Wood's Prairie Travels

Now that we are back home in the Pacific Northwest having travelled 7,400 miles this trip, we’ve been reflecting on our journey. Frequently, as we drove through various portions of ten different states we would ask the question, “Why here?” Why stop at this particular spot in the middle of an arid desert with no water in sight? Or why build your home on this particular bayou with no nearby town? Some locations have obvious reasons to stop, picturesque mountains or places with clean rivers flowing nearby. Many times it is likely that the place for your home is where you have family connections. Or maybe it is because a job opportunity arose. However, it made us wonder as we wandered .  Another frequent question of ours as we drove through little towns was, “Why is this town flourishing while that one a few miles back had all its stores closed up?” Is it the location?  Maybe it’s the natural resources of the area, but then why the difference from one little town to its nearby neighbo

Posting blogs about our travels is a bit deceptive. Although our posts show pictures of pretty places or interesting locations, it’s “not all peaches and cream” as the saying goes. Every trip has its challenges. During those difficult times we rarely get pictures because we are in the thick of figuring it out. For example, on this trip, when planning our direction of travel, a number of times there were weather warnings. We dodged “Winter Weather Advisory” warnings throughout Idaho and Utah. And then there was the “Severe Thunderstorm Advisory” when in the hill country of Texas. We talked to another traveler who had heard that there had been golf ball size hail in that particular storm. Well, that would have put a “dent” in our travels. There was also a “Tornado Warning” in east Texas, which we missed as we sat on the beach at Port Aransas. In both Texas and Nevada, when entering our destination in the truck’s nav system, we got the “Your route appears to take you into a flood adviso

Traveling west out of Utah on “Scenic” Route 50 the clouds were so low at first that they touched the ground. However, as we began to climb the first pass of the day through the Confusion Mountain Range (love that name) snow covered mountains began to peak through the cloud cover. This mountain range was mainly layers of black basalt which were accentuated by the white snow pack. Seeing the dark jagged mountains was a change from the colored sedimentary mountains through which we have been traveling recently. Much more reminiscent of home in the northwest. The next few mountain ranges that we crossed to reach our destination outside of Eureka, Nevada, were back to the colorful sedimentary layers. However, that didn’t make them any lower in elevation. They too were covered with white mantles. There are numerous different mountain ranges in eastern Nevada which surprised us. A few that we crossed through were the Snake Range, Schell Creek Range, Eagan Range, and Pancake Range. Most