The scenic route through the Blue Mountains

Greetings again from the Hoslers! We left Bellevue at 8:45 a.m., lunched in Yakima, and proceeded to cross the Columbia River around midday. Then we made our first mistake of the trip: we trusted our brand-new GPS (which we have dubbed “Via”) to get us to the little town of Sumpter, Oregon.

If you ever feel the need to go to Sumpter yourself, and you ask the GPS to get you there, you, too, may find yourself in the even tinier town of Granite, a full 17 miles from your destination. Apparently the two towns share a zip code, which is why the GPS doesn’t know the difference. Via, you've failed us the first time out! I bet it won't happen again.

Granite consists of a few small buildings, but one thing it does not have is any cell phone reception at all. So we had to go to the general store and pay them $4.00 for the long-distance call to Sumpter. (Imagine having to pay long-distance rates to call your own post office!)

So anyway, here we are in Sumpter, Oregon, where we’re spending the first night of our road trip with Christy’s friend LeAnne. We ate with her tonight at the Scoop-N-Steamer, a restaurant that also rents out log cabins for the night. But we are staying in LeAnne’s RV, a comfortable place indeed.