Far from home

I have completed the very long drive to Hood River, Oregon.  On both Friday and yesterday I found myself in the car quite a bit longer than I'd expected.  If I ever do this drive again, I think I'll try to get an hour or two farther on each of the first two days to even it out.

Adding to the unpleasantness was that I had considerable trouble finding places to stay both Friday night and last night.  On Friday I'd planned to stay in one of the U.S. Forest Service campgrounds around Flaming Gorge Reservoir in northeastern Utah so that I could paddle there yesterday morning; but when I got there the campgrounds were all completely full.  I ended up driving another couple of hours before I finally found a motel with a vacancy in southwestern Wyoming.  I didn't paddle yesterday but it was just as well because I had another formidable drive ahead of me.  The trip across southern Idaho and eastern Oregon went smoothly enough, but when I started to look for a place to stay the night there were no vacancies anywhere because of a Blake Shelton concert in the town of Pendleton.  (What is it like when somebody good is performing?)  I had to drive some 50 miles farther than I'd planned to grab the last vacancy at a motel in the town of Boardman.

The bright side is that I had a mere 90 minutes or so of driving this morning to get to Hood River.  I wouldn't be able to check into the rental house I'm sharing with four others until four o'clock, so I spent some time wandering around the town.  In the mid afternoon I did a 60-minute paddle down on the Columbia River.  Putting in where the race will finish later this week, I warmed up and did a set of eight 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals.  Having not paddled since Thursday, I was ready to rev the engines a bit.  After that I just checked out the environs, even paddling several hundred meters up the White Salmon River, which flows into the Columbia across from Hood River.

It's hot out here in the Pacific Northwest.  Today's high was around 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  But because of the lower humidity, triple digit temperatures here are not as bad as days in the 90s back in Memphis.