I wish! LOL Day Six was another long day of driving, but please remember: the drive WAS the destination for us in many ways. It’s just that this day held another 488 miles of driving. Not nearly as arduous as the Keystone to Salt Lake City trek, but a day of little else but driving nonetheless.
The first leg was from Boise to Bend, Oregon for lunch, and that drive took a little more than 5 hours. First surprise: The rock faces and winding roads I expected to see in Wyoming and Utah finally showed up in eastern Oregon! This photo was pulled from the internet, but is fairly accurate showing the EASY part of the drive.
There wasn’t much room to pull over, but we did manage to get the state line shot with little Lulu!
I took the two shots above from the road … tried to get a glimpse on film of the gorgeous white capped mountains we were seeing along the way.
Shortly after passing into Oregon, we went through the small seemingly “Deliverance”-esque town of Vale, and saw
(Thankfully, no sign of Norman or his mother at THIS Bates Motel!)
We arrived at our lunch spot, McKay’s Cottage in Bend, OR at a little before 1 PM (having now crossed into Pacific Time).
Sweet place … good food!
We proceeded to drive south on Route 97, and continued on our way to Central Point. During those 3 hours, I saw so much of this:
I was prompted to remark later to the Oregonians, “I can see where Oregon got its license plate design!” (Seriously, probably almost a hundred miles of this. Pretty! But … nuthin’! 🙂
We were so close … within 15 minutes away … when Google Maps decided to poop the bed on us!
Ugh!! The Google Lady was about 4 miles and a few steps ahead of us!! When you’re on the same highway for 200 miles, that’s no biggie, but when you’re trying to make the last several turns at the end of a long journey, and she’s telling you to “Turn left here!” and it’s a fenced-in cow field, that is NOT helpful! We finally had to pull over, and restart, and success.
Very shortly thereafter, we pulled up to the home of our friends the Tursos and Catherine’s parents, the Mullalys!
(This isn’t actually their house … LOL … this is Mt. McLoughlin, which can be seen — from a much further distance — from their back picture window!)