Day 10: Laura discovers people really DO live in Oregon

Today we were very anxious to get out of our tiny motel room and get on the road. We knew that we had a long day of driving ahead of us. We anticipated not seeing much in the way of scenery for the first half of the trip because of yesterday’s boring driving. We were pleasantly surprised to be met with beautiful mountain passes and a great view of Lake and Mount Shasta within the first 30 minutes of driving. After Mount Shasta, we were back to some of the same old until we hit Oregon.

We were very hungry, but lacked motivation to eat any of the food in the car because we have been subsisting on rice cakes, peanut butter, hummus, crackers and apples for days. None of it sounded appealing and we were running out of it anyway. We tried to eat apples, but they were full of sand from the beach. Yuck. We also keep eating this really gross bag of herb flavored popcorn we bought before we left at Whole Foods in Seattle. It tasted stale when we bought it and hasn’t improved since then, but out of desperation we find ourselves munching away. Complaining the entire time about how bad it is.

We stopped in a small town south of Eugene to see if we could get some Mexican food. We discovered a small health food store and stopped in to see if we could find anything interesting, but there was nothing to note. We walked down the road to find Mexican and instead found a man with a chainsaw in the middle of the sidewalk. You would think that he would stop when we were trying to make our way down the road, but you would be wrong. So we decided that it was not worth walking in front of the obviously crazy chainsaw man for some food.

We finally got to Eugene and immediately found a health food store where we used the bathroom and bought kombucha (which we decided is available pretty much everywhere on the West Coast). We didn’t buy any food despite our starvation problem because we were only an hour from Sabrina’s parents house and her mom was cooking us a yummy dinner.

Around 5pm we arrived at Sabrina’s parents house in Lebanon, Oregon and discovered that fall had started here in the Northwest while we were gone. Sabrina's parents moved this year from Seattle out to what is truly the country to be near their moms. It is a beautiful and picturesque pastoral area where their biggest issue is deer in the yard eating the apples off the apple tree. We sat awhile in the yard enjoying the fresh air and petting Sabrina’s uncle’s very needy kitty named Tata who drools but who is very lovey otherwise. We discovered that cats find Laura delicious as Tata kept trying to eat her. Laura says this is not the first time a cat has wanted a nibble on her. Sabrina’s mom made a delicious dinner of chicken and rice, a big salad with veggies from her garden and Sabrina’s recipe for yams which makes enough for Thanksgiving dinner for 12 so we had a LOT of yams. It was WONDERFUL to eat real food, especially a hot, home-cooked meal. Very satisfying to the body and soul. Laura also got to learn where Sabrina gets her sense of humor and strange story-telling genes as we sat and chatted with her mom and dad over dinner.

After dinner we made a stop to see Sabrina’s maternal grandma and uncle and after a short visit drove to her paternal grandma’s where we are staying the night. A new experience getting our own rooms here at grandma’s—we might get lonely, who knows.

One day left until we sleep in our own beds again. I think we can’t wait for that.