Bend!
We made the drive over to central Oregon last weekend to get in some cross-country skiing on Mt. Bachelor. Good times. It looked like the snow had been getting a little slushy, but we had quite a bit of fresh snow fall while we were out on the trails, and while six inches of fresh powder may be a dream going downhill, it made the classic cross-country skiing, well, challenging. But the upshot is we’re much more adept and going up and down hills in the crazy world of cross country than we were before the trip.
We stayed at the McMenimins (Old St. Francis School) in downtown Bend. McMenimintasic, if strangely difficult to get a seat in the movie theater. This happened to us when we stopped in Bend last summer, too. It sounds like a sweet deal to be able to catch a movie for free as a guest — but the Bend crowd shows up seriously early for movies — who knows when those people arrived to camp out on the coveted couches? We checked out some local brewery action instead, hitting the Bend Brewing Company on Friday (after hours of heavy traffic), which had been recommended for its local authenticity, but we found the food to be rather ehe — certainly nothing to blog about. On Saturday, after skiing about 25 kilometers, we decided to embrace our status as tourists and dragged our tired selves down the street to the Deschutes Brew Pub — good food, good beer, and the bizarre entertainment of watching a nearby diner proceed to garnish his coffee and, yes, his meal, with copious amounts of chalky sweet Coffeemate. Who knew non-dairy creamer was a condiment?
As for the drive home, we decided to skip out on highway 26 and pointed the truck north up highway 197 so we could drive back through the Columbia River Gorge and hit Hood River for lunch. (Sadly for J., the Full Sail brew pub was closed for renovations.) It was a beautiful drive — at least when we weren’t driving through low-lying clouds on our way up through the central Oregon hills.