Lincoln Highway
Day 20
I have a correction to make in regards to our interview with Paul Shinn. I had mistakenly said it would be on his YouTube program this Saturday. That is wrong. It will be shown the next Saturday, July 15th. Hope you all can still watch it.
We said our good-byes a second time with my cousins and left Reno at 7:30.am. After we got out of Reno, the traffic thinned and the driving went well. Kenny had told Steve we could take 395 all the way to Oregon and avoid driving in the mountains. This was so much easier than the original plan.
We crossed into the north eastern part of California almost immediately after leaving Reno and stayed in the state until we reached Oregon. The countryside again is so beautiful and it’s always different, changing from forest and hills to flat farmland and back again. I kept humming, the old Christy Minstrels song “This Land is Your Land, this Land is My Land.”
At one point on the drive we were hit with a swarm of grasshoppers or some other bug that looked similar. I thought they might have been those huge Mormon Crickets, but they were the wrong color. They sounded like rain hitting the windshield and they made a mess of it. When we stopped at the next gas station Steve cleaned them off the windshield and radiator, but somehow one still landed on my arm after we were on the road again. Yuck!
Just across the border in Oregon we stopped at a speck on the map called New Pine Creek. I saw an old building that said Just Stuff and thought it looked interesting. The stuff inside wasn’t interesting, but the man who owned it was.
He was from San Diego until he retired and bought the 140 year old building we stopped at. He restored the building and has it filled with junk he’s collected. He was interested in our trip with the car and told Steve that he and a buddy drove a Model T to LA going 25mph on back roads. They broke down often and slept under the car on the side of the road. It took them 3 weeks to get there. He wants to drive it to Florida, but that’s a pipe dream for him.
Another half hour or so we came to the town of Lakeview. It was a bigger town and had a grocery store. Now that we won’t be staying at anyone’s home, we decided we needed to fill our cooler once more with items to eat and take along with us. Today was hot, but in the shade it felt good and we found a park to eat at. The picnic table next to us had a couple who asked about the car. Of course, it was the perfect opportunity to tell of our journey traveling out west in a 1930 Model A.
In Oregon when you fill your car with gas it’s the law that an attendant does it for you. Although, the gas tank was a little less than ¾ full Steve wanted to be sure we had enough gas to get us to the next town, 140 miles away. We thought we had already driven on the loneliest road, but this must have been the loneliest road in Oregon. We were so thankful that the car was running well. For 140 miles we only met a half dozen cars or so and the terrain was so desolate.
At 6pm we finally made it to Burns, OR to stay for the night. We drove 400 miles today.
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