Bend, Oregon and the Painted Hills
2020 was a doozy wasn’t it?
Beyond the obvious global pandemic and all the magical things that came with that, the US saw civil unrest thanks as people protested excessive use of force by the police, lies about rigged elections, and at one point during the summer, seemingly the entirety of the Pacific Northwest was up in flames as wildfires ran rampant along the entire West coast of the United States. One of those wildfires even came within 12 miles (19 km) from my home in Oregon.
But 2021 is a new year, and although it’s off to a rocky start there does seem to be some hope on the horizon that things will start getting back to normal.
The COVID-19 vaccine has begun to be distributed across the US and things are slowly starting to open back up; restaurants are able to have seat-in dining, people are once again able to see movies on the big screen in theaters, and it’s starting to become safe to travel once more.
During the course of the pandemic, I was one of those people that strictly adhered to the guidelines in order to minimize my chances of contracting COVID and for me this meant no eating out and most painfully no traveling.
Here in Oregon, I was able to get my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine in early April and by mid-May I was finally fully vaccinated as was Audrey.
To celebrate our newly acquired inoculation, we agreed that the 3-day Memorial Day weekend would be a great chance to end our travel-drought, planning a road trip to the Painted Hills, considered to be one of the “Seven Wonders of Oregon.”
The hills are about a 4-hour drive from my home which is way too far for a day trip. Fortunately, the town of Bend is almost exactly midway between Springfield and the hills and since we’ve been meaning to visit Bend anyways, might as well kill two birds with one stone.
We hit the road early on Saturday morning in order to get to the Painted Hills shortly after lunch. The drive allows you to really appreciate the variety of biomes that are contained in Oregon.
In a state that takes at most 10 hours to drive from one side to the other, you go from coastal plains to grassy valley to dense forest to mountain ranges to full blown high desert and that’s only halfway through. The drive is incredibly scenic so we stopped fairly often to stretch our legs and take in the views. Oregon is a very nature-conscious state and there are frequent cutouts on the side of the highway specifically for people to pull over and admire the beauty of what’s around them. Our drive was relatively uneventful and the time flew by and it wasn’t long before we made it to the Painted Hills.
I’ll spare you a bunch of science mumbo-jumbo and summarize by summarizing: The streaks of color that “paint” the hills were created millions of years ago when changes in the climate over the course of several millennia caused minerals in the soil to turn different colors.
The hills are stunning and every single picture looks like something out of a postcard. There’s a few hiking trails, none of which are particularly difficult and they can be done in less than an hour depending on your fitness level.
After our hike, we got back in the car to make the roughly two-hour drive to Bend, pulling into town shortly after 4 o’clock in the afternoon and heading straight to check-in to the Riverhouse Hotel where we had booked a two night stay in a Premier Room with a great view of the Deschutes river. Once we brought our bags in, we freshened up a bit before moving ahead with the next thing on our agenda: visiting the LAST BLOCKBUSTER ON EARTH.
I am someone that was raised on TV and movies. Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of watching movies like Jurassic Park and the original Star Wars trilogy. When my parents got divorced and I lived with my father, movies were one of the only things my dad and I ever really bonded over. The few moments of quality time we had together were going to the movie theater on an almost weekly basis. Movies were there for me when I was a lonely, depressed loser in High School with few friends. Needless to say, I have a long relationship with movies and when I saw the Netflix documentary, The Last Blockbuster, and saw that it was in Bend, I knew I had to go and experience it for myself.
Stepping inside of a Blockbuster for the first time in well over a decade was a fairly surreal and emotional experience for me. A weeklong rental still only costs $1.99 which is what I remember it costing back in 2009, so we got ourselves a movie, two microwavable bags of popcorn, candy, drinks, and placed in order for some pizzas from Stone Pine Pizza, a food truck in Bend’s “Old Mill District,” an area with several retail shops and tons of different food trucks.
Back at the hotel, I hooked up my old Playstation 4 into the TV, we set up the snacks and spent the rest of the night watching Jurassic Park, a movie that has a lot of significance both in my personal life as well as to me and Audrey’s relationship.
The next morning, we slept in and skipped breakfast in order to save our appetite as we planned on going back to the Old Mill District to go on an unofficial food truck tour as I tried to get some footage for a possible vlog. Feeling a little anxious about filming around a bunch of people, I stopped by the Tokyo Starfish dispensary for a little herbal amuse bouche to really help me work up an appetite and to feel more at ease.
Despite it being Sunday, most trucks don’t open until 11:00 or 11:30 which fortunately gave me enough time for my appetizer to properly digest before placing my first order from one of the only trucks that was already open: The Scoutpost. Specializing in breakfast, I decided to start my “tour” with an order of what they call donut holes but they are really much more like beignets that are served with melted chocolate and butterscotch caramel.
