Oregon - Land of Volcanoes

Well two nights of camping and here we are in a Motel 6.  Nothing is too good for Liz.

May 25th:  First, when in Hood River, hit up the Full Sail tour.  It's good stuff.  After downing a bunch of beer, we did the responsible thing and hit the road.

Driving around Mt. Hood, it rained, then sleeted, snowed, and then switched back to rain as we moved down into Central Oregon.   What Central Oregon has going for it is... well it's very flat.  I guess that's good for the gas mileage.  We camped last night just north of Bend at Tumalo State Park, which wasn't too bad.  What was bad however, was the temperature last night which was about 30.  Liz and I buried ourselves in our mummy bags when we went to sleep, with just our eyeballs exposed.  They managed to not freeze though.  We would have grabbed a picture of that, but it would have required one of us getting out of our bag, and that wasn't about to happen.  So here's a photo of me making dinner instead, bean gruel over boiled potatoes, surprisingly delicious!

May 26th:  After working up the courage to leave the smothering warmth of our sleeping bags, we finally got our first road shower.  The park had a free solar hot water shower, which was awesome.  Especially after that cold night.  Back on the road, south on Hwy 97 our first stop of the day was the Newberry National Volcano Monument.  Apparently five miles south of Bend, there is a "dormant" caldera volcano.  But it hasn't erupted in the past 1000 years, and the only people around to see where Indians, and they don't count I guess.  We trekked around the lava fields and drove up the 1000' tall cinder cone.  See...

Did I mention it was snowing up there again.  It's almost Memorial Day  people.  It's supposed to be done being snow-time.

After that, we drove through what may be some of the blandest highway in America.  I'd tell you to skip Hwy 97 south of Bend, but Oregon only has about a dozen roads.  So since we wanted to go to Crater Lake National Park, it was either that road or take a wagon train though the woods.

Crater Lake was amazing once the snow squalls and clouds blew off for a second.  Seriously, they still had at least 12' of snow at the rim.  Here's a good idea of the scale.

 
But the lake was honestly beautiful.  It's over six miles wide and over 1900' deep.  Our new super wide angle lens couldn't even come close to getting it all into one shot, but here is a good one.

There is a gorgeous old lodge at the top that's for the people out there with money who don't sleep outside in freezing deserts or in a Motel 6 when they want to splurge and update their travel blog.

Tomorrow, we leave the Northwest (and hopefully snow) behind and drive out of Oregon.  We are going to spend Memorial Day weekend in the redwoods of northern California.  The first two nights, we'll be in Redwoods National Park and then down to Humboldt State Park on Monday.  That's home to The Avenue of the Giants were Ma Joad and I plan to drive our jalopy through some of them big ol' trees.

Stat Update:

Total Miles Driven to Date: 738

States Visited: Two

National Parks/Monuments Visited: Three