Lincoln Highway
Day 21
This is the part of the trip that’s really hard for me. It’s long days of driving, or in my case riding, with hardly any stops worth mentioning and it’s hot. I don’t mind the windows being down, but my feet, even with all the insulation under them, really get hot.
For you who do not know this about Model A’s it is because the exhaust system is right underneath my feet. Steve has done everything to make it less hot, but when the temps outside are in the high 90’s, it’s still makes my feet hot. Okay, enough whining, it could be worse!
We drove through the Blue Mountains of Oregon today and several National Forests. Highway 395 wound through mountains and valleys and often a meandering mountain stream would follow the road. The landscape was constantly changing from forests to rock canyons to grasslands and back again. Today was the first day we saw deer run across the road. I saw a weird sign that said Cougar Crossing. Do they really cross there?
We also saw evidence of a large fire. The trees looked like sticks growing out of the ground. At one gas stop I asked someone about the fire. She said it happened 5 years ago and that many houses burned, too.
We drove through a town named John Day and later crossed a river by the same name. I found out John Day was a hunter from the back woods of Virginia and he came to Oregon when he was about 40. He worked for the Pacific Fur Company in 1810. During a trip over the mountains to Astoria, he survived an Indian attack at the Mau Mau River. The river then became known as John Day and soon his name appeared on 2 towns, a dam and a valley. I thought this was kind of interesting.
We made one stop today at an unusual junk store that sold all sorts of signs, tools and other stuff. Steve looked through the tools, but didn’t find anything. I went next door to a gift/antique store and came up with the same results.
When we crossed the border into Washington the scenery changed again. This time there were acres and acres of wheat and some other vegetation that we didn’t know what it was. What was interesting was that some of this was grown on the sides of big hills. We wondered how could they harvest it without the machinery falling down the hill.
All the roads we drove on today were nice 2 lane highways with minimum traffic, tomorrow we will be on the freeway a lot. I’m not looking forward to that.
We stopped at Lewiston, Idaho for the night. We drove about 350 miles and the temperature was close to 100 most of the day. Tomorrow our goal is to get to Butte, Montana with cooler temps.
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