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Second Full Day In Bend
Here we are chillin' at the Sparrow Bakery in Bend, where Marja works. We worked on our blog in the morning, while enjoying the sunshine. These guys jammin' were pretty good. They played quite a few Dead songs. **FYI, LeAnne wrote the blog, & Natalie commentaried the pics...
Hey EVERYONE! Yep, it's us again hollerin' from good ol' Eureka, California. A lot has happened since the last blog....let's see, that was 2 days ago. Well we will begin in Bend, Oregon. Natalie and I had spent a good two days there checking out the parks and visiting with Marja, my guiding buddy from Alaska. Our scheduled departure date would be that Saturday afternoon, an hour before my other buddy Julie would arrive in Bend. It just seemed right to stick around a little longer to visit with her too, so we decided to stay another night. I'm glad we did. The rest of the afternoon was spent catching up on journals and taking advantage of the free wi-fi at the local bakery. Along with that, we got to listen to three hippie dudes jammin away on the mandolin, banjo and guitar in the sun...awe, life is good. It's kind of funny because the name of the bakery is Sparrow Bakery (I highly recommend it if you're ever in Bend), and just across the way we watched sparrows build a nest in the wall of an old
LeAnne at Crater Lake
This picture looks fake, like we went to Sears and chose the 'Crater Lake' background. garage, it was pretty neat. After that we made an appearance at a "white trash" themed mother's day bbq and played bean bag toss.....Natalie and I need A LOT of practice! 😊
It was great to spend time with the buds, but yes we are on a ROAD TRIP and need to get on the road at some point so early the next morning we were off again. We felt like we were in a Subaru commercial cruising through the scenic back roads of Eastern Oregon. We passed Diamond Lake and some dry forestland and finally came to our first awesome destination of this blog....CRATER LAKE! Now, I had never been there before and I must say this State Park is a-mazing. We spent some time in the visitor center before we actually went up and saw the crater itself and let me tell ya, the 25 cent post cards do it no justice. Apparently, the crater was created when Mt. Mazama blew up in such a symmetrical way that no rivers can run into or out of the crater. The snowmelt and rain collect in it and create the most magnificent blue lake. It's stunning. You should
Feeding the Birds
We actually feel pretty bad about this, but we didn't know any better. Evidently, in the area is an endangered species called the marbled murrelet. When you feed other birds, such as jays and the like, they can take over the murrelet's habitat, which is only in the Redwoods. We were actually a little north of the redwoods at this time, so maybe that's why there wasn't any literature against it. have seen us. We basically just jumped out of the car and started taking picture after picture with our own cameras. And yes, we will have a TON of the exact same pictures at the end of this trip but oh well! haha! The Stellar Jays and Camp Robbers were very friendly and wanted their share of Oma's cake...to the point of eating it out of our hands! The road was snowed in a bunch, I guess it takes them until July to have the road that goes around the rim fully operational, so we jumped on our bikes and rode as far as we could to get a variety of different photo views. It was fun to get on the bikes finally!
From there we continued on and stayed the night at Rogue River State Park in a YURT! Let me tell ya I was totally stoked! It was fun, we stayed up and watched movies on Natalie's computer and soaked in the comforts of our yurty home without compromising the fine details of camping...AKA: the ants, but hey, we were happy to share. We woke up the next morning and just so happened to come across
Cruisin' Down the Hill
This was the part of the rim drive around Crater Lake that was closed. They will have this portion open in two weeks. They're not finished removing the snow from the road...It's a laboring process that takes months. the one thing in Oregon that we both wanted to go to but didn't know where to find it, The Oregon Vortex. It was like it was meant to be. Natalie had found a website back in the winter talking about the vortex and we were both excited to go to it on our road trip but forgot the info. Well, lucky for us we were driving along in the middle of nowhere and BAM we see a sign...THE OREGON VORTEX. We went in and MAN! It was soooo cool! So, the Oregon Vortex is a place on Earth that's kind of spooky like the Bermuda Triangle. It's 3/4 of an acre in the woods close to Gold Hill, Oregon and it has strange electromagnetic activity, gravity and light anomalies. No animals will enter the area, and many scientists over the centuries, including Einstein have come up with theories about it, but nothing is proven as to why the Vortex does what it does. We went on a 45 minute tour and they lead us through a series of demonstrations of things the vortex does. For instance, Natalie and I would stand next to each other on a perfectly level
It's May!
And there's still so much snow on the ground! platform and be our normal heights, we switched places next to each other and we became the same height!! CREEPY! I stood on this specific spot they marked on the ground and relaxed my body, I then started swaying with magnetic north and south...weird! The strangest of all demonstrations was when they rolled a golf ball down a ramp and it rolled back up! There was a weird tingly feeling in our bodies the whole time we were there, it was definitely one of those experiences you leave thinking in awe about for awhile. And that's what we spent doing the next few hours in the car on our way to highway 101.
Our next and current stop is the magnificent and one of a kind Redwood National Forest. WOW. Come here to be humbled and appreciate unbelievable sites of nature. These trees are huge! They grow up to 369 feet tall and can be wide enough for a car to drive through. Natalie and I went on a great 3 1/2 mile hike this morning and yet again took enough pictures to fill a hard drive, but it was worth it. We hugged a few trees along
Crater Lake
Our attempt at scenic photography. the way too. Can you believe the Redwoods can live to be 2,000 years old??!! Can you also believe that at one time the Redwood Forest was 2 million acres big and overtime has been logged to be 100,000 acres! How sad! The Redwoods in California are the only ones in the whole world! Come and see them some day! So here we sit, camping out in Eureka awaiting another fun day exploring the Redwoods then heading down on to San Francisco! We'll keep you updated...I should hit the sleeping bag though, it's getting late and this blog is going on tooooooo long. Thanks for reading! Take care.
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Dad
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Missing you bunches
Be safe, take care of each other....and fix your headlight ! That way you will have an extra $112.00 ( Traffic fine) to spend in VEGAS baby...Why give the "man" $ when you can eat crab legs at the Belligeo!!!!! It so much better than Denny's.