Portland to Salt Lake City

Why no updates?
Its been a couple days since we updated things hear and not for lack of trying. In a brief jaunt through Salt Lake we found a place in Provo Utah for gamers to geek out. When we walked in the door we should have turned around and ran, but we decided to give it a chance. We quickly found out that the plug for the laptop has been sheered and we wouldn't be able to upload any pictures at the lackluster facility. I jumped one of the gaming pcs for around an hour and wrote our blog. About a half hour into my update my session expired, which apparently turned off my computer and deleted all my work. I proceeded to rip this guy’s off before I decided to move on to greener pastures. It’s been since then (Monday night) that I have had Internet options.

Portland: Five reasons we will be back to despite its known glaring flaws (rain and city grime)
(1) The people make Portland Portland. There is nothing glaringly special about the place except the people. There is something about the fact that the weather is typically crap that brings out the best in people. Why be glum when its always crap. Ride your bike, jog, or take a stroll, who cares if it’s a torrential downpour.
(2) Weird is king: Portland had a smorgasbord of truly unique and independent people that really cared little about what others thought of their individualism. It’s a place where you are more likely to get stared at for wearing a blue polo shirt than if you wore two shades of vintage leather and purple striped tights.
(3) Its just as cheap to eat out gourmet in Portland as it is to eat at home. The three of us had dinner with 3 apps, 3 dinners, and 2 deserts with drinks for less then 100 bucks.
Green is king too: You have a clear consciousness about your butternut squash ravioli because it was grown organic within a few miles of the restaurant and the leftovers can be taken home in a compostable to-go box.
(4) The frequent rains make it one of the most green places you could imagine. Its almost as far as you can get from the brown of southern California wilderness. This rain makes some ideal growing conditions for a variety red wine grapes.

The Oregon Trail and white knuckle driving
Ok Jen, maybe we should have stayed an extra night, but maybe should have gone to a quicker place for breakfast too.

Sunday night we left Portland late in the afternoon. It was pouring rain like Oregon had since we got there and we were obviously seeing one hell of a cold front that we have since been following as it moves east. We headed east on I-84 through a downpour. It was coming down hard and when we reached Mt. Hood it was freezing on the road making for a wild ride up the hill. The downhill was better, but the truck was blowing all over the place and I had to stop and get gas as an excuse to gather my composure. The attendant (they pump your gas for you in Oregon) told me that he heard about snow and fog up on cabbage hill to the east. A little thing inside me said ‘get a hotel’, but I wanted to press on. Even the $39 Motel 8 didn’t tempt me from facing the storm. What a bad idea. When we reached the base of cabbage hill we were inundated with a soup thick fog and as we continued uphill the snow started pouring. At first we were like ‘hey its snowing, awesome’, but that quickly turned to ‘oh crap how long with this last’. After we crested the hill the fog died off, but the snow kept coming. We passed a few snow plows blowing salt on the roads (reminds me I need to hose down the bottom of my rig). The snow wasn’t as bad as the dry ice, but when it died down it started raining again and blowing at around 30+ mph and the truck was all over the road. After about 6 hours of whit knuckle driving we finally threw in the towel at around 2am and crashed out at the Farewell Bend campground near the Idaho boarder. After reading about the Oregon trail and what we experienced I have a new found respect for the settlers of the west coast.

We woke up on Monday morning and it wasn’t raining for only the second time since Friday, but it didn’t last long. Just as we were breaking camp and gearing up for showers it started raining again so we decided to skip the showers (bad idea and you will see why) to head east and get ahead of the storm. We barnstormed east and got ahead of the storm, eventually, but had to deal with a couple of hours of that heavy wind. My truck is not made to drive on the freeways and definitely not made for driving wind. We heard that Idaho was boring and it is partly true, but we were able to find some great little places to turn off and sight see. We got to offroad a little to a vista and to hike around at a giant gorge through the volcanic plains landscape. We also saw the biggest tumbleweed ever.

Headed South? Northern Utah’s ups and downs
I am going to start this by saying that my sample of people (the guy in the sporting section at Wal-Mart, the uptight geek at Gamerzzz, and the bastard that parked his shopping cart against my truck instead of walking around it to put it in the rack), but the people who we met in Salt Lake, Provo, and other travels who were from Utah were pretty lame and weird. I already went through what happened with my the blog that I am currently re-writing, but I am equally pissed about the camping options south of town. We had to drive down several poorly marked roads to get to some shady campgrounds and decided instead to press on through the mountains despite it being late. It wasn’t till after climbing some incredible mountains and getting to around 7000 feet that we finally arrived at our campsite only to find out that it was closed for the season. This means that both the bathrooms and the showers were unavailable. By then it was far to late to go and search for greener pastures and we had our pick of any site in the place.

We woke up to one of the most incredible views from the back of the LC to date of a beautiful bend in the river. It was cold up there, but not as bad as we thought it would be. Amy made a gourmet breakfast that morning while I made coffee and a big bloody for the road. The road out off the mountain was amazing. We followed a meandering stream and a mining rail up to a peak of around 9000 feet before we descended following another meandering stream all the way into the desert valley below. It was an amazing transition of climates from the snow and trees of the mountain to the infinate flat of the desert valley.

It is getting late, so I will update soon on Arches National Park and Colorado.

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