We used our French Press accessory, but decided that the fuss and bother of cleaning out the Jetboil isn’t worth the extra taste. If our goal isn’t getting on the road as quickly as possible we’ll make real coffee, otherwise the instant will work just fine. Breakfast was one of the Mountain House dehydrated breakfast skillets. In ten minutes you have a tasty bowl of eggs, sausage, peppers, and onions. While breakfast finished rehydrating we packed up what we could, and after dishes we were on the road by 8:30am. I felt better about being an hour and a half earlier than on Sunday.
I drove us to Nyssa and we stopped at a supermarket to fill our gallon jugs with water for a total of fifty cents. We also used the bathroom and bought some bananas and strawberries for snacks and breakfast on Tuesday. After waving goodbye to Oregon, we took our first selfie in a new state: Idaho.
After passing Parma, we stopped at a rest area and ate a lunch of theringer, cheese, apple, and crackers. Highway 20 converged into I-84, but not for very long before heading east again through Meridian and Boise. We got back on the freeway at that point and were legally allowed to drive 80 MPH. Neither of us felt comfortable with Alfie going that speed for very long, but we got a photo of him doing it anyway.
Wingers was our dinner spot in Mountain Home where Highway 20 leaves I-84. Wingers is an Applebees clone so the food was decent. We shared a dinner of wings with sweet bbq dry rub, fries and slaw, and a roasted chicken and peach salad. The Pilot gas station was our first time getting to pump our own gas. The residences quickly began to thin as areas of large farms began to dominate. We steadily climbed into prairie. The craziest sight so far this trip was the road for a good quarter mile covered with giant brown crickets or some variety of locus. Some were mating, others were dragging off the dead, and it was eerie and amazing sight. We began to worry about an infested campsite that night. They weren’t jumping very high, but I closed the windows anyway.
An hour later we turned right onto Macon Flat Road and drove for seven miles to Macon Lake. It is nothing more than a giant puddle at this time of year at the end of a decently maintained road of hard, flat, dried, mud. We saw an antelope and set up camp for the night surrounded by open prairie. The wizzing birds we had seen in southeast Oregon, which we now know as Common Nighthawks, zoomed through the growing dusk as the temperature continued to move towards comfortable. We watched an awesome sunset and a group of smaller birds chase off a larger bird from from their home near Macon Lake. With the lake so close we did have some bug problems, but none of them were the biting kind, mostly dominated by mayflies.
It was cold enough that the sheet, Afghan, and one of our backup blankets weren’t enough to keep me warm. We’ll keep our thicker blankets more handy for Night 3, but at 1am beggars can’t be choosers when you’re groping around in the dark. We slept well and continued to wake up free from pain from our makeshift camper. Shar is already considering mattress shopping when she gets home.
Miles Driven: 393
Citties/Towns Passed: MIlcum, Brothers, Hampton, Riley, Hines, Burns, Harney, Buchanan, Juntura, Harper, Vale, Nyssa, Parma, Notus, Miridian, Boise, Mountain Home, Hill City, Fairfield
Temperature at 10:00am: 77
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