A home (far) away from home.

Byline: Bob Welch The Register-Guard

Editor's note: This is the last in a 10-part series on the summer travel adventures of Welch and others.

FLORA - It was Saturday at dusk and while trying to find a remote bed and breakfast, I was lost on a high plateau in Oregon's northeast corner. Next to a pioneer cemetery. On the edge of a lightning storm.

The irony is that my original plan was to stay in Paradise. Literally.

It's just up the road. But, as it turned out, the former town has nothing but fields, trees and cattle, which brought me to this near-ghost town just west of State Highway 3 and the desperate hope that my cell phone would get service to connect me with the North End Crossing.

Its owners, Vanessa and Dan Thompson, bill it as a bed and breakfast with a pioneer twist.

When, three days before, I'd asked Vanessa the population of Flora she hesitated. "Let's see, Harry's here - he winters in Arizona - and the Wilsey kids are around for the summer, so that makes seven."

If I ever found this place, I would swell its weekend population by nearly 15 percent by simply showing up.

Bingo, I got cell connection, amazingly. "Was that your white car that just went by?" Vanessa asked.

"Uh, yeah."

"I'll send Dan out in the pickup to guide you in."

You don't get that kind of service at a Holiday Inn. But any similarity between the North End and a chain hotel would be an affront to Vanessa and Dan, who will not only have guests' names written on chalkboards across their room doors but allow them to milk the cow the next morning if they'd like. (And don't be disarmed by the coyote-trap doorbell; it's been disengaged.)

The Thompsons, who both grew up in small Oregon towns themselves, have been welcoming guests to their 1897-built house for three years. Its location is to Oregon what Maine's is to the United States: seven miles from the Washington border, 20 from Idaho's.

If there's a strange allure to this remote plateau rising to 4,693 feet - think "Bonanza," pines sprinkled among fields of gold - it's the people and the house that personalize it.

"We're kind of pioneers in the modern era," says Dan, who's 52. And their guests get a unique taste of that pioneer spirit.

How often do you get to talk local history with a woman in overalls while she churns butter by hand - and a man whose pickup runs on biodiesel fuel made from the french-fry oil he gets from restaurants in Enterprise, 50 miles south?

Stay in a once-thriving town where vacant barns, houses and churches now hunch over like weathered old men?

Or, as a journalist, be a guest in a house whose living room used to be the "Flora Journal" office?

"I would love to have been born 100 years ago," says Dan, a former "cowboyer" who looks like singer/guitarist David Crosby after a Slim-Fast diet.

He works for the U.S. Forest Service part of the year, mainly feeding elk and plowing snow; Vanessa, 53, does bookkeeping, sometimes back in Milton-Freewater, from which the couple moved. Together, the two welcome guests who are more interested in local history, folk culture and game-board fun than staying in a cookie-cutter room whose toilet has a sani-wrapper on it. (The North End offers a compost toilet, which works quite well.)

The Thompsons do all their cooking on a wood stove and, based on my home fries, eggs and bacon breakfast, know what they're doing. And happily offer low-key lessons in everything from weaving to blacksmithing to making your own mozzarella cheese.

Me? It was enough just to spend a night in a TV-less, wire-less place whose walls are full of stories - I'll save the ghost one for Halloween - and decorated with antique rug beaters, hay knives and stud muzzlers. (Don't ask, just be glad you're not a horse.)

Only in a place like Flora - named for the first postmaster's daughter - can you be in a 112-year-old house that's only the third-oldest within a rock toss.

Who stays here in the two rooms the Thompsons make available? City slickers, two men from England following Chief Joseph's "Trail of Tears," hunters, attorneys, lost souls, you name it. "We want folks to feel like this is their home," Dan says.

I did. As lightning flashed outside, the three of us talked deep into Saturday night. About what Flora looked like in its day, back when farming and logging thrived and 1,200 people called it home; about the winters, when snow can be so deep Dan can walk onto the porch roof to make repairs; and about how the two will either leave guests alone, if they prefer, or engage them in a spirited game of Yahtzee until the sun comes up.

You leave a chain hotel and you take with you a receipt. You leave the North End and you take away memories, a homemade bar of soap and the thought of philosopher Martin Buber, who reminds us that "every journey has a destination of which the traveler is unaware."

As our 10-part series suggests: What better reason to go travel?

For photos and more information on Welch's trip to Northeast Oregon, see his blog at www.registerguard.com/blogs.

Bob Welch is at 338-2354 or [e-mail].