The Well Behaved Dingo

THURS MARCH 6
Sarroar

The one thing you have to do in Missoula is eat fish tacos and drink brain wash. Back in our day it was easy finding brain wash, but now only one store, Liquid Planet, carries it. You have to get two fish tacos, one with hot sauce one without, a brain wash, and sit outside and eat. If you can’t find brain wash or <gasp> don’t like it get one of those huge cups of water in Taco Del Sol. Perrrrfection. Read the rest of this entry »

The drive last night was one of the most surreal night long drives of my life. We got on highway 13 which zigzags around the Coeur d’Alene Reservation. Sarah crawled in the back and fell asleep right outside some little hick town and right afterward the CD Player quit so it was me and the rumbly AM stations I could half pick up. Highway 13 is the windiest most disorienting road I’ve ever driven. The official speed limit was something like 60 MPH, but there wasn’t a stretch in the 50 miles of the road that didn’t have a 25-35 MPH limit attached to it on account of the constant curves. It was a nauseating stretch of road. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, once again last night was more driving than I care to admit to. We got into Bends Idaho well after dark and couldn’t find the campground we were after anywhere.

When desperate we drive and drive. First up a long banging road to forest service land with “three great campgrounds” according to our guide book, all of which are about 6 miles plus up a snowed in road. Next we crept through a migration corridor full of hundreds of elk, who scared the shit out of Sarah with their Buddha serene stares and hanging flesh. The Big Ugly was dodging rock-slides as best she could. We drove 20 miles at about 25 miles an hour in case the elk beside the road spooked, which they never did.

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I’ve been kicking myself since we left the campsite on the Metolius river yesterday. We drove for hours and hours, exactly what we’d told ourselves we weren’t going to do on this trip, looking for a place to camp. We checked sites all along the way, only to find most of them snowbound or “closed for the season” a phrase that I’ve come to hate. What season? Anyway, we finally found a windy ass site just outside the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. BLM FTW! Read the rest of this entry »

After Sarah woke up we pushed on and, taking our chances on some unmarked forest service roads, found a camp site just off the Metolius river right at sunset. There was only one other set of tire tracks that had driven over the snow patches recently so we were surprised to find a perfect campsite and a road clear of snow after the first 200 feet.

I made a fire with some wet wood. It got dark as we were gathering though so I didn’t even have the best wood, but I managed to coax it into staying lit.

As we were sitting out by the fire, Scherzo had a hell of a time relaxing. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching us. Occasionally she’d growl back towards where the van was. After a while we realized she was probably cold, so we set her up in her little purple folding chair near the fire, put a blanket over her and she seemed happier. After an hour of that it was still really cold so we loaded into the van. We were at 3500 feet, the edge of the snow-line, and not sure how warm we’d be but we slept fine and the dog calmed right down inside the van.

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After a unnerving evening at a state park south of Portland we decide to push East. Scherzo was out of sorts among the fat slow moving motor homes and RVs. We slept in the van for the first time, woken up by her barking at the aimless dogs roaming the campground. With a quick reorganization of the van and after unloading a couple boxes into the dumpster we hit the highway, letting our new GPS do its best to get us into the mountains.

The sun is shining, the state highways are open, but Sarah and I are still dazed from the rush to get the fuck out of Portland over the last few days. The Big Ugly, our 1991 GMC vandura, bounces up and down over all the bumps in the highway, adding to the feeling of flying you get from sitting so high up.

As we drive south east toward Sisters there’s no campsites open along the highway. We check five or six different camp grounds to no avail. We climb into the cascades and come on a giant reservoir, sitting thirty or forty feet low.

Sarah and Scherzo are sleeping, but the lake makes me feel uneasy. There’s a long even row where the fur trees have been evenly chopped that leads into the water. The stumps linger, making the bank feel inhabited by ghosts. The rush from the last several days is catching up to me and I’m feeling tired.

I doze off at the wheel – it must have only been a second – but I saw all these branches bearing down on me and woke up. I didn’t swerve or anything, just came-to holding the wheel on a straight away. After fifteen minutes along this lake fighting sleeplessness I wake up Sarah to ward off the feeling of dark dead trees. The sun is going down and we have no where to park and sleep and I’m not sure we’ll survive the trees, hungry for death, if we have to stop here for the night.

We just got out of the apartment at like 11AM. Last night was hell. I was worried about getting out in time and having the place clean. Worked like crazy until about 4 AM when Mac broke down crying from the pressure of no sleep and the rush of moving. We were both angry that it had ended up in a frantic rush despite all the time we’d put in to packing and getting rid of our crap over the last month.

Then we realized there really was no point in staying up all night, that the land lord wasn’t going to care if we were out at 6 am or at noon.

We went to bed and I woke up 4 hours later feeling a lot better. The last of the cleaning went much easier with some sleep. I even got to talk to one of our neighbors for the first time. He’s a nice guy, has an ugly dog and three nice kids two apartments down. He took a bunch of the stuff we’d left near the dumpster in the hopes someone could use it, and kept offering to help me get stuff into the van. He said he was thinking of moving out and buying a house now that the mortgage crisis hade made real estate cheaper. Somehow chatting with him really made me feel better about things. He’s alot older than me but was the only neighbor we had here that didn’t add to the place feeling like a crack den.

We skimped on the last bit of cleaning by sweeping crap under the fridge and then loaded Scherzo into the van, waved at the couch we ditched on the curb and headed off. We drove half a mile up the street to say bye to mac’s brother Jason and his wife Chris and elliot, their spawn, went to the coffee shop to cancel the electric and internet and change our forwarding addresses, went to the ups store, the laundromat, and the grocery store, and then we were finally really ready to head out of town when I realised I had LOCKED MY KEYS IN MY CAR. aggggkkkk.

We’re rushing to get the hell out of Portland today. It’s a bitch. I was up all night studying for a math exam, the last class I ever have to take, and so was awake all night studying except for a skateboarding break, went early to school, did four and a half hours of testing, drove home in the rain, started packing and cleaning, loaded stuff into the van, drove stuff to Stranger’s house and to the free box, came home and cleaned more, lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of the day.

We’d planned to make it an easy transition into the van but like all plans what you imagine doing and what you do are two different things. So, once again, it looks like I’ll be up all night cleaning for a deposit we’ll never see and start the trip early tomorrow on no sleep.

she is very good at ignoring.

MODIFYING:

Once you’ve bought your van you’re gonna wanna modify it. Think about what you’re going to be doing in your van, what type of climate you’ll be in, what special things you’ll need to make room for etc.

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