Couple of Coffees

Playing catchup

The last few days of our trip seamlessly melded into being with family back home. So here's a short recap of Utah onwards to Oregon.

My father and his family swam in the Great Salt Lake back in the 1950s, and I really wanted to as well, but when we drove by Saltair, an appropriate place, which oddly looks like an Arabian palace, it was right after breakast. And I wasn't sure I wanted to get that briney before having enough caffeine. Instead we drove a bit farther and stopped to take photos of the lake and smell the air. From there we drove for a long time through the salt flats, which look something like this:



I was amazed at the sheer whiteness. I was also amazed by Metaphor: The Tree of Utah. After that pale landscape, we found ourselves in the desert in Nevada. Winnemucca was our overnight destination, a place with casinos and lots of hotels, so finding lodging wasn't a problem. We had a great suite at the Santa Fe Inn and a hearty diner breakfast in town. Winnemucca actually has a motorcycle festival called Runamucca. Cool.

We crossed over into Oregon, the hot and dusty side I hadn't been to before. It was beautiful, even the treacherous highways without guard rails. Great views. We lunched in Lakeview, Oregon, a small town Jonathan remembered from his boyhood due to accompanying his dad, who built a forest service cooler there. He'll probably blog more about how we made a pilgrimage to the cooler, once we get settled in more. Unfortunately, the water table wasn't high enough for us to see Lakeview's geyser, so we'll just have to go back.

From there, we spent the night near Summer Lake at the Summer Lake Hot Springs. We rented a cabin for the evening and went for luxurious dips in the hot, mineral water in the resort's bathhouse, which is open 24-hours-a-day. It was rustic and beautiful out there, and watching the sun go down over the lake and nearby mountains was a relaxing ending to our journey. Much better than hanging around making lists about what we had to do the moment we hit our front doorstep. Here's a picture of our cabin:



We frolicked a bit in Bend, Oregon, on the way back home, but we weren't much in the mood to dally or shop. We spotted a new organic coffee place in town, Strictly Organic Coffee. Then we powered through the last few hours of driving, headed past what seemed to my Jersey sensibilities a rather large forest fire in the mountains, to hit I-5, the highway that shoots up and down the West Coast. After all these weeks and months of driving on other highways, it made us smile to recognize destinations along the way and wonder if our friends who lived in those places were home.

Home like we were about to be.

posted by Laura the Writer @ 10:30 AM