I suggested we try and head out on Monday evening. Lisa was agreeable to that, but then where would we stop for the night? Either we only go the relatively short distance to Susanville (which is actually about 20 miles out of our planned route), or we hope that one of the few wayside motels along US-395 north of Susanville are still there — I can't find any of them online, and they all looked pretty dodgy the last time we drove through there — or we push through to Alturas, roughly halfway to Bend.
Neither Susanville nor Alturas have hotels in the Holiday Inn or Quality Inn families, the two groups in which I have any night accumulations. But there's a Super 8 in Alturas, and the price wasn't too bad, so we booked a room.
Having done this, we could probably have changed the Bend night to something closer to Portland, but we instead decided to make the middle leg (Alturas to Burns) on Tuesday the "short leg," especially as the way in which I booked the Bend night makes it slightly more difficult to change than an ordinary reservation. (Indeed, since I was redeeming a coupon, it's possible I might not have been able to rebook it at all; I am not certain.
