Mountain Goats, Trains and Tats

So here we are in Salt Lake City after a rather eventful couple of days on the road to Lake Havasu, Arizona. We left Penticton with a destination of Baker City, Oregon – a 7 hour drive. Well, it’s a seven hour drive if you don’t turn right when you are supposed to go straight thus adding 2 hours to your drive. (Yeah, it was Geoff’s error.) On the upside, we did get to see a herd – 13 to be exact – of mountain goats. They were quite fantastic.

The ram in the circle was clearly the leader. The entire time we watched the herd, he stood guard watching over them.

There are 8 of the 13 in this picture. Can you spot them? They so blend into the landscape.

Also on the upside, we got to see a slice of real Americana at a Subway near Umatilla, Washington. Pubescent boy – “Can I please have an extra slice of cheese on my 6″ sub?” Dad “NO! THAT COSTS EXTRA!” as he orders his 12″ sub. I would imagine the poor kid was mortified.

There were some spectacular homes along the banks of the Columbia River.

Beautiful - just beautiful. — Beautiful – just beautiful.

Anyway, our first night was in Baker City, Oregon. Checked in and went to dinner at Sumpter’s Junction. Now the meal was no rain hell – I ordered, from the menu, a black and blue burger with the blue being blue cheese except the chef, being busy with the three orders he had to cook, changed it to American cheese. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that it had a Large O scale train running around the entire restaurant – took about 7 minutes!

This is part of the uphill spiral tunnel at the entrance which take the train back up to the ceiling where it travels around the restaurant until it gets to the downhill spiral.

From dinner it was back to the hotel bar for a final glass of wine.

This is HUGE glass of a lovely Californian Cabernet - $5.00US or $6.53Cdn. — This is HUGE glass of a lovely Californian Cabernet – $5.00US or $6.53Cdn.

And then there was Greg. Greg is a long haul driver – he was taking apples from Washington to Texas. He was quite affable and chatty. One of the comments he made, however, was that he had had a number of girlfriends.