We spent most of our day driving around the rim of Crater Lake at Crater Lake National Park. Nina’s first words as we got to the rim of the crater and looked down at the lake were, “Oh my!! Beautiful!!” And she was right. We arrived at the rim about 11 a.m. and took the next four hours to drive the circumference. We had lunch at the Crater Lake Lodge. By the time we got to the last third of the drive, though, we both had taken enough pictures of the lake. I took more than 90 pictures and am in the process of uploaded 45 of them to Flickr. At least, I think they’re uploading. The Flickr upload application says they’re uploaded, but when I try to close the window, I get a message saying that there is an upload in progress and closing the window will cancel it. When I look at Flickr, the pictures seem to be there but the set named “Crater Lake” hasn’t been created.

We’ve finished our playing in this part of the world. Tomorrow we’ll pack up and head back towards Pocatello. We’re going a different route back through Oregon than the way we came. We’ll go through Redmond and take route 26 through Prineville, Mitchell, John Day, and over to Baker City where we’ll get on the freeway back to Pocatello. The route is longer but a significant part of it through Oregon is a Scenic Byway and hopefully much more interesting than the sagebrush and rocks route we came through last Thursday.

We’ve had a very good time here. It was fun being with Nina’s cousin Linda. She’s delightful to be around and we’re looking forward to getting together again in some part of the world. We’ve certainly learned a lot about volcanoes and lava flows! This is definitely volcano country around here.