Camping

Yay for summer! ;) We did finally make it camping, although it did get cut short a bit but that's ok. Our goal was to see Crater Lake, especially since Andy and I both had the realization that we both had lived in Oregon all our lives and have never seen Crater Lake except from an airplane. Not acceptable. So we decided we would change that and make sure our boys saw it too. We ended up camping at Diamond Lake, which is absolutely gorgeous! Just a beautiful campground, we went on a Monday and they have a whole section for just walk up tent camping, no reservations needed as long as they have space! Worked out well, we quickly found a spot and set up camp and got down to business, namely, dinner and then roasting marshmallows!

The next day we made it up to Crater Lake, and all I can say is wow. When you first walk up to where you can look out at it, it's amazing. Just amazing. Everyone should experience this! Wow! The water is so incredibly blue and not a ripple on it. It was a clear day, hot down at our campground, but up at Crater Lake it was only maybe 80-85 out. Much more tolerable, although I quickly found out that being that high in elevation, I burn even faster than I normally do.






And yes there were patches of snow! :) Pretty impressive, considering the heat wave the whole state was/is practically under! We had to find a spot of accessible snow because, really, who could resist a snowball or two in July??!!

The second night in our campground there was wild turkeys! They are not much smaller than my children.....

Andy did attempt to take the boys fishing, but only from the shore. Of course they didn't catch anything (not the best spot, too shallow) but it was good practice and experience. Besides, Andy figures out that it's probably best to only take one kid at a time if he wants to do any fishing himself. He spent all his time running back and forth between the boys, but at least everyone seemed to be having fun. There again, it was a beautiful morning....and the boys were thrilled to get into the water! Trust me, by 9 am it was getting pretty warm in the sun.

I wasn't surprised that we got nailed with thunderstorms given the heat, I was surprised at how much it suddenly cooled down (it was cooling down very nicely at night, sleeping was great! The kids did get a little cold though...) and then it started pouring down rain. While we were at Crater Lake the second time! The kicker of that was the entrance that we were leaving out of,ended up getting closed because of the road work they were doing and then the rain screwed it all up. So we ended up going halfway back around the rim and out a different entrance and then a long way back to our camp. We had already done the whole rim drive, and the extra part to the campground was beautiful, but we were also anxious to get back to our camp to see if we needed to pack up or not. We were soooo not prepared for any kind of rain, and a downpour was not particularly do-able for us.


We ended up packing up, (and Andy obviously had a little finger injury!) and decided to head out. But boy it was fun! I'll will have to add some more observations later.... ;)