Day 10

This post is a part of a series on my three and a half week adventure road tripping to the west coast with three of my best friends in the Summer of 2018. I was challenged to write every day of the trip to document the adventure, so I did! My aim was to be as real and raw as possible while I was documenting and writing. Because of this, some days, I was honestly just not interested in writing, so I wrote very matter of fact “this is what we did.”

Check out the first part of the series here: Day 1 or check out a list of the days here: WCT2018

I wrote everything on my phone’s notes app, and below is word-for-word what I wrote each day. Nothing taken out, no elaborations.

As part of the challenge, I also made sure to take at least one picture every day, and each evening when I wrote, I picked one photo that I wanted to feature from that day. Some days it was hard to pick them, and other days I had only one to pick from.

A couple of notes: Each day that I wrote, I wrote the date, where I was writing from, and how many pictures I had taken that day. So the location doesn’t always reflect where the picture was taken.

July 31st
Smith Rock’s Bivouac Campground - near Bend Oregon
Pictures taken: 29

Today was a fun, and somewhat nostalgic day for me. Bend is where my sister and brother-in-law used to live, and I always remember it with such fond memories. Once again, it’s so hard doing a trip like this when you only have limited time at each place, but I made a list of some of the things I enjoyed the most last time I was here, and kind of just picked from that. We left our Airbnb in Portland a little later than we were hoping because we had to do some research for later in our trip (Yosemite just closed because of wildfires, so we have to change our plans for two of the days/nights), and we figured we should do that while we have WiFi.

Anyway, I think we ended up getting out of there around 9:30. After stopping for some overpriced donuts, we headed toward Bend.

While stopping at a gas station about an hour from Bend, a random guy came up to us and asked us if we were going to Bend. I said yes, and he then told us that there was a place called McMenamins in downtown Bend. He told us that we had to go there between 2-3, go up to the third floor, and just start pushing on walls. “You won’t regret it,” he said.

Naturally, we were all a little weirded out, and we were a little skeptical, but my curiosity level was over 3,000. We had to at least go and see what he was talking about.

In hindsight, probably not the smartest thing ever to take advice from a shady guy at a gas station, but hey! There are four of us, so we figured we could hold our own.

We started by going to Smith Rock to get our camping spot reserved, then went into town. We stopped at an old fashioned soda shop called “Goodies,” and then as 2 o’clock rolled around, we headed to find this McMenamins place. The place was an old school that had been turned into a hotel, and we quickly found out that every floor has a secret room for you to find. The third floor had a secret bar that was only accessible through a broom closet with a door handle that looked like a broom. For someone who drools over architecture and anything to do with secret passageways, I was in Heaven. Our lesson was learned, take advice from all strangers no matter what they say.

Back when I visited Bend years ago, we did some cliff jumping at Steelhead Falls, so I definitely wanted to do that while we were there. So we went and did some cliff jumping, then went back to our campsite.

I went on a short hike by myself after we had gotten there, and stumbled upon this beautiful sunset. I decided it was rude to keep it to myself, so I ran and got the guys, and we talked about some really meaningful things as we watched God work his magic in the skies. I will definitely remember this evening as a highlight of the trip.