Moon rocks

Well it was another long day crossing eastern Oregon and Idaho. We hit the road around 8, but lost an hour on the way crossing into the mountain time zone. I hadn't really taken those time changes into account on the way back. Eastern Oregon was much drier than I expected. Driving through it I thought that it was the kind of place that rattlesnakes and Coyotes would be happy to call home. As if to confirm these thoughts, about half an hour later a coyote loped across the road in front of the car, stopped to give us a sidelong look and slunk off into the brush. It looked in good shape, so I gues there must be rabbits and rodents around as well.

Just before reaching the Idaho border, we went around Ontario in about two minutes - much faster than the two and a half days it took us to cross the province. Ontario, Oregon is a small farming commuinty near the border. It seems to pride itself on it's onions with several billboards proclaiming that they ship 22,000 loads of onions each season. Sure enough there are fields upon fields of onions mixed in with a sprinkling of potatoes and corn. If you think this image of abundant produce is difficult to balance with the earlier description of an arid rocky scrubland, you're right. The farming areas are heavily irregated and preumably are located close to water sources.

We crossed into Idaho and I was happy to see the highway speed limit was 75 miles per hour (that's just over 120km per hour). You can certainly cover a lot of ground driving at that speed all day.

After a quick lunch we pulled into the Craters of the Moon park. Have you noticed that whenever an area is lacking in vegetation and very rocky it is often reffered to as a moonscape, or otherwise compared to the moon? In this case, it was a large basalt volcano and it's associated products that earned the moon reference. It was quite spectacular. There are several preserved volcanic vents and cinder cones, all composed of black/brown basalt. The area for miles around was also covered in black basalt, some of it colled lava flows and some of it looking like roter tilled clods of earth. The eruption reponsible for producing this volcanic lanscape is thought to have occured just 2,000 years ago. That's like yesterday in geologic time. Consequently a lot of the features and textures produced as the lava cools can still be seen. The highlight of our visit was climbing down into a hoolowed out lava tube, These are tubes formed by cooled lava through which molten lava continues to flow until the eruption ceases. In some cases these tubes end up drained of lava and are hollow inside. It was one of these that Grham and I climbed into and walked along for about a hundred metres. It was so cool inside there was ice on the floor. This despite the 30 degree C baking heat on surface just 10 feet above.

We didn't quite make it to Wyoming today but we are close - just 60 miles from Yellowstone, which will be our first stop tomorrow.

Quote of the Day: "We don't belong in no trailer park" Graham after we took a wrong turn while looking for a camping.

Trip Facts:
Driven Today: 855 km
Driven in total: 8306 km
Run Today: 0 km
Run in Total: 118.6 km
Number of TH Stops: 16
Number of Speeding tickets: 1
Ipod progress: 628 Songs: Joan Armatrading Last "Empty Highway"
Song of the Day: "Radar Love" Golden Earing