This past weekend Brian and I rode down to Sunriver, Oregon to look at some property he was interested in. Sunriver is about 20 miles south of Bend. It was predicted to be about 98 degrees in Bend by the time we got there, so we wore vented gear, but since it was relatively cool when we started out, we had some wind blocking stuff under our jackets. We took the usual curvy roads up to the Zig Zag ranger station where we shucked some of that:
From then on it was a straight shot to Bend. I used to drive much of this route when we were riding dirt bikes at East Fort Rock, but it is changing fast. There is freeway replacing much of the old two-lane on hwy 97 between Madras and Bend, and a lot of development. We even got in a traffic jam going into Bend and it was getting hot.
Eventually we got to the property, which was pretty far out in the boonies. It is at around 4,000 ft elevation so there are some trees. It's about 1.5 acres with a 25 gpm well and electricity on site. Brian is looking ahead to retirement and building a house with a detached shop. It's behind the bikes in this picture:
One of the nice features of the location is that it is only a couple hundred feet from public access to the Deschutes river where I took these photos:
On our walk to the river we saw this guy working on an entry arch to a nice house and stopped to talk to him. Turns out he doesn't live at that house but the one across the street, which was a complete trash pile. It looked sort of like a high-end homeless camp, with trailers, RV's and cars up on jacks plus a lot of other junk. He let me take this picture of him talking to Brian but he might not have been happy for me to take one of his "residence":
He said he was planning on selling his place because his neighbor (not the house in the picture) was always trying to get him in trouble with the county for code violations. I can understand why as he was not helping property values in the neighborhood. We asked him the price, thinking it was valuable river front property that could have been cleared of all the junk and made a great homesite, but his price was ridiculous ($400K).
Next came a bit of frustration on my part. While Brian was working on getting his drone ready to fly over the area, I thought I would try to get us a room for the night. All the reasonable priced places in Bend were booked, so I thought of looking in Madras which is a much smaller town about 20 miles north of Bend. By doing a Google search I got in touch with a booking website that actually got me in touch with a human who would search for available motels. I told her we were looking for a motel in Madras, but when she checked a couple they were all booked, so she asked if we would be OK with a nearby place. I said that would be fine and she found one in a place I didn't recognize called Richmond. I asked how far that was from Madras and she said three tenths of a mile. I figured it must be the name of a neighborhood or something. So after the booking was made I thought I better enter the address into my GPS as they had sent me a confirmation email. The motel was in Richmond Indiana!! It took me a couple of frustrating hours working on it off and on to get the booking cancelled and a refund promised. Meanwhile, Brian had somehow found a reasonable place in Bend. By the time we checked in it was about 7pm and we were tired, hot, and hungry. Two beers with my Carne Asada dinner tasted really good.
I have to post this picture because after a bit of persuasion I actually got Brian to do a little maintenance on his motorcycle by lubing the chain (lube provided by me).
The next day was just a push for both of us to get home. We did get one small shot of twisty bits by riding from Antelope to Shaniko. I've done enough raving about this road in earlier blogs. I just wish it was longer.
Brian elected to go back via hwy 97 on the east side of the mountains and cross over near Mt. Rainier to try a beat the Sunday afternoon traffic back into Tacoma and Seattle. My total miles was 546 and his had to be quite a bit more. Although the roads were not that thrilling, at least I got a ride with my son.
And by the way, he did not love the property.
