1 Week In Halfway, OR: Sights, Snake River & Surgery

After spending a few weeks in Albuquerque, NM for the International Balloon Fiesta, it was time to move on to our next destination – Halfway, OR.

We were looking forward to a little bit of time exploring mixed in with a little bit of downtime, but things took a turn for the worse towards the end of our week there when Shae ended up in the hospital.

Here’s more about what happened during our week in Halfway, OR.

How We Got To Halfway

Short answer – we drove!

Longer answer – it’s close to 18 hours from Albuquerque to Halfway, so we decided to stop overnight in a couple of places along the way. The first night we stayed in Green River, UT (just north of Moab) and the second night we spent in Twin Falls, ID.

We spent quite a bit of time on the road those few days, but we did stop off at Four Corners National Monument along the way. In case you’re not familiar with it, Four Corners National Monument is where the four corners of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado meet.

I wouldn’t say it’s worth a special trip there as a destination in and of itself (it’s a ten minute stop kind of place), but if you’re passing along nearby it’s worth a stop to stretch your legs and stand in four different states at once. As Shae shared on Facebook at the time, the two of us have very different approaches to life summed up in the two pictures below!

It was a beautiful drive from New Mexico to Oregon. Much of that time was spent driving through Utah which was stunning, going from red rocks to snow-capped mountains. We stopped in Springville for lunch one day where there were some amazing mountain views.

Where We Stayed In Halfway

We booked a week-long stay in an RV via Airbnb as it looked fairly spacious, had good internet and only cost ~$50 per night.

This was our first time staying in an RV on the road trip and while I wouldn’t want to be doing the entire road trip in an RV, it was a lovely stay that provided plenty of space and amenities for the week, along with a surprisingly comfortable king bed.

What We Did

One of the reasons we’d wanted to visit Halfway was because the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center was in nearby Baker City. Unfortunately that was temporarily closed during our visit as they were moving the interpretive center to a different building.

That didn’t mean we had nothing to do though. We enjoyed walking down to the center of Halfway – a cute little city of ~300 people. It has a couple of small grocery stores, a few restaurants and boutique stores and a gas station.

They have a couple of animal sculptures, with (somewhat nearby) Baker City having many more of them. The camel was created by Samuel Ochanda, an artist in Nairobi, Kenya who created it using 55 gallon drums and other scrap metal.

One afternoon while Shae was teaching online, I took Truffles for a hike along Lake Fork Creek in the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area.

A couple of days later we drove up to Hells Canyon Overlook. Hells Canyon is the deepest river gorge in the US – even deeper than the Grand Canyon.

While driving up there we saw what appeared to be pine trees changing color for the fall. We were confused by that because they’re evergreens, but it turned out there were larch trees mixed in with the pine trees and it was the larches that were yellow.

On our way back to Halfway we drove via Oxbow to check out Snake River. This is a river that’s more than 1,000 miles long and has the border of Oregon and Idaho running through the middle of it.

That evening we went to The Main Place Cafe & Grill in Halfway for burgers and baked potatoes.

Cutting Our Stay Short

After dinner we headed back to the RV having had a lovely day exploring the area. Everything seemed fine and Shae went to bed while I stayed up working.

Just after midnight Shae woke up in pain. The pain got worse and worse to the point that we thought that her appendix might’ve ruptured. The problem was that Halfway is very rural – as mentioned earlier, it only has ~300 people living there. The nearest city with a hospital was Baker City and that was an hour’s drive away through a dark, winding canyon. That was our only choice though, so in the early hours of the morning we headed there.

After running some tests, they identified Shae’s gall bladder as being the issue and that it needed to be removed. There was another problem though – it was 4am and they didn’t have a surgeon on call who could perform the procedure. We therefore had to drive over to Ontario which was another hour away in order for Shae to have the surgery.

There’s a lot more to this story, so I’ll be sharing that in a post tomorrow. Ultimately though, it meant our week in Halfway got reduced slightly to six days.