Oregon - Day 29 - in the Pendleton campground

Pendleton KOA, Pendleton

Sunday, 29 May 2022

So it's a good thing I hadn't set my heart on finding unmitigated sunshine here in eastern Oregon, because that's nearly the last thing I found.  We didn't just have rain, we had pouring rain and a cold strong wind.  It was messy and uncomfortable. 

Likely as a result, I not only couldn't get internet through the KOA, I couldn't even find their network listed some of the time.  My hotspot said it was connected, but I could only rarely get results.  It was very frustrating both because I wanted to catch up on my blog and because I wanted driving directions to tomorrow's campground.

When I checked the weather a few days ago, the forecast for today said 50% chance of rain.  So maybe we'll get rain for 50% of the day?

And in fact, a little after noon the rain stopped but the wind was still blowing strong and chilly.

Because of the lousy internet connection, it took me all morning to get directions for only 2 days of travel, and by 1:00 it was still slow enough to make me ready to cry.  I've been compensating for the slow results by doing several tasks at once - doing research on Bing while I was uploading a photo to my blog on Google, for instance; editing my photos while I was waiting for directions to load.  But then either my computer or the signal wouldn't let me move from one source to the other, or to my email or anything else.  I was stuck with only the page I was staring at that seemed to be doing nothing.

In fact, I turned the computer off and waited (took the dogs for a walk), but then trying to access the basic blogger page again took me 15 or 20 minutes.  When I couldn't get any results from clicking on things with the cursor, I tried using my finger and all the icons pinned to the task bar disappeared entirely.

My level of frustration with the lack of wifi signal I've found throughout Oregon is now through the roof.  I started working on the post for Day 20 three days ago and still can't finish it because everything is taking so long.  By the time I finally got a decent signal, it was so late in the day I was way too tired to do any more work.

And all that took most of my time.  However, the dogs and I went for several walks (though Dext hates rain and almost had to be pulled out of the RV), and we found a nice grassy area next door to the campground that was a state office but closed for the holiday weekend.

In the campground I saw another one of those odd bulbous things I'd noticed when we were driving here yesterday and got a photo of it.

As you can tell, it was up on a tall tower.  It's got a little lightning-bolt symbol printed on it, but surely it's not an electrical conduit.  I'm still thinking an alarm of some kind.  If anybody knows, please post to the comments so we can all learn.

Also as a sort of compensation for the weather and wifi problems, I had a nice view from my campsite.  Actually, the campground bills the sites along this side as view sites, and when I first got here yesterday I thought that was a non-truth-in-advertising example.  But when the clouds started to lift, I could see that there was a view in an agricultural sort of way.

Two pieces of the view.  Those dark things that look (to me) like they might be cows are actually houses, and they're built in these 2 clumps beside those 2 yellow-topped buildings that I'm assuming are some sort of manufacturing plant, though I didn't drive down to look.  The rest of that land is agricultural, backed up by mountains in the distance.

It looked calm and peaceful from up here - perspective tends to do that.