Trip to Oregon 6-9

Yesterday we left Fallon about 6:50. It was a nice day for a drive. We stopped in Fernley at BK and got a breakfast sandwich and headed for Reno. From Reno we got on 395 north and headed for Oregon. At some point in Oregon we picked up highway 31 to highway 97 to Bend, Oregon.

It was a beautiful drive, lots of green with all the rain this whole western area has been getting, wild flowers and wild life. We saw several herds of Pronghorn antelope along the way. I saw a big Coyote racing for his life across the highway In front of our truck, he was going so fast that Larry was looking out his side window at something and never saw the Coyote. The racing animal never even slowed down as he hit the dirt and by then we had moved on and I couldn’t see it any longer.

Up in Oregon we saw a family of Sandhill Cranes, they are big birds and a Ferruginous Hawk that we mistook for a young eagle until I looked up the spelling for the Abert Rim and they (the hawk) were mentioned in the article and I read about them and thought, ah, that is what we saw.

The first couple of pictures is of the Abert Rim, one of the highest fault scarps in North America. It is the longest exposed fault scarp (you can “wiki” to see what the heck a fault scarp is) in North America. I just think it is pretty and interesting; it rises 2,500 feet from the valley floor and it is a popular place for hang gliders in the summer.

We arrived at Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Gene’s around 4:25…it was a long drive, but uneventful and scenic.

Today while Auntie and Uncle were at the gym, we took a walk and gosh darn we ended up downtown at Starbuck’s…amazing. I found these gorgeous hybrid Lupines on our walk. The Dahlia’s are on our front porch here and it was a lovely sunny morning and then in the afternoon we had a major thunderstorm/hail event.

We went out to watch the hail fall and like most storms we have ever seen we expected it to be over quickly, but not this one. It lasted for over a half hour, the temperature plummeted and the hail kept building up like snow, lots of thunder and lightning. The hail pieces averaged large pea-size and the cars left deep ruts driving through it. It has been about an hour or more since it started, it has pretty much quit raining, it quit hailing after about a half hour and the roofs, lawns and vehicles are still coated in white ice. I’m too lazy to put on my shoes to slip and slide out to the truck to see what the temperature is…but it is cold. We’ve never seen anything like it and we have seen some doozies in the mountains.

We saw on the news later that the thunder storm just stalled over Bend instead of passing through like most thunder storms do.