August 15th, 2008
12:04 am
OK gang, we’re here in Reno. Bruce, I must say that the mob types are in the same abundance they were 30 years ago. Actually, I think it was merely 27 years ago, for the record. We’re not that old! But just as it was way back when, the best photos aren’t obtainable. Cameras are not welcome indoors in these parts.
Anyway, today was mostly about getting lots of miles logged and ending up in Reno, and we succeeded in our mission. We’re so close to the Bay Area now, I can practically smell the seagulls. Damn seagulls.
We cut across the godforsaken southeast corner of Oregon today. Look on a map. It’s pitiful — 100 miles from Jordan Valley to McDdermitt, all dreadfullly dry and dreary. Between the occasional dog in goggles riding a motorcycle and restrooms hurtling toward a rest area somewhere, I could barely stay awake.
So Megan drove us into Reno. I married well.
August 14th, 2008
7:04 pm
I hope we didn’t worry our mothers too much by going dark on the blog, but we had a good excuse: we spent last night in a hotel built in 1863, in a town with a population of 12 and no electricity (other than a couple of privately owned solar units). It was another spontaneous change of plans, and we’re really glad we did it. Spending a night in Silver City, Idaho, as the only guests of the Idaho Hotel & Bar, with our host Roger and his big old black lab, was an amazing experience. We’re in Reno now, preparing to get fleeced at Harrah’s later tonight, and meanwhile I’ll post some photos and tell the tale.
We planned to simply pass through Silver City, since it’s sort of on the way from Boise to Reno if you think creatively. But after the rugged drive through 20 miles of dirt road to get there, the silence and solitude of this little mountain town (6200 feet above sea level), and the ambience of the Idaho Hotel & Bar (to say nothing of the friendly service from Roger and his hired hand Sherry) pulled us in. We asked if they had a room, which turned out to be rather silly since we were the only tourists in the whole town, and the rest is history.
I had perused the Silver City web site in the morning at Nampa, and I thought it was going to be more of a tourist trap like Virginia City, Montana. But this is the real deal — a town that is essentially the same as it was in the glory days of Idaho mining over 100 years ago. Sure, there are a few modern conveniences (like ATVs, which seem to be the preferred mode of transportation around town), but there were so many things that we’ve never experienced anywhere else.
Silence, for instance. It was so damn quiet when I took a midnight walk to snap a few pictures that I felt self-conscious about my footsteps. Even when walking softly, I felt like I was waking up everyone in town. And whenever a cow so much as coughed anywhere in town, I heard it clear as a bell. Combined with the absolute lack of light (no electricity lines run to Silver City), which made the sky come alive with stars, and the full moon shining bright through the clear cool alpine air, it was a surreal place to be.
Sherry, who had to return to civilization in the evening leaving the entire hotel to us and Roger (have you read The Shining? :-)), is a bit of a Silver City history buff and she told us tales of the ghosts that haunt the area. After hearing those stories we really wanted Room 28, but the bed in that room was made for a little girl in 1910, and we decided to opt for comfort over ghoulishness. So we rented the Empire Room, the fanciest room in the hotel at $150 per night.
Roger is amazing. He does absolutely everything, with a cheerful spirit of self-sufficiency that few of us urban whiners could ever measure up to. He’s the cook, the bartender, the plumber, the electrician, the carpenter, and everything else the place needs. In the morning over breakfast he told us of all the cool trinkets he finds around town, like opium bottles and old coins.
Roger has discovered Ebay, where he buys things like 15-watt fluorescent bulbs for his chandeliers, and 4-watt LEDs for the shower stalls. When you generate your own electricity with your own solar panel, you have to be careful about that stuff. Roger’s approach is to never let guests have access to an electrical outlet “because they’ll plug in a 1500-watt hair dryer or something,” but if you ask nice he’ll charge your camera or laptop.
We will definitely be back to Silver City. Everyone should go, because it’s supported 100% by private contributions and the trickle of tourist dollars that goes to the Idaho Hotel. There is one other business in town, a trinket shop that was closed because the owner is off helping her daughter move to Texas. Back in its day, though, Silver City was the de facto capital of the Idaho Territory, and the first town in all of Idaho to get telegraph service, telephone service, and many other things. One final bit of trivia: the hotel was built in nearby Ruby City in 1863, and in 1868 they rolled it on logs to its current location in Silver City, a few miles away. Men were men back then.
August 13th, 2008
10:09 am
Yesterday was our first hike of the trip, at Hat Point. Leaving our rental unit in Joseph bright and early at 10:00, we drive out to Imnaha, where the pavement ends, then continued 24 miles up a steep gravel road to reach Hat Point Lookout. The elevation there is 7000 feet, and the Snake River is at 1250 feet above sea level, far below. We hiked down to an overlook around 5000 feet, and it felt good to get sweaty and sore on the way back up.
Back in Imnaha, we decided to have dinner at the Imnaha Store and Tavern, where they serve beer out of pint jars and the ceiling is splattered with dollar bills. The tradition is that you push a thumbtack (provided) through a dollar bill with your name and address written on it, wrap the bill around a quarter for weight, then fling it upward and try to stick it into the ceiling. The quarters fall out eventually, and the plan is to invite everyone on those bills to the party when the bar closes down some day.
Another local tradition is keeping track of who kills the most rattlesnakes and grizzlies each year, then giving them an award in the fall. Seriously. That’s Imnaha.
The tavern is also a general store for Imnaha’s 30 residents. Wood shelves alongside the pool tables contain various staples such as gallon cans of pie filling, sauerkraut, and shortening. The two items that they had the most of, at several gallons each, were ketchup and chain saw bar lubricant. A sign above the pool tables sternly warns “No pool players under 8 years old unless accompanied by adult.”
In keeping with our commitment to spontaneity on this trip, we decided in Imnaha to not bother going back to Joseph and just push on instead and see how far we could get before dark. The answer was “somewhere along the Snake River on the Oregon-Idaho border,” where the rising moon created some great scenery as we drove alongside the river.
Then we started looking for a hotel or motel. Cambridge was the first sign of civilization, 28 miles into Idaho, but its 363 citizens don’t seem to include an innkeeper, so we drove further into the darkness. Weiser, half an hour later, had a motel with two cars and two motorcycles parked in front of a dozen rooms, and a NO VACANCY sign glowing in the window. Payette looked promising, but after seeing the line at the front desk of the Best Western we decided to check out the La Quinta instead, and made a wrong turn and got back on I-84.
So we just kept going, and finally arrived here at the Shilo Inn in Nampa some time after midnight. The internet seems to work, and for breakfast they give you $2.50 discount cards for the Denny’s next door. My first Moons Over My Hammie of the trip … mmm.
And now, thrilled with our proximity to the biggest town since Spokane on Sunday, we’re headed for the Boise Towne Square Mall 20 miles down the road. We’ll pick up a few more CDs there, and maybe replace the broken 18-55 lens, then it’s on to Nevada.
August 11th, 2008
8:46 pm
Today we spent time in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon … and we’re now settled down for the night in beautiful Joseph, on the high plains of eastern Oregon where the Nez Perce nurtured a starving Lewis and Clark and then had the US Army chase the women and children all the way to the Canadian border, slaughter a bunch of them, and then throw the ones who weren’t dead onto reservations around the Northwest.
We rented half a duplex, and it’s really cute and we’ll post photos of it later, but when we found it didn’t have internet access we decided to give up on posting pictures and headed for a bar. Megan picked the place out, and she has such great instincts in these matters — I’m pretty sure we’re in the only bar in this part of the county where we can be the only tourists in the whole place. It’s called the Hydrant, and there’s an unsecured network (creatively named NETGEAR) nearby, so I’m live on wireless and can do a blog post from here.
There were two old guys here when we came in a couple hours ago, then the place got packed, and developed a strange and quite likable vibe. It’s not just that the cocktail waitress, whom we’ve grown quite fond of, has no idea how to make a cosmo and serves “mur-lot” and “cabber-nett” wine; it’s not just the gravitationally correct mermaid over the bar, or the 80s rock on the jukebox; it’s not just the tattooed guy talking about his last time in court and saying “the judge said I shoulda got 55 years.” No, it’s not any one thing, but overall this place really rocks.
… a few hours pass …
OK, it’s later now, and the place is back to mellow. The bartender and her boyfriend, me and Megan, and a few drunk graybeards at the bar, with Motown playing on the jukebox now. I could practically dance.
If you’re in the Joseph area, come on by. And if not, enjoy the pictures from the rest of our day, while we look through our new book on the hikes of Hell’s Canyon and pick out an adventure for tomorrow morning. I just love how many warnings this book has about rattlesnakes!
August 11th, 2008
10:06 am
Day 2 of the road trip was full of socializing in Spokane. We visited Michell and Markus in their new house and met Hank and Dean (Hank’s the acrobatic one), then we spent the afternoon with Phil and Karin and Alex. Alex stays so extremely still if you hold up his ball, anticipating the throw, that you can take sharp HDR shots of him — he doesn’t even twitch through all three exposures. He’s the most HDR-friendly animal I’ve met.
We had plans to have dinner at the Globe, an old favorite of ours in Spokane, but it was mysteriously closed on Sunday. 0 for 2 with the Ridpath and the Globe, I then dropped the D40 in a parking lot (that’s why I carry a spare!). It destroyed the 18-55mm lens, but the body’s sort of workable if you don’t mind the lens being a bit loose.
The thing Megan and I are most excited about on this trip is not having any plans for a few days, because we’ve had non-stop social plans and work events nearly every day lately. So after visiting a few people in Spokane, and giddy with the prospect of no further specific plans until Molly’s wedding next weekend, we decided to celebrate our newfound spontaneity by leaving Spokane at twilight and heading south on I-195 into the Palouse.
A little over an hour later we were alone on top of Steptoe Butte (above). I won’t relate the saga of Steptoe here, but it’s one of my favorite places, a 1300-foot triangular peak standing alone in the middle of the rolling plains of the Palouse. It was a clear cool breezy night, with coyotes howling all around, meteors streaking overhead, and a bizarre set of flashing red lights on the eastern horizon. (These lights were spread over an area at least a mile across, and flashed in unison — I couldn’t get a good picture because they were so small, and called Megan from the car to verify I wasn’t seeing things. She saw them too.)
Then we cruised down the scary guardrail-free access road, past big waddling porcupines and skittish rabbits with eyes glowing in the darkness, and headed south to Pullman, where I’m typing these words at the Quality Inn on Monday morning. Unfortunately the wireless doesn’t seem to be working here, so we’ll have to find a Starbucks or somewhere to upload everything.
And then we’re heading into some true wilderness. From here, we go south through to the Wallowa Mountains and Hell’s Canyon, home to rattlesnakes and grizzlies. If this is the last post on the blog, send the search party there.
By the way … the view from Steptoe Butte above is not HDR, just a traditional long exposure by the moonlight. Note the streak of car headlights on I-195 in the center of the photo, heading north during the long exposure.
August 11th, 2008
10:03 am
We’re finally off on our road trip!
We left Saturday morning heading east on I-90, and after a few clouds and sprinkles in the Cascades it was sunny all the way to Spokane. We had a great dinner at Scott and Karen’s house, with Mitzi and Kenny and all the kids, and then crashed at the Davenport. We were planning to stay at the Ridpath because they have a retro jazz club on the top floor, but when we found out the jazz club is closed down and the elevators weren’t working, we decided to opt for someplace a little nicer.
I’ll post photos whenever I get a chance, but no promises. After all, sitting at a computer is what I do when I’m not on vacation.
14 hours ago, there were 1377 emails in my in-box. And now …
OK, I cheated a little bit, by archiving a few emails and making notes to myself about handling them on dates in the future. But that’s only 10 or 15 of them, tops. Out of the rest, I replied to about 100 of them, and the rest were things that required no action, or were so old they’ve become irrelevant, or just had an attachment that I needed to file, and so on. But I looked at every damn email. Good riddance to them all.
August 4th, 2008
10:25 pm
It’s not just Megan’s birthday today, actually. Happy birthday Barry too!
August 2nd, 2008
10:46 pm
This is our third year of living near the southwest shore of Lake Washington, where Seafair descends every August with its thousands of spectators. They all watch the hydroplane races, air show, and fireworks from this area, so parking’s a mess, traffic’s a mess, and the simplest little errand can turn into a big deal.
In 2006, we fled the area. In 2007, we stayed home and watched the show. This year, we each took a long walk around the area on Saturday. Here’s a shot of the air show, and Megan relaxing after her walk …
And here’s a shot of some kids in the neighborhood who are raising money for Obama …
I’m not sure yet what we’ll do to cope with Seafair on Sunday, when the crowds are biggest, but I think it involves no driving, some paint stripper, and some sandpaper. And maybe some scotch, since the liquor store’s within bicycle range.
