Another Vicarious Vacation

     Hello again, friends and neighbors! It seems it’s that time again, wherein I regale you with tales from my recent travels. You may recall previous entries in this vein, such as the trip to Universal Studios, or the time I went to the Grandadadaa Canyonananaaa. Well, this time I (along with my Lovely Traveling Companion) made the trek eastward, to a small but lovely yurt at Lake Wallowa, in the eastern half of Oregon.
     Before I get into it, let me just say, it’s beautiful, and you should check it out.
     Now then.
     We began our trip on a Saturday, as we’d previously agreed, with an audiobook in our hearts and the still ascending sun in our eyes. The book was about a man who died and was brought back as a computer program, downloaded into a spaceship, and sent off into space (where spaceships go) to colonize planets and hold lengthy meetings with copies of himself. The drive itself was quite pleasant, taking us out of the bustling, but still well treed, Portland metropolis, through the Cascade Mountains, and then the high plains desert/prairie/whatever it is over there. It was a very pleasant drive, but uneventful, so to the next paragraph we go.
     We arrived at the park in the late afternoon, and made our way to our assigned yurt, which is when we figured out that the necessary code to open the small lockbox which contained the key to said yurt was not in the confirmation email my Lovely Traveling Companion had received.
This is also about the time it began to snow. Which was not only lovely, but also so preternaturally inconvenient that one could almost be driven to abandon atheism and accept the existence of a cruel and petty god.
     Very fortunately for us, occupying the yurt next door was a lovely family who tried to help us, and then offered us homemade tamales, which like an idiot I refused for perhaps the first time in my life, and a beer, which I accepted, because I may be an idiot, but I’m not stupid. The family informed us that not long before our arrival, park staff had been cleaning the yurts, and may yet be close enough by that we could track them down. So I set off, grumbling to myself about our situation, the ubiquitous animal scat along my path, and the general misery of life itself, I managed to locate some members of the staff just as they were departing for the day. They were kind enough to believe this miserable looking stranger in front of them, and gave me the code. I sent a text message to my Lovely Traveling Companion, who had the door open by the time I returned. We again thanked the family next door, and began to move our equipment inside as quickly as possible, feeling fortunate that it had not been soaked sitting in the back of our truck, and that a good portion of the beer we brought was cold and ready for consumption.
     It was dark outside by then, so we supped on the cured meats and cheeses and vegetables from the cooler, turned on my computer, and sat down to watch movies while we warmed ourselves by the panel heater and began the puzzle we’d purchased along the way.
     Truly roughing it, just like the pioneers of old.
     The next morning, after a short trip into town to poke around and eat some delicious fattening breakfast foods, we finally made it outside and, let me tell you friends and neighbors, I wasn’t kidding before. It is beautiful. We went out to the lakeshore and strolled around, taking in the surrounding snowy mountains and the towering verdancy of the trees and blissfully quiet lack of people. It’s the singular sort of sublimity one only experiences when physically reminded of the geological time scale: like a short-lived speck, whose immeasurable luck it is to witness this small moment in time. Or a bug, about to get splattered upon the windshield of eternal beauty.
We made our way to the woodline, dodging the sticky silk of floating spider webs being carried freely through the air (which was a new kind of momentary horror) and trying not to let the sunlight stab into our eyes. After a (very) short hike, which I had to stop because I’m (very) out of shape, we traveled back to our yurt and spent another wonderful, peaceful evening, this time with the addition of (very) bourbon laced hot cocoa.
     On the third day of our trip we left Wallowa Lake, and ventured back into the high plains desert./prairie/whatever, where we stopped at another yurt, this one a little different in both fanciness and surroundings. What it lacked in close in mountains and trees and lakes and deer (we saw a bunch of deer those first two days), it made up for in dry air, far off smaller mountains, a pond, and a pretty large RV parking lot. It was the kind of quiet landscape I would have very much enjoyed if not for the large RV’s and the people inside them.
     The yurt, however, was the main attraction here, and boy did it deliver. Wifi! A coffee maker! A mini fridge! A private back patio, with decorative fire podium, propane grill, and (here’s the best part! Are you ready? Take a breath!) a cedar hot tub, filled by a natural hot spring, which also heats the floor inside the yurt itself. Once one gets over the slight smell of sulphur and figures out how to balance the insanely hot water with the almost cold enough to be room temperature water, a hot tub makes for a very relaxing camping experience.
     It gets even better when one reenters the tub in the late evening darkness, with the string lights on and the decorative fire burning, to watch reruns of “King of the Hill” on one’s computer with a Lovely Traveling Companion.
     As the final morning awoke us and we loaded up the truck and began our return drive home, listening to more of the audio book about spaceship programs taking meetings with each other and discovering planets and such, I found myself thinking quietly about the beauty of everything we’d seen, the simple pleasure of spending a quiet, secluded evening with a dearly treasured Lovely Traveling Companion, and how much nature must hate me on at least one level, because my sinuses were absolutely on fire, and have been punishing me ever since.
     Everything comes with a price tag, people.
     Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this small diversion from the terrible things our world is rife with these days, and now you feel at least a little recharged and ready to face it again. Also, go vote, will you?
-John