Climb every mountain......

 7:39 am - Sunday - October 17th - John Day, OR - 52° F, 39% humidity, wind 6 mph out of the east by southeast....partly cloudy today with a forecast high of 70° F.  Fall colors are in evidence here in John Day, OR at 3,000' elevation......↴

.....on this date in 2015 our daughter, Kate, married Nick....we could not be happier.....↴

We love to drive roads we have not yet driven, and our plan for Saturday was to continue a little further east of Pendelton on I-84 to US-95 and take it south to I-80.  You may recall that we drove US-95 south from I-80 near Fernley, NV all the way to I-15 near Las Vegas last February during our 1 month vacation from SRRVC.  We really try not to drive the same secondary roads more than once, but there is one US Highway we never get tired of driving and that is US-395.  Back in 2015 we picked up US-395 just south of I-90 in Washington and drove it all the way back to SoCal.  We had never driven the section from I-90 to I-80 until that year.  Well, fast forward to October of 2021 and TLE suggests we revisit the northern section of US-395, foregoing the northern section of US-95 until another day.  As I have written previously, US-395 is kind of our 'Mother Road'.  When I was still in single digits age wise my parents drove us up US-395 from SoCal to Lake Tahoe every summer.  Over the years TLE and I have spent a lot of time along this Eastern Sierra Nevada highway spending time in its quaint towns (Olancha, Lone Pine, Big Pine, Independence, Bishop, Mammoth Lakes, June Lake, Lee Vining, Bridgeport, Walker, Topaz, Gardnerville, Minden, Carson City, etc.), so when TLE made the suggestion to drive this northern section of US-395 again it did not take much to get me on board.

We departed Wild Horse Casino around 9:45 am, stopped at their fuel station to take on 30 gallons of diesel at $3.61/gallon ensuring that we will make it to a much better price Carson City in a few days.  We then merged onto I-84 westbound back to the US-395 exit, and then proceeded south on US-395.  The section between Pendelton and John Day, OR has a length restriction of 65'.....we are 62' long.  This is a windy, twisty up and down road where you traverse from one summit to another......

Nice to be back in 'big view' country

.....our first climb of the day began immediately after we left I-84 and took us all the way to Battle Mountain summit sitting at 4,270' above sea level....TLE took pictures of most of the summit signs, but I am sure there were one, or two more than shown below......

....then came Ritter Butte Summit at 3,993' above sea level......

......then Meadow Brook Summit at 4,127' above sea level.......

....and then the coup de grâce.....Long Creek Mountain Summit at 5,075' above sea level.  This was a long, winding grinder running from 6% to 9% grades.....the final mile was 9% putting me in first gear for the first time since the summer of 2020 on the Million Dollar Highway.....we chugged along that last mile at 17 mph in first gear....

....the last summit of the day, and then it was a 2,000' downhill plunge to John Day, OR sitting at just 3,000' above sea level.....

Just past the final summit of the day

.....we haven't been much above sea level for the past year except for our one month trip south back in February, and it was so good to see the 'big views' once again.  We arrived unscathed at the Grant County Fairgrounds in John Day around 2:30 pm, where we stayed back on October of 2015....it's as beautiful as I remembered....

.....we choose site #10, a pull through site with a good view of the southern sky, plugged in and deployed our Winegard Traveler automatic HD dish.....there was much college football still to watch on this Saturday.  

Around 4:30 pm we walked into town to have some dinner and brews at 1188 Brewing Company (Yelp gives them 4.5 stars on 112 reviews.....back on October 30th of 2015 they had a 4.5 rating on 21 reviews).  The last time we  ate there back in 2015 it was just a hole in the wall place, but we loved the brews and food.  It was nice to return 6 years later and find they had more than doubled their square footage, were flourishing, and were still serving great brews and food.....

Cool totem pole we passed on our way to 1188 Brewing

....we chose a window seat, and within minutes had two pints of beer....

A Porter for moi, and an Amber for TLE

.....for entrees I chose their French Dip, and TLE their Caesar on Nitro......both were splendid!  We'll be in town for a couple of days before continuing our trek to SoCal.  Fall has truly arrived in John Day, OR....

.....on a side note, Grant County, OR has had just 12 deaths, and fewer than 1,000 confirmed cases of you know what in the past 21 months.....nothing safer, and more healthy for you than rural America!

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