The Best of the May Walkabout

Now that we are back home, we thought we'd capture the 'bests' from our trip. Here they are, in no particular order...

The best place we didn't stop, and would like to return to see: Lake Coeur D'Alene, in Idaho. We drove by it on the way home, and thought it was one of the most beautiful places we had seen:

Best souvenirs: Deb's charm bracelet from Carmel, and Steve's Mount Rushmore mug, which matches his favorite Lake Powell mug.

Food...

Best home cooked meal: ham cooked in Coke at Sally's. Best brew pub: Bend Brewing Company in Oregon, where we had a beer sampler, calamari for an appetizer and salmon pizza. Best pizza at Campisi's, in Dallas:

We had pizza with Sally and Art at the original Campisi, known as the Egyptian Lounge when Jack Ruby ate there the night before shooting Lee Harvey Oswald:

In a typical Internet "walkabout", I ended up reading 50 pages of the deposition Joe Campisi gave about his association with Ruby - and all I was trying to do was get a picture of the restaurant back in 1963, when Ruby ate there. So easy to go off on a tangent, on the Internet....

Best hotel: The Driskill, in Austin.

Best chain hotel: Fairfield Inn. After saying in an earlier post that our plan to stay at Marriott hotels wasn't working for us, we stayed at Fairfields in Bend, Seattle, Bozeman, Rapid City and Rockford IL - basically, the whole end of the trip with the exception of Portland, where we stayed at the Mark Spencer. We found the Fairfields to be a good value, plus their consistency was a welcome comfort on the long trip home.

We received our best insight on the final day of the trip, from a nice man working breakfast at the Rockford hotel. It had opened only weeks before, and was lightly booked. They had upgraded us to a suite, and were taking good care of their relatively sparse clientele. When I was getting breakfast, I told one exceptionally helpful gentleman that I was well acquainted with their breakfast setup, since we had stayed at so many Fairfields in the last month. He asked about our trip and why we were traveling so long. I explained that we were investigating possible places to relocate to and he asked me what we had learned from our walkabout. I said 'that no place is perfect', and he replied 'yes -- not until you make it so'.

It was an insight worth driving 7500 miles for.

Bend Highlights

Bend was a great stopover for our trip, even though we never considered it as a place to resettle - not enough work opportunities. It is a popular place for people from Portland to have second homes, and it is easy to see why. The town is named for being a bend in the Deschutes River, which runs right next to the downtown.


There is a wonderful city park along the town side of the river, and the night we were there it was full of families walking and playing. The weather in Bend is much sunnier than Portland, though we have had sunshine our whole visit in the Northwest - veeerrrry deceptive! We used to live in Seattle, so we know what it really like here (it's been known to rain occasionally). But inland, past the Cascades, it is dry and sunny, and Bend is a friendly town set in that nice climate. This is another shot of the Deschutes River:

The downtown is cute and has good restaurants and shops. We went to a brew pub and I was able to get a beer sampler, one of my favorite things to do.

Bend has been especially hard hit by the recession, which is not unusual for towns populated with second homes. All of Oregon is hard hit; the unemployment rate is second only to Michigan, or so we hear. Something to consider as we weigh the possibility of moving here.

On the Road

In a land full of beautiful images, this is perhaps my favorite picture. We stopped off the road at a totally desolate place between Bend and Hood River. This is truly high desert, with very few trees and scrubby gray sage bushes. But the sky is incredible and the silence is broken only by birds singing -- the birds sounded like they came off one of those nature cds, too good to be real. I'm planning on getting this picture printed large scale; it's the only way to really appreciate it.


Mount Jackson was the next mountain we saw in the Cascade Volcanic Arc. It is between Mount Jefferson and Mount Hood.

This is a shot I took at a rest stop on the way into Bend. I'm really missing my cats, in particular my red tabby Sage, so somewhere between Austin and Mesa I bought a 'fake Sage' at a rest stop. It's one of those stuffed animals that breathes and purrs. This is Steve with Fake Sage:

And here's a closeup of Fake Sage:

She rides in container we keep right behind the front seats, next to the sunglasses, bottles of water and computer power supply. Good for a laugh, but no substitute for my real furry friends!

Mountains from California to Bend

The drive to Bend is punctuated with one snowcapped peak after another. The first major mountain is Mount Shasta in northern California. Mount Shasta, or the "White Mountain" in English, a 14,179-foot stratovolcano, is the second-highest peak in the Cascade Range and the fifth highest peak in California. It is a member in the Cascade Volcanic Arc:

Just to the west of Bend are the Three Sisters, three volcanic peaks, each of which exceed 10,000 feet in elevation. They are the third, fourth, and fifth highest peaks in the state of Oregon:

Just to the north of the Three Sisters is Mount Jefferson. Mount Jefferson is the second highest mountain in Oregon:

Bend is a place where homes with spectacular views are available for reasonable prices. It also has a great downtown area. We would consider looking at real estate here, but it is too far from a major airport and has limited work opportunities.

Tomorrow morning we head to Portland...