Why? What do you do on the weekend?

Updated 9/17: Look what NPR just printed! 

For years my husband and I have been inviting my parents to accompany us to the Cowboy Dinner Tree; but, what with one thing and another, we have never been able to go after all, so that finally my dad pronounced the Cowboy Dinner Tree mythical.

It's not mythical. It's a real restaurant near Silver Lake. From Bend you drive southeast, toward Nevada,  for about an hour and a half. The land grows less and less populated the further you drive and begins to look like Nevada: all dirt and sagebrush and sky. The restaurant is remote enough that it's off the grid, and they serve only the kind of food a hungry cowboy might want: a baked potato with a whole roasted chicken, or a baked potato with a 26oz steak. And dessert.

Anyway: at long last we found a weekend that works for everyone, and I made reservations. Since it's such a long drive we figured we'd make a day of it; we'll stop to hike around Fort Rock. My mother and I have been wanting to go there for ages. It's a fascinating feature to encounter in the desert. It's a volcano which erupted out of a lake during the last Ice Age; it was heavily eroded by waves on one side, so that now you can just walk right into what, they say, looks exactly like what it is: a dry lakebed. Ten thousand years ago people lived (or camped) in a cave there. Ten thousand years ago. Archaeologists found sagebrush sandals in it, and baskets.

Of course, life proceeding the way it does, my sister had the sudden chance to stop by Portland after giving a talk in California the exact weekend we had reservations, and we had to choose: drive to Portland to see Julie, or keep our date with Fort Rock & the Cowboy Dinner Tree? I choose the Dinner Tree. (Well, in point of fact I chose not to disappoint my father, who as I said is convinced that place is mythical. If we don't go next weekend, we'd have to put it off until June 2013!)

My sister took the news pretty well: she laughed and laughed. Reservations at a restaurant in the middle of nowhere! An extinct volcano! Sagebrush sandals! Jennifer, she said, where the heck do you live?

Well, but -- ? What do other people do on weekends?