Caldwell, Idaho

I'm a little late on my postings. We left Port Angeles on Saturday morning. We had planned on leaving about 9:00 but actually didn't get out until 10:00. Oh well, those of you who really know us know that's an average time for us. The Ranger wrote a really nice letter of recommendation for us so if we ever want to camphost again we'll have a glowing recommendation. She even mentioned that the campers had written comments about us and our interaction with them. Nice. We did have to have one last fire before we left because we knew we wouldn't be able to have anymore campfires for a long, long time. We'll both miss that.

Rod's chopping more wood for our campfire


GREAT, lots of wood for the fire!


We headed out Highway 112 to the 101 Highway. It was a really beautiful drive but not the best route time wise. Oh well, we really weren't in a hurry and it was raining so I guess it was best that we took our time.

Highway 101 was gorgeous but wet.


We stopped in Tumwater, Washington on I-5 for our last teriyaki fix. In case you don't know Washington is as famous for the teriyaki as it is for Starbucks. It was good but nothing compares to the teriyaki at Koto Teriyaki in Tacoma. We got back on the freeway and took that to I-205 through Portland, Oregon and on to I-84 to The Dalles. I-84 follows the Columbia River through this incredible gorge on the Oregon side. We had to go across the bridge over the Columbia River (back into Washington) to a campground that the Garmin was taking us to. We passed a place on the way that kinda looked like a RV Park but really looked like RV storage except there were pickup trucks with the trailers. We pulled in but the office was closed. As we were reading the notices on the door a pickup pulled up and a guy got out and asked us if we were looking for a spot. We told him we were and he said he had one spot left for $20 a night. Cool, we took it. We got set up and unhooked the truck and went back across the bridge to a restaurant that was advertised on the freeway. It was not the best but, whatever, it was food and we were hungry. I don't know how many times we crossed back and forth between Oregon and Washington yesterday.

Look Jenny, I finally got a picture (sort of)!!


And then back into Oregon


Columbia River Gorge


This morning we got out at 9:30 after setting our clocks back an hour. That was pretty nice because we had gained an hour. We drove only a few miles till we had to get fuel. We paid $3.13 a gallon for diesel and we didn't even have to pump. It's against the law to pump your own gas in Oregon. $100 filled the tank with 31 gallons of fuel and it was really empty. We haven't done that since we bought the truck back in October!

We drove over the Blue Mountains (summit 4,000 feet) through lots of rain. Not really heavy rain but rain nonetheless. We stopped at a Flying J for lunch and I don't know if you've ever been in a truck stop dining room but the portions are HUGE. I ordered the chicken fried steak and eggs. It came with three eggs, hash browns, toast and the biggest piece of steak I've seen. Needless to say, I had the leftovers for dinner tonight.

This is how most of the road was through the mountains


Interesting cloud formation


Cool view of the windmills



We had to reset the clocks AGAIN ahead to our original time because we crossed into the Mountain time zone. So much for that extra hour we thought we had. We could have just kept them the same and not changed them at all. Rod never did change his.

We're now in Caldwell, Idaho for the night and believe it or not we plan on getting out early tomorrow morning for our drive to Salt Lake City. I'm going to set the alarm for 7:00 but probably won't get up. At least it will wake me up and once I'm awake I can't go back to sleep. We don't have a lot to do in the morning because we didn't unhook the truck tonight. We have another three hundred mile day but the end result is worth it. We don't usually travel on weekends but this has been kind of nice because there's not a lot of traffic and the construction sites are not working.