Crater Lake, Oregon

July 12 and 13 - Sunday afternoon we landed at the KOA in Eureka, California on our way to Crater Lake in Oregon. Nice campground but it was very cold at night. When we awoke Monday morning Shirley had 2 blankets and her heavy bathrobe over her. For the first time in 2 weeks Les donned long pants. Off we went to see the Trees of Mystery located in the Redwood National Park. This is where there are statutes of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. They are huge wooden structures and of course we had pictures taken under them. We then took a shuttle to the entrance for the Sky Ride a gondola type ride that took all three of us to the top of the Redwood canopy of trees. It was fun and Shirley was a good sport to do it since it’s not one of her favorites to be higher than a couple of feet off the ground. We all enjoyed ourselves and were glad that we made this stop. We took lots of photos and are posting some here of the ride from Eureka to Diamond Lake (Oregon). We are also posting a couple of photos for some friends. Can you determine if these were taken for you? We rearranged our schedule a tad so that we will go to Diamond Lake tonight and then tour Crater Lake tomorrow as it will be almost 4pm when we arrive at Diamond Lake. As one of our friends wrote us “the pictures are worth a 1000 of your words” so we will let them speak for themselves.

July 14 - Today we traveled to Crater Lake located in Oregon. I had no information on this as it was a place that Les wanted to visit and was I ever glad he made that choice. Until we started traveling this summer I thought I knew a fair bit about the United States but how wrong I was. Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and the 7th deepest in the world! It’s color of dark deep blue is like nothing you have ever seen. Our highest elevation today was approximately 7,000 ft. and the outside of the Crater (the lake was formed by a volcano “imploding” and the glacier melt filling it up as a lake) was dotted with snow pack. Apparently it can snow every month of the year but usually only snows 9 months of the year. There was plenty of ice/snow pack evident and I hope you can see it in our photos. From all the shaking we did on the road yesterday Shirley has a sore shoulder so she spent most of the day in the pilot seat alternating between ohs and ahs and OMG Les we’re going over the side! What a beautiful place. Our evening stop was only about 100 miles from Crater Lake in Sutherlin, Oregon. We are staying at Hi-Way Haven RV Park which is an old drive-in movie theatre and they show a nightly movie on the large screen that you can watch from your RV! What fun!