Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Rather than adding a two-mile run onto the walk, Joe chose to incorporate it into the beginning of the walk today. We first drove two miles beyond where we had finished the previous walk, left one car there, then drove the other car back two miles to Lebanon. We both started at the same time with Joe running ahead as I walked alone. Forty minutes later I caught up at the two-mile car. We drove it back to the beginning, drove both cars nine miles to the end, left one car there and drove the other car back seven miles, parked it where we had just finished the first two miles on foot, and both walked from there. (If anyone can magically figure out a more efficient way to do this and still have us walking in the desired direction at the same time, please tell us how. We’re obviously burning a lot of gas doing it this way.)
For most of the walk the scenery was pretty uninteresting, mostly edge-of-town stuff, sawmills and railroad tracks. The good news was that it was mostly flat and straight with wide safety margins between us and the logging trucks, and the weather was a little warmer and nearly perfect. We did see some interesting things, including a line of railroad vehicles parading in a broken line down the tracks. One of these cars was towing a trailer with a portable toilet on it, like in that TV commercial, you know the one. Pretty strange to see on the railroad tracks. Another thing that caught our eye was the sign at a well-drilling business that looked like water running out of a faucet that was suspended in space with no pipe running into it. And we did find almost a dollar in change since we spent more time looking at the ground. (See pictures.)
Generally speaking, the environment was starting to trend toward more forest and fewer farms as the Cascades began to rise up ahead of us on the horizon.
We finished about a quarter to one. On the way back home we grabbed a couple of Big Macs in Lebanon for lunch.
