{"id":193,"date":"2011-06-11T23:22:26","date_gmt":"2011-06-12T06:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rubschlager.com\/matt\/?p=193"},"modified":"2011-06-11T23:22:26","modified_gmt":"2011-06-12T06:22:26","slug":"day-2-yakima-to-john-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rubschlager.com\/matt\/day-2-yakima-to-john-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 2 – Yakima to John Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>So I’m writing this on my iPhone because apparently John Day is the most interesting town in eastern Oregon. “How do I know this,” you might ask?\u00a0 Simple.\u00a0 Every hotel in this town is packed.\u00a0 Had we not called ahead to the one we’re in now we would have been staring at the stars.\u00a0 Alright enough on that rant.<\/p>\n

So what happened today..?\u00a0 I’ll start with the first official sign from the heavens that we should pack it up and head home.\u00a0 While packing up the bike, after checking out, I fumbled my helmet and it fell to the ground.\u00a0 It didn’t land on the back or a side where a scratch might make it look cool. No it landed on the visor, and now I have a nice big gash down the center. On the plus side the gash distracts from the floater I have in my left eye.<\/p>\n

Yet another iron butt day awaited us as we rode from Yakima to John Day.\u00a0 Before rolling along on the ride we stopped by in Moxee.\u00a0 That is significant only because that’s a conference room at my office where I booked a reoccurring meeting, as it is the “official” conference room of the project — since it is nearly always free.\u00a0 Anyway, needed to get a picture of myself next to the city sign to send to my co-workers who probably think I’m insane.<\/p>\n

Between Moxee and Umatilla the wind gods took over again — officially.\u00a0 There were signs on the side of the warning about dust storms and the like.\u00a0 The signs were not in the least bit misleading.\u00a0 The wind on the stretch of road was obnoxious.\u00a0 Clearly sign number two to head back home, but we soldiered on.<\/p>\n

We stopped for lunch in Hermiston, were we rested our tired souls.\u00a0 Fighting the wind took a lot out of us, but we still had the other half of the days planned mileage ahead of us.\u00a0 We called ahead to the hotel we were planning on staying at only to find that they were booked.\u00a0 We called down the list of hotels in John Day.\u00a0 One by one they were booked.\u00a0 We ended up at a value lodge.<\/p>\n

On the way down to John Day there are simply beautiful tracts of roadway.\u00a0 Smooth, windy, and very pleasant to ride a motorcycle on.\u00a0 If numb butt and numb hand hadn’t settled in it would have been seriously fun ride.\u00a0 I had my first up close and personal encounter of the Bambi kind.\u00a0 I was coming around a blind corner.\u00a0 To my left a rushing river, to my right a steep rocky slope.\u00a0 I slip around the curve and up against the rock wall was a deer.\u00a0 I succeeded in spooking it, and I was afraid that it would bound out into the road in front of Angie.\u00a0 I grabbed my breaks and dropped my speed considerately.\u00a0 Angie grabbed her breaks.\u00a0 The deer, now entirely freaked out by the bizarre human behavior, bounded up the rock wall and out of sight.\u00a0 Freshly reminded of the wildlife along the roads we continued on.<\/p>\n

Upon arriving at the hotel we learned what “value lodge” means.\u00a0 By value I presume that they mean only enough to keep a roof over your head and water\/electricity going to the room.\u00a0 It was a serious let down after having been on the road all day yesterday.\u00a0 Gone were the finer points of our usual hotel experience.\u00a0 Like molding on walls, matching paint, and a working shower head.\u00a0 It really is the little things that make it less creepier.<\/p>\n

However, semi-thankful for a bed we called it a night.<\/p>\n

Pictures from Day 2<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I’m writing this on my iPhone because apparently John Day is the most interesting town in eastern Oregon. “How do I know this,” you might ask?\u00a0 Simple.\u00a0 Every hotel in this town is packed.\u00a0 Had we not called ahead to the one we’re in now we would have been staring at the stars.\u00a0 Alright […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-motorcycle","category-ride-report"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rubschlager.com\/matt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rubschlager.com\/matt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rubschlager.com\/matt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rubschlager.com\/matt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rubschlager.com\/matt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rubschlager.com\/matt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rubschlager.com\/matt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rubschlager.com\/matt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rubschlager.com\/matt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}