Category: Travels

For anyone not familiar with it, “AirVenture” is an annual gathering of aviation enthusiasts in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, but that doesn’t begin to describe how over-the-top crazy this event is. Imagine an airshow with all of the usual aerobatics and stunt-flying, except that the airshow is attended by about 600,000 people, many of whom fly to the airshow in airplanes they built themselves, and who spend the week sleeping on the ground under the wings of their aircraft. And during the same show, the military takes advantage of the opportunity to show off its latest hardware. And all of this is held at “Whitman Regional Airport” in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a dippy little two-bit airfield that, incredibly, for the week of the airshow actually becomes the busiest airport in the world. During the week of AirVenture, the airport will see 10,000 aircraft, 3,000 show planes, nearly 1000 journalists, and 900 commercial vendors. Besides gawking at airplanes, there are hundreds of seminars for the attendees, with topics ranging from the latest aviation technology to (no kidding) “How to hand prop your aircraft,” which I think means starting the engine by grabbing the propeller and giving it a good yank, getting out of the way before the propeller slices you to ribbons.

Seeing as how I’ve basically been an aviation aficionado my whole life, AirVenture is a major bucket list item for me. So Wendy and I are here to spend a few days immersed in aviation excess.

But life is not so simple. Just before we arrived, a major weather system passed through, leaving our camping area at Whitman Field a soggy, impassable, mud bog. So, we’re stuck in a nearby campground, waiting for things to dry out enough to get to Oshkosh.

So, we spent today, first, killing time at a different airport, sitting at the finish line for air races where guys take their own airplanes and, just for the fun of it, see how fast they will go.

So, after a couple hours of watching planes (either fascinating or boring, depending), and with Oshkosh still closed, we decided to explore a bit of central Wisconsin. A friend had suggested the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, but it’s closed for renovations for the entire year. Wendy read a short blurb about the Dells of the Wisconsin River nature area, and we always enjoy hiking, so it’s off we go!

A-a-a-a-a-r-g-h!!! Somehow we missed a turn and ended up in the town of Wisconsin Dells. Words cannot even begin to convey the vulgarity of that locale. Billing itself as the “water park capital of the world,” the city has more water parks than any other city in America. The experience is so demoralizing that the only way to convey its full effect is to labor through the details of it all. In the span of a few blocks, one is confronted with:

• The Mount Olympus Water and Theme Park (three hotels serving a 300-acre outdoor and 120,000-square-foot indoor water parks, with more than 40 waterslides, plus eight go-kart tracks, seven roller coasters, a large wave pool with 9-foot waves, lazy rivers, and hot tubs).
• Noah’s Ark Water Park (the Flamingo Hotel, serving what is billed as America’s largest water park, 70 acres of waterslides, pools, rivers, bumper boats, surfing experiences, arcades, a 4D dive-in theater, a water coaster, slides, swings, water cannons, along with 12 eateries and bars).
• Kalahari Resort (750-room hotel with indoor and outdoor water parks with multiple slides, lazy rivers, activity pools, wave pools, including a Ferris wheel, African-themed carousel, ropes course, climbing walls, go karts, bowling, mini-golf and arcade games).
• Great Wolf Lodge (80,000-square-foot indoor water park, with 6 slides, rivers, activity pools, hot tubs, kiddie pools, a four-story water tree house, and the Howlin’ Tornado, a water slide “thrill ride”).
• Wilderness Lodge (600-acre, also billed as America’s largest water park resort, with four indoor water parks, three outdoor water parks, a large outdoor pool area, indoor go karts, a lazer maze, a ropes course, bumper boats, mini-golf, a kids’ club, arcades, the Klondike Kavern, with its two, five-story tube slides, and the Wild WaterDome, America’s largest indoor wave pool).

And so on and so on. It never ends. You get the point. Except you don’t. As if this isn’t enough, in and amongst all this are go-kart tracks, t-shirt shops, junk food dispensers, souvenir shops, and an unimaginable array of the most ghastly, grotesque, garish architectural nightmares on earth. The “Rome Hotel,” for example, is an ersatz replica (or maybe caricature) of the Roman Coliseum.

That’s enough. No, it’s not. One more point. You might think such an area is so repulsive that it would be empty, devoid of people, like those creepy photos one sees of abandoned amusement parks. Wrong again. The area is packed, crammed, jammed with people standing in pools, elbow to elbow, in whatever microbial soup exists in these communal pools, which almost certainly includes E. coli, Ebola, and flesh-eating bacteria. Thousands of people, everywhere you look. It’s like Manhattan, only wetter.

Somehow, we managed to maneuver our motor home through the traffic, and out of this little piece of hell on earth, and back to our campground. The Oshkosh campground is still closed, and unfortunately we didn’t tow our car along with us, and all of the rental car agencies within 50 miles are sold out, so I’m not sure what’s next. But it certainly doesn’t involve Wisconsin Dells.

At long last, the Washington emigrees made it to New Orleans and we met up with them (rather inauspiciously in a WalMart parking lot) and headed to the campground at the New Orleans Naval Air Station for a couple days. We spent the first afternoon tending to an electrical matter so that they could have a working air conditioner (an important feature of “camping” in southern Louisiana), and then had to make plans for the following day.

The original plan was to take to the boys to the World War II Museum, but based on our impressions, and after a discussion with Robert and Laura, we decided the boys would profit more from the experience if they were a few years older. So, what else to do? Tour New Orleans cemeteries? No. Sample some cajun fare? No. Visit some jazz clubs? No. The “other kind” of clubs? Probably not for a few years. Swamp excursion? Nope. Maybe a “Confederacy of Dunces” tour? (There actually is a statue of Ignatius J. Reilly somewhere in New Orleans.) Don’t think a two-year-old would appreciate the literary significance of that tour.

Finally, Robert and Laura hit on the perfect solution: a tour on the riverboat Natchez, along with a buffet lunch aboard. Perfect for little boys and, actually, pretty interesting for the grownups as well. The most grownup-engaging part of which is that we actually got to tour the engine room. Except that the boiler is power by diesel fuel instead of coal, these are the real thing: huge steam-driven push-pull pistons driving the two arms of the paddle wheel, with no supplemental drive (i.e., no “cheating” with propellers).

Then back to the campground for a quick trip to the PX for haircuts (technically the NEX), then back to several hours of the boys doing drag races and 100-yard dashes on the campground road.

So now it’s off to Pensacola.

We’re depleted. We’ve spent the past couple days at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. This was a bucket list item for both of us and was supposed to be a stroll through a period of U.S. history that both of us could relate to, me because of my dad’s role as a Navy pilot in World War II, and Wendy’s because of her dad’s role as a B-17 pilot. Easy-peasy, connect with our parents’ era, see some exhibits, maybe see a 1940s musical show, and wait for Robert and family to show up in a couple days.

Things started off on a particularly high note. We had the honor of meeting the last surviving crewman from the U.S.S. Indianapolis, Sgt (fmr) Edgar Harrell, and his escort, Marine Capt (fmr) Donald Montefusco, and got to spend an hour chatting with them about those fateful days in 1945.

Then it was off to the first exhibit: the “Arsenal of Democracy,” describing how America geared up for the war effort. Mussolini mocked America, saying that all we could do was to make refrigerators. Well, Benito baby, as Eisenhower said, there is no force on earth like that of a democracy enraged, and it’s a surprisingly small step from a refrigerator to a bomber, and when America created a “war production board” to oversee conversion from consumer goods to war materiel, Mussolini and his Axis cronies learned first-hand exactly what America’s “refrigerator” factories could do: 108,000 tanks; 97,000 bombers; 100,000 fighters; 24 aircraft carriers; 324 destroyers; and 100 billion (that’s billion, with a “b”) bullets. Add to that 15 million men and women in the armed forces. Oh, and in our spare time, we developed the atomic bomb to vaporize the little Axis creeps in the Orient. So far with the museum, we’re pretty good, so with that exhibit done, we were off to the D-Day exhibit.

At this point, though, the nature of our museum experience changed dramatically. The stunning might of the American response occurs in the context of human carnage of an unimaginably horrific scale. The museum experience begins with a film, narrated by Tom Hanks, that recounts the death tally, country-by-country, as a result of the war, for a total of 65 million people dead. And in every museum exhibit, the human cost of this war is clearly and graphically displayed, often in gruesome photographs, videos, and statistics. Over 400,000 Americans died responding to the evil of the Axis onslaught, and the museum does not downplay that terrible cost.

But the museum’s message is not just about the horrors of World War II, but also the heroics of it all. Indeed, in many ways, the museum is more about the unspeakable heroism of ordinary Americans than anything else. As Stephen Ambrose once made clear, at the start of World War II, it was far from clear that a bunch of farmers, teachers, policemen, and clerks could take up arms and successfully overcome an army of battle-hardened professional soldiers. These weren’t guys who were trained to fight. They were just ordinary people who responded when their country called and resolved to do their best. And somehow, out of the ordinary humanity of decent people, there arose the most powerful fighting force the world has ever seen. Throughout the museum, there are the stories of these ordinary guys doing the most daring, selfless acts of bravery one can imagine. And they’re largely not anyone special; they’re just guys doing their job. Millions of them. Over and over and over. Many times, the stories were so overwhelming it was, for me, actually hard to breathe.

We started off with the hall dedicated to D-Day. When the museum first opened in 2000, it was known as the National D-Day Museum, and it was not until 2003 that Congress declared the concept should be expanded to a National World War II Museum. It is the nature of the way Wendy and I travel that we read every display, listen to every audio, and watch every video. As a result, it took us fully five hours to work our way through the D-Day experience.

And so it went, exhibit-by-exhibit, through the entire progress leading up to, during, and in the weeks following June 6, 1944. Even that event, though, is presented in a stark and foreboding context: on that fateful date, while Americans had seen some victories in expelling the Germans from North Africa, and were moving mile-by-mile up through Italy, and had some victories in the Pacific, the entire world, save for a few small areas, was overwhelmingly in the grip of dictatorships. Knowing how this all ends, it’s easy to forget what we were up against, and to forget that the end was never certain, a point that the museum makes clear throughout.

The next day we returned and, after a seeing a couple smaller exhibits, it was off to one of the newly added halls, “The Road to Berlin.” Same deal: one display after another of the stark combination of horror and heroism.

By the end of our experience in the Road to Berlin, we were pretty much exhausted. There was only an hour left before the museum closed, and we hadn’t even started “The Road to Tokyo,” the battle for the Pacific. But we couldn’t. We were too emotionally drained and didn’t have enough time to see the exhibit in our way anyway. So we’ve saved it for another day.

After all of this, one thought kept coming back to both of us. Could America ever do something like this again? Is there enough dedication to our country, as a country, that millions of men would sign up motivated only by a sense of national duty? Do the citizens of America have the character to put their lives on the line to save others? Are we physically and mentally capable of prolonged periods of deprivation and misery to sustain this kind of effort? We don’t know. Maybe. One hopes so. But the museum experience was a glimpse into an era where America was all that and more. And we’re glad we spent a couple days here. We’ll be back.

One of the extra added benefits of military service, besides being overworked, underpaid, sent off to God-forsaken hinterlands for months at a time, and having people try to shoot your fanny off (sounds pretty good so far, eh?) is that every couple years, you get to uproot your family and drag them off to some area of the country where they get to start their lives all over again. And because everything in the Army has to be described by a TLA (“three letter acronym”), this pick-up-and-move ordeal is known as a PCS (or “permanent change of station”). (As opposed to TDY (“temporary duty”), which is where you abandon your family for some period of time, and which further shows that everything in the Army must have a TLA, even two-word expressions. Go figure.) Besides the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of military families going through this process every year, what’s doubly amazing about it is that somehow military families not only rise to the challenge, they largely show the fortitude to make it a virtue. Like this:

All of which is a long way of getting to the point: Robert, Laura, and the boys are, as I write this, in the process of PCS’ing from Seattle to Tampa, Florida.

Because they are who they are, though, they are once again “PCS’ing with style.” All five of them, plus a poodle (don’t ask), with whatever belongings they’re toting with them to avoid their being destroyed by Army movers, and towing their trailer, are meandering diagonally across the country, camping and seeing the sights along the way.

As you might expect, Laura has the boys studying in the truck between stops, getting their Junior Ranger badges at each stop, and somehow making sure that three boys and a dog crammed into a four-foot wide space for three-plus weeks don’t kill each other.

So, our plan is to meet up with them in New Orleans, see the World War II Museum together, then off the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, and then, with a stop in the middle, travel with them down to Tampa, where we will help out with the Little Darlings while they get everything moved in to their new abode.

Further posts to follow…

I guess “post mortem” isn’t exactly the right term, since technically we’re not dead (yet), but it’ll do.

Our trip this year covered 6500 miles in 32 days, through 19 states and 6 national parks. Of the 44 national parks in the continental U.S., we’ve taken our little ACE to 28 of them. Our goal was to spend retirement traveling the width and breadth of the U.S., seeing what the country has to offer, and we’re well on our way to doing that.

The highlight of this year’s summer trip was, of course, the 8-day stretch in the middle with Robert, Laura, and The Boys.

And the highlight of the highlight was definitely the stop at Redwood National Park.

There are lots of reasons why the stretch in the middle of the trip with the west coast fraction of the family was special. Obviously, and firstly, they’re family, and we don’t get to see them as often as we’d like, and they’re the only branch of the family tree with a cohort of little boys, with all that such entails. But beyond that, seeing them on a camping excursion is doubly special. There’s a Ken Burns series on the national parks called “America’s Greatest Idea,” and during the course of that series there are interviews with numerous leading conservationists, among whom there is a uniform and recurrent theme: “I developed my love of nature and my approach to caring for and protecting the natural order over years of camping with my parents.” It is true: Learning about nature by watching the Discovery channel gives one only a superficial and incomplete understanding of the natural world; camping in it adds another level; camping in it in the presence of parents like Robert and Laura adds even more, mainly because they infuse the process with experiences, such as their mandatory participation in the “Junior Ranger” program, that are fundamentally transforming, even (or maybe especially) for little boys. It was a special privilege to be a part of all that.

And, of course, there was our stop in California to see Kathy and Tommy.

Add the stays at Crater Lake and Theodore Roosevelt national parks, and this trip, despite the challenges (described below), was in my estimation worth every bit of the effort.

However, Wendy tells me that I have PAINTED too rosy a picture of this trip, and she’ll give me a good SHELLACKING if I don’t provide the UNVARNISHED truth. (Enough of that.) So here goes…

For lots of reasons, the planning and execution of this trip was not one of my better efforts. We spent way too many days doing only overnight stops. Spending all day on the road, usually on nothing but interstates, only to stop at some unattractive RV park, set up, eat, crash, pack up, and head out, for days at a time, is just plain brutal, no matter how worthwhile the destination. Plus, on both sides of the family time in the middle, we were confronted with record-breaking heat waves, which pushed the experience from tedious to outright awful. Even our stops at the national parks were too short, just a couple days each, meaning that we were rushed at each location, not even having time to spend an extra few days at each park hiking and exploring. And we ended up racing through some areas, like Montana, where we otherwise would have stopped. The bottom line is that doing this trip in only 5 weeks was a mistake.

How much of the LUSTER (sorry) (now I’ll really stop) this takes off the experience is something that requires some time to work out. My hunch (or maybe my disposition) is that the unpleasant aspects of the trip will fade from memory, leaving only the SHINE (sorry) (I promise, that’s it) of the highlights.

Since the link-up at Crater Lake, our plan for this segment of the trip has been to let Robert and Laura come up with a plan that makes sense for them and three little dirt-bag boys, and we’ll follow along and watch. In part, that’s a necessity: only the parents can come up with an itinerary that is tolerable for little boys who will spontaneously combust if confined to car seats for too long, taken to a venue where they have to remain quiet, or otherwise expected to behave in a way incommensurate with boyish realities. But the plan also makes sense because Robert and Laura have a spirit of exploration and a joyful approach to travel that makes the itinerary fun for us, and it’s our pleasure to let them guide us along.

Of course, driving US Highway 101 along the Oregon coast cannot be anything but beautiful.

But what made the trip especially fun were the stops that Robert and Laura selected. Whether it was something as kitschy as “Trees of Mystery” (where, incidentally, Wendy and I stopped on our way back to get married in 1972!)…

Or tide pools (where we cringed as the boys literally leaped, baby mountain goat style, from rock to rock, wearing ill-fitting rubber boots that somehow gained traction on moss-covered rocks…

 

Or a stop at the beach at Fort Lewis State Park, running in the water and collecting (no kidding) jellyfish carcasses in a bucket…

  

  

Or a visit to Fort Clatsop (the winter home of the Lewis & Clark expedition in the dreadful winter of 1805-1806) (“dreadful” in the sense of 90 inches of rain in 4 months!), continuing to work on their Junior Ranger merit badges, and learning how to load and fire a flintlock…

Or a visit to the local maritime museum…

Or, of course, playing with sparklers on the 4th of July…

In other words, it was four days of family time, camping and having fun, and we were privileged to be a part of it. Now, they’re headed back home, and we’re starting a trip over to Teddy Roosevelt National Park and then home.

As I’ve noted several times, the National Park Service was created in 1916 with this objective: “… to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” The tension is obvious: providing for enjoyment, while leaving the resources unimpaired. Even still, though, I am repeatedly impressed with what a wonderful job the Park Service does in balancing these seemingly irreconcilable objectives.

Our trip to Redwoods National Park is a perfect example. The Coastal Redwood trees, although not possessing the same volume nor living as long (“only” 1200-1800 years) as their cousins, the Giant Sequoias, are actually taller, reaching heights of 350 feet. Prior to the last ice age, their range extended as far south as Los Angeles, but now their range is limited to a sliver of coastline in northern California and southern Oregon. Over 95% of that range has been logged, meaning that only 5% of old growth redwood forest remains in its natural condition. The state of California preserved much of that old growth area in three state parks, and in 1968 the federal government created Redwoods National Park to add to the area protected by the state.

Which brings up the “enjoyment” side of the enjoyment-preservation balance. The Park Service has constructed the most wonderful series of trails and exhibits throughout the federal portions of the park areas. Although we only hiked for 1.2 miles of the trail system (there’s a limit to how far a little two-year-old can “hike”), the walk was truly memorable.

 

And, for reasons one would understand only if accustomed to spending excessive amounts of time in the company of little boys, the highlight of the walk, in the midst of this unspeakable beauty, was encountering two Banana Slugs (Ariolimax californicus, if you’re interested) engaged in what I assume is the slug-version of a “romantic moment.”

 

And then, following the normal practice of both families, it was a lunchtime stop at a nearby picnic area.

And one last thing. The campground in Crescent City where we stayed was one of the best. Not only did we have side-to-side spaces…

…this was the “play area” next to our sites:

As good as Crater Lake was, this stop was even better. And now it’s on to the Oregon coast.

 

 

At long last, we finally made the link-up with Robert, Laura, and the boys. We arrived at Diamond Lake RV Resort in southern Oregon about an hour before they did, which gave us plenty of time to set up and brace ourselves for the explosive energy of three little boys! More on that below.

But first, Crater Lake. For a while, we thought Badlands National Park presented the weirdest geology we could imagine. Then it was Bryce Canyon National Park. But now, it’s Crater Lake. Definitely Crater Lake. Hands down, the lifetime achievement award for weird geology goes to Crater Lake.

Crater Lake was formed about 7700 years ago, recently enough that the account of its formation exists in the oral histories of some of the local Indian tribes. At the time, what was then Mount Mazama was a 12,000-foot tall volcano, with a magma chamber under the peak growing in volume and increasing in pressure. Over the course of two to three weeks, which is “instantly” in a geological sense, a series of vents opened up around the base of the mountain, forming a circle where lava, steam, and gases were ejected from the magma chamber. Then, suddenly, with the pressure relieved in the magma chamber, in a matter of two to three hours (that’s right, hours), the area inside of the vent holes collapsed and dropped straight down 8000 feet (that’s right, eight thousand feet), leaving only a circular rim that had been the slopes of Mount Mazama. Think about that. A twelve thousand foot mountain dropped straight down 8000 feet in 2-3 hours. That’s completely too weird to be true. And it’s not just me. I was talking to a park ranger who was helping do the math and when I looked at her, visibly thinking to myself “I’m not buying this,” she said, “I know, I know. It’s hard to imagine that such a thing could actually happen. I wouldn’t believe it myself except that there were eyewitnesses!”

After the collapse of Mount Mazama, there was a rim with a three thousand foot deep crater inside of it. Over the course of the next couple hundred years, the crater filled with water from rain and melted snow and, due to an area of permeable material that acts as a sort-of “overflow drain,” the level of the water has remained constant ever since. Presto change-o, Crater Lake. At 1900 feet deep, it is the deepest lake in the United States, and one of the deepest in the entire world.

Which brings up the second too-weird-to-be-true aspect of Crater Lake. There are no streams that flow into Crater Lake, which means that the water is only rainfall and melted snow, which in turn means that the lake is filled with only distilled water. No sediment, no organic matter, no nothing. Pure water. As a result, there is a color and a clarity to the lake water that is seen nowhere else on earth.

I’ve mentioned the idea before that certain scenes in national parks are “breathtaking” in a literal sense. One of the rangers mentioned that they watch people when they first see Crater Lake and the rangers call the experience “sucking air,” that sound visitors make when they audibly gasp because what they see before them literally takes their breath away.

For all that, there was one downside to Crater Lake. The trail and vantage points around the rim all present a life-threatening fall down rocky slopes. Everywhere there are signs that read: “DANGER! FALLS CAN BE FATAL! DO NOT CROSS THE WALL!” Traveling with three young boys, all of whom love to climb and jump, and for whom a low wall is something to walk along or, even worse, jump over, made for some casual, carefree walks along the rim. Not.

 

Robert and Laura, like us, always include a picnic lunch in the middle of the day, but the dangers to three unpredictable boys from the precipice along the rim caused us to move away from the rim for the mid-day break. Fortunately, there was a picnic area not too far away, which allowed the boys to climb on lava flows, fallen trees, and boulders, all of which present nothing more than the usual risks of cuts, bruises, and concussions. In other words, a relaxed environment.

So we spent the day with the boys getting their Junior Ranger badges, going on ranger walks, and otherwise taking in the story of this most improbable place. Next stop, Redwoods National Park…

 

What a pleasant surprise. As we were driving up towards Lassen Volcanic National Park, we realized that we had some chores to tend to, and we couldn’t remember why we were going to Mt. Lassen in the first place. Who goes to Lassen Volcanic National Park anyway? No one that I’ve ever heard of. So we decided to cancel our reservation at the Lassen campground, stay in town where it would be easier to get our chores done, and hit Lassen for an hour or so, just to say we were there.

First of all, the little fall-back KOA campground turned out to be one that had won an award of excellence every year for a couple dozen years. It was really one of the best places we’ve ever stayed.

But the park itself was the big surprise. It was not only stunningly beautiful…

…the park memorialized those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction events that we keep running into at national parks. Apparently, there are four kinds of volcanoes (not including a fifth variety that I’ve classified, namely the dreaded “man eating volcano”), and the national park is the only place in the world where all four occur in the same area. And besides that, Mt. Lassen is the largest volcano in the world of the “plug dome” variety. A plug dome volcano erupts with lava that is thick and gooey, so it doesn’t really go anywhere except to make the volcano bigger. Until all hell breaks lose, which has happened a lot to Mt. Lassen in the past few hundred years. Like, for example, this area known as the “Chaos Jumbles.”

About 300 years ago, the volcanic dome suddenly collapsed, and the rocks broke into little pieces (from a few inches to a few feet across) when they slammed into the ground, and then this pile of rocky rubble raced down the mountain riding on a cushion of trapped air. Seriously? Trapped air? Imagine air hockey played with a couple billion tons of rock racing at you at 100 miles per hour.

Then again, on May 22, 1915. Mt. Lassen literally blew its top and sent a wave of rocks, lava, and poisonous gases down the mountain, destroying everything in its path, but seemingly stopping short in places for no good reason.

Scientists are studying Mt. Lassen because it foretells what we can expect from the process of natural recovery at Mt. St. Helens. But to me Mt. Lassen was interesting because volcanoes, earthquakes, and shifting tectonic plates are those sorts of things whose destructive power is, in a way, well, interesting. It’s like those videos of lava flowing over highways and into people’s swimming pools in Hawaii. (I don’t do the stupid apostrophe thing.) Or, I’m really interested in what happens if there’s a shift in the Cascadia Fault and a giant lahar wipes out Seattle. (Like as is described in this article, “The Really Big One.“) Anyway, for the perverse appeal of nature’s destructive power, it’s hard to beat the Mt. Lassen area.

So, it was a great day and we wish we could have stayed longer. But Crater Lake, and a link-up with Robert and family, is next.