The Great American Road Trip - Tenth Stop, Bend Oregon
We struck out for Bend and stopped at the Newberry caldera (http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/centraloregon/newberrynvm/index.shtml), as we had the last time we were here. It’s just south of Bend; the park actually encompasses two vents of the old volcano. It really couldn’t encompass the entire volcano, since the crater is now home to several towns, a number of farms and ranches and a military air base. In other words, it’s huge. We went up the vent that holds Paulina Lake and is decorated by obsidian flows. The big obsidian flow is a mile wide, a little more than a mile long, and 150 feet deep. It’s a pile of chunks of obsidian and pumice that are big enough to sit on, piled high and sharp and deep. They’ve been there since the last time the vent blew 1500 years ago. You can’t see the other side of the crater from the top of this vent. Wow.
We had stopped for lunch at a tiny little diner in Chermult, where The Boy had the aforementioned oyster stew. There was also a pretty passable huckleberry cobbler, and I bought a snickerdoodle the size of a dinner plate. We ate it for breakfast this morning.
I’m a little amazed at what’s happened to Bend. It used to be a little farming town, and had developed some resort action for skiing and fishing when we came through here for our honeymoon a million years ago. It was very pretty then, and it still is, but in the interim, there has been something of a boom here. Not only in more vacation commerce, but in real commerce. There are a lot of industrial businesses that weren’t here before, even if outright factories are lacking. Accordingly, there are new neighborhoods with big houses, and at least two nice, fancy malls.
And the cuisine industry has exploded here. There are now 275 restaurants in Bend. What I’d give to be a food critic. How long do you think it would take me to get through everything in this pretty little town? We found our campground, which was neat and very well kept with lots of landscaping and extras that almost would make up for the highway noise for some people, I suppose. Really nice management couple. And then we sat down to choose someplace to eat.
We chose Greg’s Grill (http://www.gregsgrill.com/Home/), and we chose well. Warning! Food pron, especially for greyrider and sauvagerie: nice lofty space right on the Deschutes river. The grill was open, and the place smelled marvelous. We started with a Mediterranean appetizer plate loaded with flatbread, olives, roasted peppers and house-made hummus. The Boy had a seafood Alfredo: cavatappi with big shrimp, clams and chunks of fish. My Beloved had a huge salad with pears, cranberries, hazelnuts, raspberries and balsamic vinaigrette (IOW, everything he likes), topped with grilled chicken and rolled into a spinach tortilla. I had sablefish in a piperonatta, served with
Garlic mashed potatoes and green beans, only the whole thing was stacked like the Tower of Babel: beans, then potatoes, with the fish and its sauce on top. Very cool-looking, but a little hard to deconstruct. I managed to deconstruct it quite well. I had a Washington pinot gris that was just a little sfrizzante, and I wish I could remember which vineyard it came from, ‘cause I’d buy more.
Meanwhile, The Boy has been experimenting with his new cell phone, and he’s learned how to text. He’s mostly been bugging his Big Brother, who has been quite patient with him. Big Brother was teasing us when we were hunting for a place to eat outside Sacramento. “You have a smart phone! It’s supposed to tell you where to go!” OK, but I don’t know how to do that yet. Warning to Older Son: you get to show us how to do that, dear.
We got up late this morning, and wandered into Sisters, a little tiny town north of Bend that I don’t remember from our honeymoon. It’s gone through the same metamorphosis as Bend, and is now full of cute shops and eateries. We had lunch at a brewery (http://www.threecreeksbrewing.com/brewpub.aspx ) (chicken salad for me and house-brewed beer for Hubby), and I would have loved to shop and browse. It could have taken all day. But we are expected in Eugene, and we are valiantly driving through firs and pines that grow straight out of piles of lava, ooh-ing and ah-ing over lakes and vistas, but that’s not as big a deal as that at last we are on our way to hug babies! Grandbabies! Oh yeah, and their parents, too.