The Windmill Posts

More mountains, but this time not as boring!

I came out of the Idaho mountains and crossed the great plains of Washington. It was like a mashup of everything I’d seen so far. Rolling hills (SD), but they’re covered in trees (WY). Significant hills (MT) and mountains (ID) in the distance, and lakes (MN) here and there.

Coming out of Yakima I headed west on 12 into the White Pass. There was a sign listing that pass and another one, and the other was closed. Made my trip planning skills shudder to think how easily they close and less easily open. It had just rained, so the roads were wet. No problem there, except the spray. The car in front of you kicked it up unless you followed waaaay back, and oncoming traffic hit you with it as well. I made a risky pass overcoming an RV because it was like following a shower, and I wasn’t going to do that all the way over the pass.

Got to go through a mountain tunnel, which was cool. Just the one. And I’ve seen the whole “falling rocks” warning signs before, but never with rocks scattered across the roadway. Nothing bigger than a softball, but that still wouldn’t be a great thing to hit.

We followed the Tieton river for a long time, some nice curves here and there. I saw a Larch leaning out like it was perpendicular to the mountain, and noted the other trees were being very judgey. Also crossed the Continental Divide, but didn’t see the river change direction or anything. Also, did you know that if you trailer a boat across the Continental Divide, it has to be inspected ASAP on the other side?

Now for the fun part!

The Fun Part

I had been driving for many hours. While most of it was on cruise control, it was still a lot of driving. My right leg tends to get painfully tired at the end of the day. Unfortunately, that was exactly when the driving became much more active. As we rose above the river and the road stuck to the mountain, the curves became much sharper. So now I’m driving with my sad and tired leg, and it’s all getting much more complicated. No more cruise control. Also, it started raining.

Coming around a curve and then curving back the other way, I had great visibility on a wall of rock and dirt. It was nice to have that view, so I could see the slide happen clearly, and in realtime accelerated. It was not a giant cliff landslide horrible thing. But it was rocks and dirt about the size of my car, and watching it slide down the hill at the car in front of me was a very constricting moment. They must have been terrified, as they were so much closer, but I was right behind them and instinctively ducked as I passed by. The slide was caught by a berm of rock squares put up for just this kind of thing, but enough of the rock made it to the road, and the dust still hung in the air. My bigger concern was that more of the mountain was about to come crashing down on me. Not to be.

That was very exciting, and I had no idea that “See a slide right up ahead of you” was on my life bucket list. Well, check that box! But it was intimidating. I don’t know about frightening, but a lot of thoughts went through my head in those 10 seconds or so. And it gave me a renewed respect for the situation you are in when going over mountain passes. Not just things falling on you. It wasn’t an old highway, but it wasn’t a new one. However, whenever you went over a particularly smooth section of blacktop, or a really ground up section, you were crossing over a place where there was a significant slide, and it took out the road. That’s scary enough, but there are so many of them. You don’t go far without seeing one. So now you worry about being crushed, or sliding off the mountain. I have one more serious pass in my future, and it’s recently been closed and re-opened. If it’s still open, I will approach that one with great respect. If it’s not, I’ll have to drive around that range and back up a bit. Oof.

Gravity Fails

Earlier in the day I had decided on an alternate route for the day, getting off the interstate onto the state highway. It was a nice change and didn’t add much time. That is, until I looked for interesting stops in the area. There was one that was quite a bit out of the way, but I realized if I skipped it I would regret it forever. It was a gravity defying hill! You might have heard of these. Put your car in neutral at the bottom of a hill and it was magically start to roll – uphill! I’m a big believer in the laws of nature, so I didn’t think this would actually be the case. But I wanted to try.

First of all, getting there was tricky. When I took the first turn I swear I heard my GPS say “What? Wait, What?” and then for a long time the argument (her side only) raged on demanding that I “make a U turn at the nearest safe location.” Except I wasn’t making any damn U turns. I was on a mission! The roads were one and a half lane blacktop and just kept getting smaller and smaller. Google maps told me the speed limit was 35, but there were no police within miles. I could see that far.

I finally arrived, passing the spot on google maps for the starting line, then slowly crawling along looking for the line. Worried all the way I’d been had, and there was no way to tell where to start. Also, there was a very sketch barn next to the road. This was all a ploy to lure in idiot tourists and take their stuff and then kill them. Finally found the line, turned around, and set up. Now, I had come down a bit of a hill from the barn. And I was watching to see if I’d be going down a hill from the start, but it all looked flat.

So I place the car into neutral, and it starts rolling. Not some tiny slow roll building into something more, but an actual “ha ha you think you’re going down a hill” roll. I looked to my side and it really looked like we were going uphill. And the hill down from the barn? Actually rolled up that hill. Gravity is a lie! About halfway up that hill I rolled to a halt. On my way back to the start again I stopped halfway and used the spirit level app on my phone to see how things leaned. It was almost perfectly flat, with a little bit nodding to being on a downhill. Getting back to the starting point felt even more so.

I break it down as being an almost imperceptible slope from the starting line, but enough that it gets you going. Then there was a clear flat area that your momentum would get you across, and finally you’d get halfway up the hill to the barn before Mother Gravity stepped in and spanked you with her wooden spoon.

The thing is, you really feel like the impossible is happening. It’s very convincing. Looking out the window looked like going uphill. That strong rolling start was enough to really surprise you and make you buy into the claim. If you ever get the chance, try one of these, it’s a lot of fun. Even if it’s all trickery.

And that is what I call a proper quality side quest. Totally worth the two hours it added. Suck it, geographical center of the nation!

Dad is my copilot, or, Because sometimes you find yourself crying in a motel in Idaho, surrounded by mountains and fog, happy to be wandering the country with your father’s ghost.

I wrote about having this feeling that I had companions. Sometimes friends, sometimes family, sometime … who knows what? Well, this morning I was going to hit the road bright and early at 7:30, but didn’t make it til 8. Because I got this collection of super long texts from my sister. She had been thinking about me and my trip, and also thinking about November. We have lost more than our fair share of people (and a dog!) in November. All by coincidence, or possibly some sort of fate. One of those people was my Dad. Her thoughts on Dad as my companion (and some other thoughts) had me crying in that retro motel in the middle of the mountains, but it was happy and sad tears.

Dad and I have a lot in common. We can both spin a yarn, we enjoy Duluth in the rain more than a beautiful day, we play the same instrument, we love driving, we both had scooters, we both loved our kids more than we ever knew we could. And we loved road trips. When I was in high school we once drove around Lake Superior on a three day weekend. That trip is usually best done in a week. But we just tore through the miles, but still managed to stop and look at boats or eat a lunch on a picnic table in a wayside park. Even if I would have preferred that be McDonalds. I did most of the driving, as I was a newly licensed driver, but there wasn’t much left to learn. The car is an extension of myself. At one point my oldest daughter asked my wife if she could teach her how to make turns like me and her younger sister did. For some people it’s a flow state of instinct, for others it’s learned and not always loved. (Though to her credit her first trip of any substance was a drive halfway across the country in a questionable car and no money. She did just fine.)

We also wet to Duluth countless times, and it seemed to rain every single one of them. But that’s what Duluth really felt like to us, and it’s spread to other places too. So today I was driving through stereotypical Washington weather – 49 degrees just cold enough to need a couple layers of flannel but not cold enough for a coat, gray, drizzling enough that you need the wipers but not really enough to get you wet right away. Cloudy but with the occasional beam of sunlight shining right when you’re facing it and it blasts your vision. And it seemed so much like the weather Dad and I enjoyed not enjoying, and sure, lets just drive 350 miles in one day. That’s reasonable. And I don’t know if it was my sister who planted the idea, or that she clarified it in my mind, but Dad was around today on my drive, and man would he have loved it!

Deets

• License Plates: UT, NV
• States: ID, WA
• Departed: 8:00 am PDT, 42 degrees
• Original ETA 1:26pm PDT
• Arrival: 3:03 pm PDT
• Longest distance between turns: 245 miles
• Weather: Everything. Sun, drizzle, downpour, clouds, clear, windy, calm, 70 degrees, 20something degrees. Often a combo of many of those.
• Budget: Food below, Hotel below
• Food: “Double Dog” (won’t be doing that again), Caesar Salad (tired of burgers)
• Music: Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures, PIL – Happy?, Fatboy Slim – Better living through chemistry, Best of Debussy, Lorde – Pure Heroine, Siouxsie and the Banshees – Through the Looking Glass

Observations

• I loved Wallace, ID. It’s now on my top ten list of cities I’d love to live in.
• As I left I stopped at the drive-thru (that’s all it is) at 1910 coffee in Wallace. Got a 24oz Latte and a large orange juice and the total was $7. Can’t believe it. Try that at Starbucks!
• Saw seagulls. Sailors used to see seagulls as a sign of hope after countless days or weeks of nothing but ocean. I felt something similar.
• More tumbleweed. Hit one with my car, didn’t do anything to the car. I did see one later that was big enough it would have caused some damage. Also saw a car with a large tumbleweed lodged in its grill. Looked like someone with some lettuce stuck in their teeth.
• Crossed a bridge that had another airport-quality windsock on it.
• I’ve seen so few Minnesota license plates, and only one other MINI this whole trip.
• I see a lot of trucks with trailers with Indiana license plates. Is that a tax thing or just a crazy coincidence?
• I passed a very large penitentiary, but there were no “do not pick up hitchhikers” signs. I guess they just think if the prisoner can escape that far, good luck!
• There have been parts of Washington that are so windy it makes me wonder how they can tell if someone is swerving because they’re drunk or just being buffeted by the wind. And if you drove drunk in the wind, might they both cancel each other out and get you driving in a straight line?
• Not to be obsessed, but Washington has had the least variety of license plates yet. Besides the odd Oregon or Idaho plate, it’s just all Washington. I went into a rest stop, which is usually great plate hunting ground, and they were all WA. All!

Pictures