Day 703

Sumpter, OR to McDermott, NV
What a great time we had with Steve, Denise, Jack and Maggie Mae. They have a great place near Sumpter that is loaded with all kinds of wildlife. We saw several white tailed deer, that believe it or not, come right up to their front yard. Steve threw one of the Doe’s an apple and it was so cool to watch her eat it. Dinky Dawg and I saw an elk, but it was hiding in the trees so I didn’t get a very good picture of it. Dinky Dawg assumed the position and pointed it out to me. I swear sometimes that dog is part bird dog (elk dog?!?). We also saw a little squirrel and a couple of chipmunks. The only snake we saw was a baby that had been squished by a car quite a while ago. Oh yeah, we also saw some cows, when Steve took us sight seeing. Ok, so not that exotic, but still.
Steve and Denise let us stay in their little cabin so we didn’t have to unload the side by side. Lucky for us, because it got cold. Had to bring the tomato plants and the avocado and key lime trees in.
Steve taught me how to hold the guitar strings so they actually played music, imagine that. Denise used us as ginney pigs for her homemade sourdough rolls. I ate two of them, without butter, and they were so good. Thought about stealing the rest, but decided I’d better not. And she also made peach cobbler with fresh peaches. Tasted just like you were eating them right off the tree.
I left them a Tic-tac-toe set I made at Jerry’s house with bumblebees and ladybugs painted on rocks so that they’d have a game in the cabin for their guests. Steve sent me a text saying that they now had bugs in the cabin since we stayed there. Made me smile.
Of course we didn’t have any definate plans of where we were going to stay when we headed out this morning. We only knew that we wanted to drive down US95 since we had never been that way. So we punched in Winnemucca, NV into the GPS and headed out across the mountains. We climbed 4 summits, only one over 5900 feet. They weren’t too bad, and the truck did ok. We got stuck behind an oversized load and were driving about 10 miles an hour for about 3 miles until we were finally able to pass it. Other than that, the traffic was almost nonexistent.
Speaking of nonexistent. There weren’t any gas stations along our route. We gassed up in Baker, OR, before heading to Sumpter, but only saw one small gas station about 20 miles past Sumpter. We were getting a little tense as we were getting down to 1/8th of a tank of gas and the GPS showed the closest station was in Winnemucca. The GPS on my phone showed that we could back track about 12 miles, heading back towards Idaho, to Rome, OR. So I made a frantic phone call to them and they assured me that they had gas pumps.
Funny story about Rome, OR. Back in July of 1982, when I was moving to Idaho, I had to stop for fuel in Rome because I spaced filling up here in McDermott. My friend Todd P. and I made it to Rome, only to find that it was locked up tight until morning (remember those days when you had to wait until a human was available to get gas). I didn’t think we had enough fuel to make it to Jordan Valley, so I called my sister to let her know that we would be spending the night. She insisted on driving from Nampa and brought us gas so we didn’t have to sleep in the car. And here we were again, me and Lee Todd (strange coincidence, same name and all) needing to fuel up in Rome, OR.
We started out this morning in the Pacific time zone, then went to Mountain time, then back to Pacific. So needless to say, we are all confused. So we decided to just park in a casino parking lot for the night here in McDermott, but the only one in town was all boarded up, so we found a simple little RV park on the Oregon-Nevada border that had room for us. So now we are getting ready to lay our weary heads down for the night. Until tomorrow, where I actually have plans to stop at our first of hopefully many Nevada State Parks, and its only 125 miles down the road! That’ll make Lee happy, for sure.