Returning

August 26, 2010 | I-205 bridge over Columbia R.

Coming back, we took a detour to avoid traffic in Portland. I was on Yelp looking for restaurants - it was dinner-time. We ended up at one Mexican place.

This was quite a memorable trip. Lots of good memories, and lots of bad ones. The good ones make it worth it.

Ponderosa

August 26, 2010 | North of Oregon SR-168, Winema N. F.

Find me in the picture. The tree is the ponderosa pine, smaller and prettier than the redwood / sequoia, although we kind of have to see those since we already drove as far South as Crater Lake. Today was the return trip.

Crater Lake was very beautiful, and the park was well-kept. I didn't do nearly as much camping as I would have expected from a camping trip, but enjoyed it nevertheless. Only 8.5 days left now until I see you.

Obsidian

August 25, 2010 | Newberry N. V. M. Big Obsidian Flow

The other park that we drove to is another crater about an hour North of Crater Lake. The highlight of the park is a large field of obsidian (note picture in Wiki). There's also two lakes there. We were tired of driving and didn't see the second lake, but my parents wanted to swim in the first.

Here you can see the lake and the field. The patches of black that you see on the right are the obsidian. It's very smooth and can be very sharp on the edges. My mom picked one up, cut her finger, and was a bit cranky for a while after.

The weird thing about this park is that it seems very new. It has new paved roads, new signs, and a new visitor center that doesn't seem to have much of merchandise at the moment. They can attract a lot of visitors with the obsidian and the lakes, and a lava cave which we didn't get to see because everything closed very early, but they're not advertising very well right now.

I come home tomorrow. Yay!

Cruisers

August 24, 2010 | Crater Lake N. P. Cleetwood Cove Docks

We went on a boat today. This is us getting off. The boat went counterclockwise around the lake, and they showed us the different highlights.

This is us finding time to do other things. We intended to spend the whole day on this tour - it would drop us off on an island, leave us there for 6 hours, and then pick us up and complete the tour. Well, we realized it's a horrible waste of time - there's nothing but rocks and dirt (and a crater) on the island. So we wanted to reschedule to a three-hour drop-off, but the boat broke down, so we just did a regular tour. Cool!

At one time when we were on the boat, a bald eagle flew right overhead. It was interesting, but my camera wasn't ready. The narrator said eagles don't fly over very often.

We're going to another park tomorrow, close-by. Yay, I'm getting a little tired of this ex-mountain.

Visitorial

August 23, 2010 | Crater Lake N. P. Steel Visitor Center

This is one of the Crater Lake visitor centers. Inside are a gift shop, a postal office that is open from 9am to 3pm with an hour-long lunch break, and some other stuff.

I was kind of worried about not being able to contact anybody outside the park - it doesn't feel good. Much of the day was spent trying to get cell phone signal.

Crater

August 22, 2010 | Crater Lake

This is Crater Lake. It wasn't dark when we arrived, but the sun was low and it was really cold. It was dark when we set up tent though. The night would be really cold, with low temperatures forecasted at 1 °C.