The 5000s at Play

I wish I had discovered earlier the Kurt Vonnegut quote "peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."  Or that "unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."  Or that "unexpected travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."  Quoters on these here internets are rather free with the opening word, and I do not have the text handy at present.  But you get the idea; it is an assertion by a famous person, or at least by a character imagined by a famous person, in support of the practice of arbitrary travel!  So obviously I feel it is very wise.

During the blog sabbatical of a few weeks back, Mrs.5000 and I were out dancin' in the Vonnegutian sense.  I've prepared a little synopsis of our trip for you.  Some will be surprised to find that it did not involve new county acquisition (for me; the Mrs. may have bagged one), even though we got fairly close to fresh turf at our apogee.  Well, I've got plenty of other random factors to guide my travels.

It was like this:

So, the dark purple line east from Portland is the initial freeway burst to get through the Cascades into dry county.  From there, red lines indicate new roads for the AART (Atlas of All Roads Travelled).  The yellow circles denote unsuccessful geohash attempts, and the green circles indicate successful ones.  (Expeditions 58-67, full descriptions and photographs of which are available here.)  I'll have you know that we pioneered three new graticules, so of course we are very proud and happy about that:

 There were scenic vistas:

And mishaps!

The little feet on the map are places where I went running: in and around Spray, John Day, and Ontario, Oregon, and Moscow, Idaho.  This made a big splash on my recently crafted county biking/mapping of Oregon.

...on which yellow represents counties in which I've biked, blue indicates counties in which I've run, and green is what you get when you mix blue and yellow.  It also allowed me to add another state to the short list of states I've run in, something I started thinking about last summer.

Anyway, we had a grand time, and resolved that we should continue to sample the scenic wonders of Eastern Oregon every decade or so!

If you are very good, maybe I will share some samples from the extensive library of pictures of grain elevators that Mrs.5000 took during the trip.