It’s dang chilly here. At this point, we’ve been here almost three weeks, and we’ve driven up and down this stretch of coast, plus gone over the coastal range to the valley to Corvallis and to Salem for various things like doors, fencing, plywood, hardware, and more, and it’s always 20 to 40 degrees cooler in Depoe Bay than in the Willamette Valley. I even think it’s cooler here than in other coastal cities, Newport south of us and Lincoln City north of us. The temperatures range from about 50 degrees overnight to 60 degrees during the day. It hit 68 degrees as I’m writing, and that was about the warmest it’s been out here. A foggy evening on the Depoe Bay oceanfront It was really a beautiful day today after the fog burned off, and when it’s sunny and warm(ish) we tend to want to sit in the sun and just soak it in—we don’t get a lot done. But there are plenty of cool foggy days, so we are indeed getting a lot done around the new homestead here. We’ve been to many Habitat for Humanity...

Leaving Montpelier, Idaho, I saw an old wagon—or a replica of a wagon—on the roof of a building, with bears attending it. There were carved bears everywhere in Montpelier, but we did not see any live bears. A couple of pronghorn antelopes in Wyoming, and those cute prairie dogs, are really the only wildlife we’ve seen so far. A wagon with bears, perched on a roof in Montpelier, Idaho, near where we ate breakfast A stop at Soda Springs, Idaho, where the water allegedly tasted like beer according to Oregon Trail pioneers, led us to the Soda Springs geyser, supposedly the world’s only manmade geyser. The city was trying to find a hot springs to feed a town swimming pool when the workers hit the geyser, and it was capped in such a way that they could set the spray off every hour on the hour. Imagine our dismay when we found out the geyser was out of order. That’s what you get with manmade natural wonders, I guess. Soda Springs Geyser: Out of Order We traveled mostly along the interstate in...

 When we left Casper, Wyoming, we were trying to find Wyoming 220 to continue to follow the Oregon-California Trail. But we took a wrong turn somewhere, so we had to backtrack, and found that the road we wanted was called Cy Road in town. Nice they named a street after our son (or maybe after Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the thresher, who can say?) We found our way out of town, heading west, and passed Red Buttes, some big red bluffs that were a landmark along the trail for the emigrants, as they had been for the Indians as well. Nearer to the trail along the Red Buttes was the North Platte, still wandering cross country, and Bessemer Bend, one of the last places that it was possible to cross the river without paying a toll for a ferry or bridge. (And some times the toll was quite exorbitant, whatever the traffic would bear.) Red Buttes, just outside Casper, Wyoming, was a landmark on the Oregon Trail Then we came upon Independence Rock, which is something to see. It’s a hu...