Trapped In Historic Baker City (Also Known As Hell)

Determined to make the best of the situation we decide to walk the mile or so to "Historic" downtown baker city. An hour and a half later the entire town could be considered completely and thoroughly dominated. There is nothing happening here at all. We were directed to a little brew pub as the "happenin' spot" for dinner but the place was deserted (along with the whole town) by 11:00. It's Friday night remember. We also quickly realize that there seems to be some kind of generation gap here. Everyone is either over 50 years old (mostly over 70) or are schoolkids on their bikes. Aside from some banged up waitresses at the 3 resteraunts in town we haven't even seen anyone in our demographic. We walk back to the hotel a bit tipsily and head to bed with hopes of finding some outdoor adventure for the weekend.

Saturday our plan is to rent a car and got to some of the sights in the area. This place has a big visitor center and seemingly lots of things to see in the area. It's mostly tied into the Oregon Trail and the people who passed through here on their way to find gold or some crapola like that. We head down to Superior Towing to get the minivan they told us about but were informed by Denis the mechanic that their only vehicle was taken out the night before and wasn't due back till Monday. Next stop was the Ford dealership where our van was patiently awaiting service. The salesman there informed us that "The girl that rents the cars ain't in today and I don't know how to do the paperwork, sorry fellas."

Well we weren't going to let a little thing like not having a car stop us from sightseeing. It's about 30 miles to Sumptner, OR where we can ride the narrow gauge steam train which operated for logging and gold mining from 1890 to 1910 before an invention called "the truck" put it out of business in the 20's. The brochure made this seem like a scenic ride through the mountains where rolls of film would be clicking and zipping and flashing like mad. We walked to the edge of town and started hitchiking up into the mountains. It took about 40 minutes for us to finally catch a ride.

Corey and Amy were from a town about 80 miles east called Ontario, OR. They were on their way to a camping trip with a bunch of NA and AA buddies. Corey asked if either of us were potheads as if he were Robert DeNiro in Meet the Parents and could barely believe that neither of us were. We assured him that we knew many potheads and that booz is my drug of choice and he seemed satisfied with that. Corey was an aspiring singer and along the ride Amy held his written music while he sang some bad sounding folk songs and messed up the words over and over while she corrected him. He was glancing between the road and the sheet music and speeding around the turns at 85 mph ignoring the signs with the curvy arrows on them. Scared out of my wits I gently asked him to slow down a bit and he set the cruise control at 65 to shut my ass up.



We purchased a 10 dollar round trip ticket and waited for the train to arrive. A gigantic man saw us and said "Aren't you glad I didn't pick you guys up, you beat us here!!" Just one of the many people we would see on the train who whizzed past us on the streets earlier.



How can I say this......the train sucked!!! It went 5 miles in a straight line at about 9 mph giving us a flawless view of piles of rocks on either side and the exact same view of the mountains as we had when we left. At the end of the trip was an enormous 1,250 ton floating dredge that looked like a stiff wind would topple it. We didn't go on. Instead we headed up to a restaurant that looked like an actual log cabin and, in what amounted to the highlight of the day, enjoyed a couple of juicy boca burgers with the works and some blackberry pie.




We were ready to hitch back to town when the giant man who had passed us on the way up offered us a ride. He was with his wife and another couple but we were comfy in the way back of his big ass truck. They had driven from Idaho (110 miles or so) just to ride the shit ass train but they seemed to have no regrets so we decided to make pretend we liked the train too. The guys reasoning on helping us out after leaving us in the dust: "I watched you guys for the past hour, and you didn't kill nobody." I guess it didn't occur to the dute that he could have squashed the both of us like grapes.