't had an opportunity to test it out or install it yet. The concept is simple. The outdoor antenna mounts up high, usually on the roof of the RV. A coax cable is fed into the rig to an amplifier and a smaller internal antenna is fed from the amplifier. In areas where the cell signal is poor, this system will give us a fighting chance to get a reasonable signal. Of course if there is no signal to be had, the booster cannot make something out of nothing. One drawback is that the cell phone or iPad needs to be sitting within a few feet of the indoor antenna to get any signal. This isn't too bad since one phone can be placed by the antenna and then turn it on as a wi-fi hotspot so other devices can connect to it.

I'm okay with going up on the roof and doing the work with the exception of drilling a hole through the roof to run the coax cable. I came up with a solution that uses one of several existing coax cables from our rooftop satellite dish. Since we don't use the dish, the cables are available. Better yet, I find the one that feeds into the front overhead compartment where I want the amplifier installed. I tried it out with the outdoor antenna simply clamped in place. Once I was satisfied it would work, I found a couple of stainless steel brackets intended to be used to hold a handrail. That portion of the install was pretty easy other than it was rather hot up on the roof the day I did the install. In the campsite we were in, I had reasonable Verizon coverage so the booster wasn't required but Chris' T-Mobile signal was unusable without the booster, but worked with it. I guess we will see how it goes as we move about. 

Brackets Holding Outside Antenna

After Applying Dicor to Make It Watertight

We found there was a disc golf course in the area so we decided to give it a shot. It has been at least a couple months since we had played so we were rusty and that's on top of the fact that we aren't real good even when we play more frequently. At least this course didn't have any water hazards to deal with but it did start out with lots of tall grass and brush so finding our discs after each throw was a bit of a challenge. We survived but it definitely wasn't pretty. 

One of the visitor's guides we picked up for the area described the Hanford B-Reactor tour. Depending on your age, education and interest in the subject, you may be familiar with this place but I will admit I didn't know anything about it. For all I know, it was taught to me somewhere along the way, but it didn't stick. The place was built by the US government back in the 1943 timeframe to produce weapons grade plutonium to be used in an atomic bomb. It was one of several areas associated with the Manhattan Project. The area was picked for its remote location (at the time) and a large source of water (Columbia River). The whole reactor facility was built in just a little over a year! It produced the plutonium used in the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki Japan in the summer of 1945.

Since we were somewhat ignorant of what happened here and not all that familiar with nuclear fission, we decided to spend the night before the tour watching several videos provided that detail how plutonium is produced, how this facility was built and how the reactor works. I will admit that this is the first time we ever "studied" in order to take a tour of National Historic place. The six people in tents at the next door campsite had come across as a bunch of country bumpkins. So while we are sitting watching some fairly intense atomic theory videos, we could hear them talking while sitting around their fire and I suggested we invite them over for a fun evening with the Rutters! 

There were a handful of reactors on the property that have been or are in the process of being decommissioned. The B reactor has been set up for tours since 2009 and is now part of the National Park System. Tours are free, but you must register for them online in advance. We managed to check one day and found the next morning's tour had plenty of openings. The starting point for the tour is in a little strip mall location about a 45 minute drive from the reactor. It is definitely not an expected spot for the tour and it wasn't until we saw the signs that we were sure we were in the right spot. There are several rooms in this facility with lots of pictures and displays to check out while you wait for the tour to start.

The OffSite Starting Point for B-Reactor Tour

There were 16 or so of us for our tour. We started out with the tour guide giving some descriptions and then playing the movie that went through more about the facility. It wasn't one of the videos we had watched the previous evening but did go over much of the same things. Next we hop onto a nice big tour bus like Greyhound uses and we are driven to the reactor. Our tour guide gives more description along the way including pointing out some other remaining buildings on the huge Hanford that can be seen from the road.

Your Fission Lesson for the Day

Spare Pieces of the Reactor Core

Cutaway Model Showing Core and Shielding

The B-reactor building was definitely not built with aesthetics in mind but given the urgency to beat the Germans to producing an atomic bomb at the time, I think it was understandable. Front side of the reactor pile is accessible on the tour but the back side isn't. Several other tour guides are at the reactor and do a little more talking and play an additional video. Then they take us around all the portions of the building we are permitted into, including the control room. It is very impressive given the technology of that era. After the formal tour, we are more or less turned loose to explore on our own in order to read many of the displays and even play with some of the models they have created. It was way cool. I'm sure Leonard and Sheldon would be jealous. 

Entrance to B-Reactor

Front Side of Reactor with a Total of 2004 Tubes for Uranium

Close Up of Plumbers NIghtmare

Main Control Room

Temp and Pressure Panel For Each of the 2004 Tubes

The Mess Behind the Panel

It is kind of surprising that the whole tour is free. It doesn't seem like the type of thing that will survive much longer in its current form. If you are ever even close to this portion of southeastern Washington state, put this place high on your list.

Did Gary Larson Work Here???

Hack Saw on Steroids

After a week in the area, it was now time for the geocaching events to start. The first was an event held at a pizza joint. Oftentimes geocaching events center around food. Back home it was often ice cream, but the pizza here was good. We easily filled up the one large room we had with 60 or more people. We were readily accepted into the fold by those local people sitting at our table. Many of them gave us suggestions of other things to see and do while we were here. This first event was to kick off a poker run they had planned. This one was arranged that you go around town and find five new geocaches and punch your poker run passport with the unique paper punch at each one. Then at tomorrow's event you trade in your punched passport for your five cards. We ended up only drawing a pair of kings so didn't t have much chance of winning anything.

Friday's event was a meet and greet at the same park where the actual Mega-Event would be on Saturday. As we were chatting with people, we found another camper from our COE campground that was in from out of town. Not only that, it turns out we had found about 20 of his caches when we were in Arizona camped at Lost Dutchman State Park. Many of those caches were very creative ones, that I had event written about in a blog post from that stop. What a small world.  

Now That's a BIG Ammo Can

Even Signal the Frog (Geocaching's Mascot) Made an Appearance

There was also a night cache that was setup in Sacajawea State Park. We all started doing it prior to dusk and with a string of people going from one spot to the next, it wasn't too challenging. 

The actual Mega-Event wasn't until early Saturday morning. This one was setup with 8 new caches in each of the four Tri-Cities. In each of these caches, there would either be a code word or a paper punch. The goal was to find the caches and fill up your sheet. The "prize" was to be a set of geocoins. In order to qualify for the coins you needed to find 7 of the 8 in each town or if you opted to do the two puzzle caches that were part of the series you only needed to find 6 of the 8. So the minimum number needed would be 26 of the 32. We typically don't do that many caches in a day, and it wasn't necessary to do them all in one day, but we didn't want to have to go back out the following day.

The Group Getting Ready for Photo by Drone

The 32 new caches were published at 9:30 AM while the group picture was being taken. We figured out the two puzzle caches without too much trouble so off we went. We headed to the furthest out cache with the idea of working our way back to the location of the event and get our coins. I really should have reset the Jeep's trip computer to see how many miles we drove, but I would suspect 70 miles wouldn't be too bad of a guess. 

Most of the hides were super easy simply because there would be a group of other cachers standing at the cache signing in and getting the code word. I think there was only 2 or 3 caches where I needed to pull out the GPS to search for the cache on our own. It took us 8 hours with only a break for lunch and ice cream mid-afternoon since it was a really hot day. Although apparently not as hot as two years ago when it was up around 115 degrees.  

After we picked up our coins, we grabbed some dinner and sat around talking with a couple that had just gotten their first travel trailer and were starting to make plans for camping with it. It was nice to be able to give them some advice that will hopefully help them out. The event ended with drawings for a multitude of donated gifts. One of our numbers was called and we won an additional geocoin. 

Front and Back of 4 Coin Set

The following day was the Cache In Trash Out event (CITO) in the same park the main event was held. A CITO is where a bunch of geocachers get together to pick up trash. It turns out Sacajawea park is kept pretty clean by the staff and visitors. With about 50 people people walking around the small park, there wasn't much trash to be had. In past CITOs we have done, we will often fill up a full size trash bag and have difficulty carrying it back to the dumpsters. That wasn't the case here. The park started out pretty clean and ended up very clean.

Our time here seemed to go pretty fast even though we took it easy for a fair amount of time. Guess it proves we don't always have to be busy at each place we stop at.

A Short Stop in Oregon

Map of this blog's locations click this link to open the map

Our week in Idaho was too short but we still had another 260 miles to go between the Elks Lodge in Caldwell Idaho to the Corps of Engineering campground in the Tri-Cities area of Washington state where we had a 10 night stay planned. Plus we had 3 days to kill. Having spent the week with no water or sewer connections, we really needed to go to a full hookup campgrounds so we could dump and flush the tanks. Generally that would imply a private campground, but as we were searching for a spot, I noticed that one of the state parks midway along our route had full hookup and with 50 amp electric! Better yet, there was availability for the 3 days we needed. This is only the second state park we have found with full hookups, the other being one in Texas.

Emigrant Springs State Heritage Area isn't the biggest place. Only 18 of the sites are full hookup and the sites themselves are on the narrow side. We managed to shoehorn our rig in without too much difficulty. There is a day use area associated with the park that is dedicated to the people that crossed the Blue Mountains on the Oregon Trail right along here. We only have two full days to explore the area so we will only get a superficial understanding of the place.

Just to the southeast of us right off I-84 is the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center.  It was a nice little area with a name that's too long to become a big destination for most people. It is part of the national park system so you either need to pay the day use fee or just display your National Parks pass. The interpretive center had a short walk on a paved trail that led you from one sign to the next. There were also some dirt trails that looped off this paved trail. We spent a little time investigating the displays and then moved on.

Part of Oregon Trail

Nice View Along the Trail

Our "Covered Wagon" is Nicer

We had passed a picnic area on the way in and knew there was a trail located there so we headed back and checked out the historic logging display. There were some really interesting flowers in bloom along the trail. It felt good to be back in a wooded area that reminded us of Western New York after such a long stay in arid desert landscapes.

Old Logging Cart Ready to Go

Fields of Flowers

Clarkia pulchella. Pink Fairies. 

Another Pretty Flower

After lunch, we followed the more scenic side roads back to camp doing a fair number of geocaches along the way. This might have been a bad move from the sense that we are trying to coordinate our visit to the Seattle area with our reaching our 10,000th find. Our stay in the Tri-Cities area will include another geocaching mega event like the one we attended a few months ago in Yuma. It's not clear how many caches we will be doing there but it could be on the order of 30 to 40 so we really need to ration our caches for the next few weeks to not overshoot our goal. Such is the life of semi-professional geocachers!

A Train Passes While We Geocache

The nearest town of any size is to the northwest. Pendleton is somewhat famous for its wool mill and products. They offer free half hour tours several times a day during the workweek. We head there on our second day which works out since it is overcast and rainy at times so having something fun to do inside will work well. The drive to Pendleton along I-84 includes a steep downhill section. So steep and winding that there were 6 warning signs regarding downhill speed limits for trucks based on weight. A truck coming in at 75,000 to 80,000 pounds is to keep the speed down at a snail's pace - 18 MPH. It wasn't to bad in the Jeep but it is the same route we will be taking in the motorhome the next day. The interesting thing is that the two lanes of interstate in each direction do not follow the same path. A closeup of the map shows just how windy the road is.

The Curves on I-84 Heading to Pendleton

We get to the factory store with time to spare so we looked over the sales racks to see if there was anything we just had to have. There were some nice clothes but none of them spoke to me. At 11 o'clock they announce where to converge for the tour. I was surprised that there were about a dozen people. We were all handed wireless headphones so we could hear the tour guide. Of course mine turned out to be defective with just pure static, not even Charlie Brown teacher level of fidelity. I managed to catch her attention and had a working pair before we headed into the factory.

Entrance to Store and Factory Tour

Need a Blanket?

There were yellow lines on the floor and maybe she told us to stay inside the marked walkway but nobody else did and she never yelled at us. Plus, I would argue I'm bright enough to not stick my hands in fast moving machinery. The complete process of taking sheep's wool and turning it into yarn and then blankets was pretty fascinating to me. Maybe even more impressive is how many of the older machines were still in working order. It's hard to comprehend the volume that just this one factory produces. The bigger cylindrical spools of yarn holds 10 miles each! It would takes a boatload of spinning wheels and people to crank out this amount of yarn.

Spools of Yarn

Vibrant Orange Yarn

Stages in Yarn Making

Foreground Spools are 10 Miles Each!

The big looms are all computerized now and the and it is easy to see the lengthwise "warp" feeding off the huge roller. The crosswise "weft" was more difficult to comprehend if for no other reason than the speed at which the gizmo goes back and forth - 300 times per minute! As an engineer, I would have liked to see the thread up process. And Chris thought threading up her serger sewing machine was a pain.

Working Portion of Loom

"Brains" of Looms on Second Level 

They don't have a huge staff of people working here since much of the process is automated. There was at least one job that still required a person. All the material produced here is run through a series of rollers so that person can sit there and inspect both sides for defects. The woman was just coming back from break as we passed her station so we didn't get to see all the action, but as she started the thing up, I was impressed with the speed she was able to complete her job. There is a small museum of sorts that has quite a few displays and information about the history of the place.

Blankets Galore

Hanging in the Museum at Pendleton Mills

After the tour, we headed into town and found a place for lunch and then did a few of the better geocaches in the area. One was located in a highway off ramp circle and consisted of a bunch of sculptures of cowboys on horseback driving a handful of cattle with the help of their dog.

Cattle Drive Display

This Cowboy Has a Couple Doves Perched

This Dog Should Get Away

Three nights was obviously not long enough to "see" Oregon, not even this little corner of the state. But we will be back in Oregon, albeit further west, in mid to late August for the solar eclipse. We should be able to do some more exploring at that time. We haven't really planned out too much for that time period, but we should have plenty of time before we need to head south for the winter - at least I hope so.

View from Scenic Stop Along I-84