There’s a stretch of the Owyhee River Backcountry Byway that zig-zags between Oregon and Idaho. A hundred miles of dirt road, but after a dose of spring rain, it really is a nice drive, with beautiful valley views and stunning mountains, through an area of Oregon we’d never visited in all our years of living in the state.
Of course, we couldn’t come back to our home state of Oregon without rain, right? Lots and lots of rain! Fortunately, we were back on paved road when the big rain came.
Burns – Malheur
Burns, at about 3,000 residents, is one of the “big towns” of this remote ranching area in the east side of Oregon. Just west of Burns is BLM land where we found a spot up Sage Hen Hill Rd with a gorgeous view of the thunderstorm and sunset, just a mile or so from the rest stop. We tucked Moose into the trees and enjoyed lots of walks with the critters, visits from local cows and other critters, except for the rattlesnake, we weren’t too keen on that critter.
Burns is the gateway to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, an enormous basin that creates a beautiful wetland area in the midst of the high desert of Eastern Oregon. We had some time to explore this beautiful area for a few days.
While we were still in Idaho, we decided it was time to start shopping for a school bus as our next nomad home. Calvin and his brother and friend had been searching for school buses for sale and were coming up empty, even expanding their search nation wide. Apparently in the era of COVID, districts have not been rotating their bus fleet. Who knew?
Driving past so many cattle ranches on our backroad journey, and seeing old buses in several equipment lots, I suggested he contact a local truck repair shop to see if they might have some leads. That led us to Mike and Hilda Allison, owners of the Burns “Truck Shop” who, A) just happened to have a bus, B) had done all the service and inspections on said bus, and C) had just hours before decided to sell it. Fate, Kismet, Divine Intervention, call it what you will, but this was our bus.
So, we are now the proud owners of a 40’ diesel pusher, Moose II, the Sequel! Woohoo! We’ve been talking about and planning this project for a long time, and we’ll get into more detail on that later, but we are excited for this next chapter in our adventure.
Two drivers – Three vehicles
Problem – we have three vehicles and two drivers. Solution – get a car trailer. Closest reasonably priced trailer? Milwaukie, Oregon, 280 miles one way. How to summarize? Long drive – trailer – random storage unit issue – good timing as I was only 90 miles away – Overheating on a mountain – transmission death, but we got 60,000 miles more than the average Jeep Liberty transmission so, Way to go Libby!!. It was a very long day.
The good news is we have a bus and a trailer. We have a little work to do to get all of our rigs to the Oregon Coast where we plan to spend time visiting friends, working, going through our storage unit and further down-sizing, and working on the bus, starting with a roof raise. We’ve got our work cut out for us.