Road Trip - Day 13 – Boise to Bend
8:30 a.m. 48 degrees. Chilly
Sorry no photos on this one. There just wasn’t much to capture.
We checked out and then walked into downtown Boise for breakfast. It was 8:30 before we hit the road. Traffic going out of Boise was light, not so coming the other way though.
Our route is Highway 84 north to the Oregon boarder. Around Caldwell there was a lot of road construction but it didn’t hold us up too much. The road construction lasted for 12 miles but finally we were through.
We are headed towards Bend but we may stop before we reach there if we see anything decent. On Friday evening we are expected in Eugene, where we will be staying with Annie, Tom’s daughter, and Mitch, her husband.
It is mostly farmland we drive through, with lots of cows, sheep, goats but mostly horses. Towards the Oregon border the cattle all but disappear and so have the houses. There is just wide open spaces. We did not see too many potatoes in Idaho. Isn’t Idaho famous for potatoes? Maybe it is the wrong season. Thought I saw a truck load of them but Tom said they were sugar beets.
Just when I thought we were stuck with the open spaces, small farms and cattle were back. At 9:20 we enter Oregon and soon we exit I84. It was time to turn my watch back to Pacific Time. Negotiating our way around the town of Ontario to Highway 20 was a bit confusing but we eventually made it.
This part of Oregon is pretty. Difficult to say why it is different from Idaho. Maybe it is because the grass is greener. What we did notice, though, there were lots of onions around, both on trucks and on farms where they were sorting them. There is even an Onion Avenue.
We pass through the small town of Vale and we are out into the country again. On the right we see large white buildings with two tall chimneys belching white smoke. In my Benchmark Oregon atlas I can see it is called the Eagle Picher Diatomaceous Plant. Tom thinks it is something to do with soil. Will have to check it out later. (Well Tom was right. It is a chalk like soil which is similar to pumice powder and is used as a filtration aid, insecticide, in cat litters and dynamite. It is also heat resistant.)
The road starts to climb and the hills begin to look dry but then we go downhill into Little Valley and all is green again. More hills and more arid landscape but the Malheur River is running alongside us. We drop down into Harper Valley and we are green again. We pass a field of sun flowers, which was a stunning sight.
Right in the middle of nowhere we pass a tree to our right covered in shoes! Go figure.
October 09 2007 | Further Afield | No Comments »
