Are We Ever Going to Get There- Adventures to Crater Lake!

After finding our way through Idaho, we headed West to Crater Lake.

 Papa has tried to make it to Crater Lake National Park before, but has always been foiled, so we were determined. We got a good start along some promising back roads, made it a good hour or more into the middle of know where, when: our car no longer wanted to play. The transmission died, and of course there was no cell phone service. Luckily, after very little time, a local sherriff heading home from work happened upon us. He was kind enough to drive Papa back a mile down the road to a farm house.

Now car trouble is never good, but good things can come out of bad. The owners of the hay farm are some of the kindest people we have ever met. They not only allowed us to use to the phone, but let us stay with them while we watied the possible 3 hours for the tow truck (thankfully it took a bit less), they even made us a lovely lunch. Thank you kind friends, we will be forever grateful!

They were the best part of the ordeal, as the closet the tow truck could take us to a city, was back  to the town of Burns, OR. Which only has one rental car, for quite a pretty penny. So within one days time, after increasing our car insurance coverage, we drove the 130 miles from Burns, to Bend, rented a new car, spent one night, and returned back to Burns (before noon when they close) to return the other rental car.

Now we were all a bit tired by this point, but even more determined to make it to Crater Lake. And.....

make it we finally did.

We only did a drive through, but it was beautiful!

Plenty of places to check out the view. What an amazing Lake!

Even got to see a waterfall.

Crater Lake, we shall return!

Getting Lost and Found in Idaho

After we finished our adventures in Montana, we headed West. As back roads are much more exciting than main highways, we thought we'd try a back road through Idaho. At the time our handy little GPS phone was out of commission, so we broke out the good old fashioned maps. One of the maps showed a 'short cut' through the back country.

But as you can see the short cut turned into a very long adventure.

All the burned out trees and no one around (well there was that one camp out there with big barking dogs that looked like they didn't want to be disturbed, so we didn't) was a bit creepy.

We may be lost, but we're still having fun!

And then we were found.

Actually we found a little campground amidst the burned out wilderness, with some natural hot springs. The two other campers (locals out for the weekend) informed us we found Horse Creek Hot Springs.

I was just happy to be out and playing!

There was so much to explore and many rocks to throw.

Where the natural hot springs formed a little pool, campers have erected a little protective shack. Which survived, along with it's neighboring trees, from the fires that had moved through a year ago.

This place was too great of a find to just pass through, so we decided to set up camp for the night.

There was plenty of firewood, go mountain man Papa.

Beautiful sunset.

Just a bit dirty from all that playing!

Mom, I don't need to wash up before dinner, we're camping!

Papa up with the sun, ready to go.

Wondering why the rest of us are still sleeping?

Time for a morning bath? Maybe just for the toes.

What a cool place.

Thankfully the other campers we met gave us a back country map, so we can get unlost.

Maybe we should take a different road.

We could have been lost for a while!

Good thing we didn't end up like this car.

Getting lost was well worth it!