Bend

I'm in Bend tonight, a town of about 75,000 in the high desert of Central Oregon. When I left Detroit this morning it was about 7 degrees F outside, and when I arrived here it was about 70. Pretty nice! This is a pretty cool little town, with lots of funky restaurants and lots of people out walking around the downtown area.

One thing I couldn't figure out was that some of the cars driving by had tires that were making all kinds of noise as they rolled down the street. At first I thought there must be a bunch of gravel in the treads, but I finally figured out that these were snow tires with studs on them. I have to say that I grew up in Muskegon, Michigan, and we got a lot of lake-effect snow there; we never had tires with studs on them. Sometimes we put snow tires on the car, sometimes we didn't. It reminded me of when I went to California for the first time one Chistmastime, and during a drive into the mountains we saw signs talking about the requirement for chains. Chains! Crazy.