Road Trip 2017 - the Analemma

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West Day 9 and 10

Day 9 started by picking up my daughter and her boyfriend at the Boise Airport, checking them into the Boise hotel I had reserved, and getting some lunch. Now that we were all here w could do some sightseeing, but with tired travelers in tow we spent the afternoon at the World Center for Birds of Prey, run by the Peregrine Foundation. They have a dozen or so birds available for viewing, and many come out with their handlers to meet the visitors. If you are in Boise with a couple hours to spare, it's well worth the trip to the south end of town.

Day 9 ended when my wife and I got back to our McCall unit at about 9 pm with a note on the door from the manager. They were able to get our two bedroom unit for next week ready that night, and could we move in before housecleaning in the morning. By doing so we no longer needed the second night in Boise and some calls got the hotel to give us a refund. Of course that also meant they could rerent to some desperate eclipse chaser at a rate far higher than what we paid. Fine by us.

Day 10 was more sightseeing. We went to Silver City ID, an almost inhabited ghost town 70 mi from Boise, but about two hours to reach since the last 13 miles are on unpaved mountain roads. I say almost inhabited because it was probably the busiest ghost town I've been in. There are no year-round residents, but there are quite a few homes that are still lived in part of the year. The hotel was open for lunch and had weekend rooms available. The Catholic church had mass that afternoon. The biggest population were the ATVers who cruised the streets and took advantage of the many off-road trails available in that part of the Owyhee mountains. I suspect the easiest way to be a ghost in town these days would be to not watch out for the ATVs.

We ended the day with a stop in Idaho wine country west of Nampa. Tastings came with the usual charge ($5 here) that was refundable with purchase. We did find a couple of battles we liked to take back to McCall. And now with our whole party of five together we can set alarms for an early start to eclipse day.

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West Day 11

Total eclipse of the sun. It was my fifth totality (sixth if you count annular eclipses). The drive to Weiser from McCall was easy and we got there by 8:30 MDT in under two hours including a significant coffee stop. There were lots of campers and cars with chairs at a lot of points along US-95. It was the kind of scene one might see at 8:30 am on a 4th of July parade route.

I was hanging out in the science team section, but I wasn't working any of the controls. The roped-off area had four scientific groups: two associated with the citizen CATE project collecting identical data from over 60 spots along totality tow assemble a neary continuous 90 minute+ observation of the corona, and two from MIT and NASA Goddard precisely measuring the Sun's diameter in infrared, since it is known to be different than the visible diameter. My job was to answer questions from the media and other members of the public when the scientists inside the roped off area were too busy. One fellow was so pleased with the time I gave him and his buddy that he spotted me a ten afterwards and said he wanted to buy me a beer, but was going in a different direction.

I was extremely glad I was staying north of Weiser away from the populated Boise metro. The traffic going south was a 50 minute delay within a half hour after totality ended. Think about a big football game.people will come in hours early to tailgate and watch the warm ups, and some will even arrive the night before. But after the game is over, boom, everyone just wants to go home and the roads are jammed. My friends who watched from the OR side so they could quickly get on the highway got to the airport on time. However, because of the traffic delaying most of the passengers the flight was delayed an hour, they missed their connection, and had to spend a night in Salt Lake City.

Anyway the rest of the day was chilling in McCall, checking out photos, and working towards completion of the quilting patterns. As you can see one photo I could edit to a small enough size made my signature.

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West Day 12

Every state treats liquor differently - it's a feature of the amendment that ended Prohibition. In ID that feature is manifest in that liquor stores don't sell wine or beer. You can buy wine at a grocery store, but that can be just as generic as some of the staples in the cereal aisle. I did find that one of the grocery stores in McCall had a markedly better selection than the other, but a shop owner also mentioned a bistro in town.

I took a walk with my daughter after lunch to check out some of the shops in McCall's downtown and stopped at the bistro. Indeed they had a wall of good wine by the bottle for sale. If you wanted to drink it there they charged a $5 corkage fee which seemed reasonable, so I bought one with thought that if we were back later and anted a late snack we'd bring the bottle along. The wine was a cabernet sauvignon from a winery we stopped at in Walla Walla on the 2015 road trip and one that we didn't see at retail in Chicagoland.

Later that afternoon we took a 90 min drive down the Payette river to a rafting company I had scoped out online when planning the road trip. We got a nice 2 hour whitewater raft excursion though a canyon during sunset - super. There was even a stop at a hot spring originally used by Chinese immigrant miners for showers, and the hot spring felt good on cold feet from my encounters with splashes from the Payette.

We got back to McCall at 10:20 pm, and that was just before the bistro's kitchen closed so they were cool with us coming in even as they were mopping the floor. Some of us had dessert, some worked on cheese plates and I went for a salad as Blink-182 played on the speakers inside. And yes, the Walla Walla cab was as smooth and warm as I remembered it from 2015.

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West Day 13 and 14

If the eclipse was going to happen this week, I'm sure glad it happened Mon. On Tues the smoke from wildfire to the west put as haze in the air that would have made for a much less exciting view of the sun at totality. I've seen them through thin haze before, and it's not quite the same. On Wed clouds started to appear and by Thurs they thickened enough to produce a little rain, the first since we arrived in ID.

As I said at the beginning quilting is a major hobby for my wife, and my daughter enjoys it, too. Two years ago they completed a quilting challenge while on the road using a 1961 Singer Featherweight that fit easily in the car. The goal was to repeat that feat and be the first to turn in a quilt at a shop with patterns from at least eight different shops to win a prize. Neither shop in McCall had a winner yet, so the hope was to complete it by 5 pm on Tues (Day 13) when the shops in town closed. It was clear by 4 that it would not be ready until the shops opened on Thurs, and that proved successful.

However, Thurs was also the day we had to shuttle my son 3 hours up to Lewiston airport and return the second car, so that left the Mccall crew on foot. On a side note, we passed the burned-out hulk of the truck I talked about a week ago. I guess it takes a while to move it off the cliff face, so they just put a few cones around it until they can move it. Someone who came a little later than us during the detour put up a video of their descent.

This our last night in ID, and we leave early for our mountain drive into MT.

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West Day 15

The return trip has a very different feel than the legs going out, even though both involve a number of long days on the road. The first day out has all the excitement of an adventure about to begin. The first day heading back has the mixed emotions of a vacation coming to a close and the welcome thoughts of a return home.

This day had an early start and no long scheduled stops along the way. I did pick a route notable for scenic drives, and a good portion appears in National Geographic's 375 best scenic drives. Indeed the route from Lowman ID to Stanley to Salmon and up to Lost Trail Pass had some great vistas. Other than coffee, gas, or food, the only pure photo stop was at Sunbeam Hot Springs. The water was streaming as it came from the ground and part was piped to a cove on the Salmon river below. As at many roadside hot springs in ID there were a couple of bathers taking advantage of the hot mineral water, in this case brought to a reasonable temperature as it mixed with the river.

I was hoping for more scenic vistas from Lost Trail Pass on the ID-MT border, but the cloudy skies left me with nothing more than a toilet stop at the rest area. However, just 20 mi down slope on ID/MT 43 is the Big Hole Battlefield National Monument with a sweeping view of grassy valleys and mountains as well as a very instructive visitors center. From a quilt shop outside of Whitehall we saw billowing smoke to the north. The wildfire had started only yesterday from a lightning strike and already had consumed over 2000 acres. We had seen large helicopters with water slings underneath earlier and now we know where they were working.

The day ended in Bozeman at an ale house built in the old Northern Pacific freight depot. It's still a small world when it turns out the waitress grew up less than 10 miles from where we live outside of Chicago. Even if you don't find a waitress from your home town, the presence of Montana State in Bozeman gives it a lot of choices for food and drink.

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West Day 16

The general impression of the High Plains is that it makes for a boring drive, devoid of scenery, just fields of wheat. Two years ago my road trip took me across the northernmost parts of the country from nw MN to Glacier NP in MT, and until we got to the foot hills of Glacier, it was pretty much as stereotyped. This Day we traveled from Bozeman to Bismarck on I=90/94, a route that was at times less than 100 mi south of US-2. The landscape was nothing like the more northerly route, and had some fantastic vistas.

After crossing the Bozeman pass the route mostly follows the Yellowstone river, which is generally flat in its valley. However, that valley is cut into rocks that create extensive badlands. Individual views are not as dramatic as those in Badlands NP in SD, but the length of terrain running for over 400 miles east-west provides for a drive that can keep one interested. The drive also drops a couple thousand feet so the types of badlands change over the drive from rusty volcanic rocks to intensely carved sandstones and mudstones at Theodore Roosevelt NP in western ND. The terrain in TRNP rivals that in Badlands NP one state to the south.

Besides a stop at TRNP we found a real gem for those who like art. In Miles City there is an art gallery in the old water works on the Yellowstone. The art is much better than one might expect so far from a major city or university and they have both fixed and rotating exhibits. Miles City was also the location of one of those inevitable travel disasters, the one where a coke bottle explosively decompresses upon opening, even when care was taken. That caused 10 min of wiping coke off of upholstery as well as my person to keep things from getting too sticky. As it was I rode the second half of the journey with slightly sticky legs.

But travel has a way of balancing out. We got to Bismarck a little after 8:30 CDT, losing an hour from the MDT we had been in most of the trip. The Radisson we checked had reserved had overbooked the  rooms with a king bed, so they upgraded us to a larger suite with a king bed. Well it turns out it also has a jacuzzi, full size living room, kitchen and dining area - bigger overall than a lot of one bedroom apartments. They even threw in two free drinks at the bar. It probably helped that my wife had business a few years ago that had her staying in a Radisson in La Crosse WI a few days most months. It certainly helped us decide where to sit down for supper that night (that would be the bar with free drinks), and how to relax afterward (an in-room whirlpool easily beats the hotel hot tub).

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West Day 17 and 18

For those who thought my last post about the High Plains makes no sense given the usual impression, you only had to wait until Day 17. The rough and interesting terrain west of the Missouri river turns into rolling hills and fields east of the river. Ranch land is replaced by crop land and driving gets a lot less interesting. It was a Sunday and not many attractions were open, but we did plan two stops along the way to take advantage of natural features. Fort Ransom State Park sits in a deep valley of the Sheyenne river and has walking (and riding) trails including a portion of the North Country Trail which runs from ND to the NY/VT line. I also got to see the one of the lowest Continental Divides in the US on the SD/MN border where a short valley separates Lake Traverse which flows north eventually to Hudson Bay from Big Stone Lake which eventually goes to the Mississippi.

Day 18 was the last day of the journey and as is typical, we are mostly interested in getting home. We did make a few quilt store stops, including two shops in Madison WI and Woodstock IL that contributed patterns to the winning quilt. They enjoyed seeing how their patterns were incorporated into this quilt that was largely sewn on the road by my wife. Note the eclipse theme that made its way into the top and bottom rows.



For my county-collecting hobby I picked them up in IA (1), NE (18), WY (2), UT (6), ID (17), OR (2), WA (1), MT (13), ND (12), SD (1), MN (5) for a total of 78. In the last 12 months I've visited over 200 new counties.