Fabulous Exploration!

Friday morning my neighbor and I left at 7am for the drive to Crater Lake. I was correct in my guesstimate of travel time -- we arrived right around noon. After gorging ourselves on the views of the lake from the visitor's center (and that took awhile), we began our clockwise trip around the lake. Hunger called, so at the first opportunity we stopped for a picnic. Hauling the cooler and paper bag of food up a hill was effort well spent -- we sat on a fallen stump in the shade overlooking the lake, and dined upon PB sandwiches, cheese, and cookies. My companion shot this photo of our picnic 'table' and a portion of the bounty. Simple food, but it served the purpose.

After packing back down to the car we continued our next five-hour (true!) journey around the 33 mile circumference of the lake. Obviously, we stopped often. In fact, not an opportunity to pull over and see what we could see was missed. I have a hard time even now believing we could have spent that much time driving 33 miles, but even if you include lunch in that time span, which I do, the fact remains that we arrived around noon and returned to the starting point around 5 or 5:30, utterly pooped.

Indefatigable photogs that we are, we'd planned to stay until sunset to catch that event, but that didn't happen. Somehow, with another couple of hours to go we couldn't envision either continuing to drive or just stopping to sit in the car until sundown, so we headed on down to our lodging an hour away. We were even so tired we decided we didn't need to return the following morning as planned, for that lovely morning light. After retiring to our rooms, we both crashed. I, of course, driven soul that I am, had to process my photos and upload to the Southern Oregon Coast blog. And somehow, as tired as I was and despite the comfortable bed, I didn't sleep much at all. Nonetheless, by morning we were refreshed enough to return to the lake, and I am SO glad we did! The public story is over there. Check it out. This angle of the story is for family.

Driving home was an interesting adventure. Hot, for one thing -- about 90-95 most of the time between Shady Cove and California, which was a couple of hours. And I was sleepy, for another. I'd put a few jazz CDs into the player and somewhere outside Grants Pass I asked Jack to pop those out and put in..... he finished the words for me.... Delbert McClinton. Loud and rowdy Texas blues guaranteed to wake anybody up! I turned the sound way up and we sang ourselves silly to this one, dancing in our seats. When that one finished he found some Hank Williams Jr. and when that was finished, yet another of the same ilk. We rocked and sang all the way into Brookings where it seemed only fitting to finish up the journey with a beer at a dive on the main drag. I enjoyed the entire trip, but these last couple of hours were certainly the most sheer fun of the whole time. And I was wide awake for the driving.