Roadtrip - The Ashland days
Having arrived, surprised the hell out of Kerstie and met all their friends at dinner we settled in to Kerstie and Thom's house for a week of fun, food and frolicking. We drank good American beer (shock horror! the microbrews in Oregon are actually really good!) ate lots and lots of delicious authentic Mexican cuisine and went shopping (Target hasn't quite made it to Canada yet and Col was going through withdrawal). We spent a day kayaking down the Rogue River in Tahiti inflatable canoes which was awesome fun (although no pictures were taken due to the watery nature of the experience) and made especially enjoyable when Kerstie managed to get a thorough dunking through one of the first sets of rapids.
Kerstie managed to finagle a day off work before we left and took us for a trip up to Crater Lake. Whilst it looks like a crater from a meteor impact it's actually the caldera from an ancient volcano that's filled up with water over the millenia. It's way up in the clouds, very starkly beautiful and apparently has some great ski touring in the wintertime (could be another roadtrip in there someday). There's a National Park surrounding the lake itself to protect its natural beauty from the depredations of man and so the trip up to the top is made through some of the lushest forests that we'd seen so far on the trip.
The lake itself...
Road through Crater Lake NP...
The sides of Crater Lake are exceedingly steep and there's only one path down to the water itself where they run boat trips out to one of the small islands in the lake, so we decided to make the hike down to the water just to see it close up and hike back up (the boat trips were priced to a captive market at $20 a head).
The track down...
It turned out to be a bit of a scrambling track down and the first people we saw on the way back up were almost at the end of their rope. I guess they'd pushed it a little too hard coming back up or hadn't been out in a while because while the hike was reasonably energetic it certainly didn't leave us in the state that some of those poor buggers were in. Once we got to the bottom it turned out that the boats weren't running that day anyway because the winds were too high, which didn't really matter to us anyway since we were in it for the walk. One strange thing was the dozens and dozens of chipmunks loitering around near the dock that were being shooed away by the rangers who were just packing up for the day.
Cute, but...
We sat down to take a bit of a snack break and discovered that these chipmunks are actually brazen chocolate thiefs in disguise as small rodents. One of these supposedly cute little guys jumped up onto the bench between where Kerstie and Col were sitting, stuck its head into the chocolate bar that was sitting between them and started chomping down. And continued to eat while we all jumped up in shock and yelled at it. It wasn't until bags were thrown at it that it scampered away leaving a nice little imprint of its front incisors in our choccie bar. Little bugger.
After a delightful, jampacked week with the Kneelands it was time to get all of our stuff back in the minivan and start the trek homewards via the interior of the states this time instead of taking the coast road.
Kerstie managed to finagle a day off work before we left and took us for a trip up to Crater Lake. Whilst it looks like a crater from a meteor impact it's actually the caldera from an ancient volcano that's filled up with water over the millenia. It's way up in the clouds, very starkly beautiful and apparently has some great ski touring in the wintertime (could be another roadtrip in there someday). There's a National Park surrounding the lake itself to protect its natural beauty from the depredations of man and so the trip up to the top is made through some of the lushest forests that we'd seen so far on the trip.
The lake itself...
Road through Crater Lake NP...
The sides of Crater Lake are exceedingly steep and there's only one path down to the water itself where they run boat trips out to one of the small islands in the lake, so we decided to make the hike down to the water just to see it close up and hike back up (the boat trips were priced to a captive market at $20 a head).
The track down...
It turned out to be a bit of a scrambling track down and the first people we saw on the way back up were almost at the end of their rope. I guess they'd pushed it a little too hard coming back up or hadn't been out in a while because while the hike was reasonably energetic it certainly didn't leave us in the state that some of those poor buggers were in. Once we got to the bottom it turned out that the boats weren't running that day anyway because the winds were too high, which didn't really matter to us anyway since we were in it for the walk. One strange thing was the dozens and dozens of chipmunks loitering around near the dock that were being shooed away by the rangers who were just packing up for the day.
Cute, but...
We sat down to take a bit of a snack break and discovered that these chipmunks are actually brazen chocolate thiefs in disguise as small rodents. One of these supposedly cute little guys jumped up onto the bench between where Kerstie and Col were sitting, stuck its head into the chocolate bar that was sitting between them and started chomping down. And continued to eat while we all jumped up in shock and yelled at it. It wasn't until bags were thrown at it that it scampered away leaving a nice little imprint of its front incisors in our choccie bar. Little bugger.
After a delightful, jampacked week with the Kneelands it was time to get all of our stuff back in the minivan and start the trek homewards via the interior of the states this time instead of taking the coast road.
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