Unity Lake State Park, OR 8-6-07

We woke to a lovely day in the forest. It was very quiet and very dark last night! This first picture makes me laugh. Yes it is just a satellite dish in the forest, but it is still odd to me how we can now stay connected to the “outside world” and be out in the middle of nowhere. Thirty years ago when Larry and I started camping together you had to find a pay phone somewhere if you needed to get a message to someone and of course there was mail. Now we have cell phones, but they still don’t work in a lot of places, but as long as we can see the sky we are connected through the magic of the computer, satellites and the internet, oh and solar panels to charge the batteries and the inverter to power up the computer and receiver.

We were on the road around ten. Heading east on highway 26 we almost immediately left the forest and spent the rest of the drive in varying high desert terrains. We also went through another forest. There are more trees and it is greener then we expected, lots of creeks and rivers and lots of ranches doing a lot of irrigating along the way. We stopped and had our toast about an hour after we got on the road in a lovely canyon with a lot of willow trees.

The town of John Day was small but clean. None of the towns we have gone through on this route have looked run down. Most have lots of pretty flower baskets which always catch my eye.

We reached our target today at two. We traveled 138 miles today and we are at Unity Lake State Park in Oregon just a little north and west of Unity. There are thunderstorms moving through so the wind comes and goes and the rain comes and goes and we had a little thunder. The lake is murky and rough. We have hookups today so I had to get caught up on the vacuuming. This place isn’t giving us the feeling that we want to stay and explore so we’ll be on the road again tomorrow and probably in Idaho somewhere. We are expecting we’ll find a few places that we’ll want to stay a week or so and explore around.