The journey had the feeling of winding down today, transitioning from going out to coming back. The off and on dashed road lines said so, as did the passing jumbles of sagebrush. Our direction east had a sense of home and the future beyond this journey. A sense of mileage guided us. It was time to watch and absorb some, and time to think.
The trip was definitely changing. We ate at a McDonald’s this day. No more Bayshores. The towns had become regular American, connected by interstates of the usual car mix with the in-between slots filled by loaded trucks. The ground had been tread much more frequently before by millions of Goodyears.
The experience was not over yet, though, and it still threw valuable experiences at us. In fact, this morning opened up with great scenery continuing through Oregon. Timberline had been cozy, though the small end-framed bed contorted me for fit. Dad was still in a pamper-me mood, so the bellman was called to take our bags back to where we had hauled them from the day before, in the alcove by the Indian head.
We had to go out to our steeds and push off the covering snow. The bikes slowly and grudgingly started in the cold, and we needed to pull them out of their snow piles. The road down the mountain was surprisingly trouble free, only being wet and steaming from the bright sunlight warmly absorbing into exposed black asphalt.
Looking over our shoulders provided a bottom frame for Mount Hood, which we were truly seeing for the first time. A beautiful mountain, wind buffeted and deeply covered in shining snow. It rose up and steeper, ending in a huge near vertical rock block. Not just a cone or a mound, but instead a unique shape from lower to higher.
Mount Hood eventually disappeared for the last time around a corner, and we were heading east across Oregon country. The Columbia River Gorge opened up to say “aaaahhhhh”, and I was swallowed. It was amazing country, completely unexpected and some of the most impressive scenery of the trip. And all this from an interstate on the cannonball trajectory back home!
Gusted from either side when we popped around a hill or over an open flat expanse, we weaved in our lane through the gorge. The wind, fortunately behind us for most of the day, was a Heaven-sent gift for the bright multi-colored windsurfers skimming over the Columbia’s white caps. They criss-crossed each other’s paths near shoreline take-off spots.
Rising to either side of them and us, ancient eroded canyons stood in segmented degrees of brown. Bare rock was shaped into hoodoos and rock slide walls. Hillsides were covered with dry grasses, short scrub, and stunted trees. And the overall effect was an amazing pass-through.
The area did not entice me in the same way as Denali or the Washington and Oregon coasts. The gorge was not intimate. It was an area where I planned to return, but not necessarily to get out and hike through for a finer, up close experience. Passing through on an open motorcycle seemed to fit this place. Without the changing perspectives and mind-overloading inputs, the impact may have been lessened. The river and bushes overshadowed an essentially barren, forbidding feel. An area to be oohed and aahed at, but not taken in or touched.
Oregon eventually ran out of its grand scale momentum, metamorphosizing into rolling hills of dusty, post-nuclear-war looking farmland. The interstate was in good, lower-48 shape, and the traffic matched the design of the road. Two lanes each way with moving traffic all over, and an eternal parade of transporting trucks.
Our gas up and go spot held us back from “going” when we decided to do dinner. We were at a place designed for trucks and truckers, and everyone else was considered extra money but unimportant. A sign in the restaurant warned that truckers would be served first over anyone else, so please be patient. Sure thing. Most likely a marketing strategy for making the truckers – this place’s bread and butter – feel the king treatment.
Not that I had been in many truck stops, but the place seemed fancier and more modern than my preconceptions about truck stops. Very clean, well painted, with strong attempts to draw customers in, and funky bathrooms with showers and a public hair dryer. I had never seen much appeal in trucking as a profession, but this type of place probably served as a paradise interstate island for them.
Night crept up and then pounced. This was something that we had not been accustomed to for a while now. The sun would occasionally accompany us to bed up north, but the sun had long sunk below the dark horizon before we arrived at the Monterey Motor Inn in Twin Falls, Idaho. What “Monterey” had to do with anything, I didn’t know. Maybe some quaint, witty reason for the name. Maybe not.
The sun lowered itself below the haze, and the huge sky remained in light blue with pastel rainbow shades rimming the horizon. There was something special about the sky out there in the meek rolls of flatlands. It opened wide; huge to all horizons. Everything below looked smaller: Dad seemed a lit-up dot, and the trucks resembled kid-pushed toys. The mountains became hills. Railroads became N scale toys in a Christmas garden. And the sky just hovered and loomed.