DAY 25: God Was In A Good Mood When He Made This...

Thursday, June 25: Diamond Lake, Oregon

I promised you waterfalls and craters and snow covered mountains yesterday, and today I'm delivering!  

It is indescribable. The pictures and video we took today just don't reflect what our eyes actually saw.  Stunning.  To my friend Judy who will be here in another two weeks or so, girlfriend, you will not be disappointed!  I am so glad you are getting to visit here.  And for those of you who haven't been here, be making reservations now to visit this awesome place.  I mean it!!

Well, we started the day by trying to get Murphy to quit "humping" his monkey (security blanket) in front of the other campers.  Didn't work.  I don't know what has gotten into him today, but he won't stop "humping" his monkey.  He gets it in his teeth and starts thrashing it about for a few minutes and then hops on........and to town he goes.  We tried taking it away from him (with rubber gloves on, of course!) but then he just growls at us and wouldn't let us get near it.  So we locked him and the monkey up in the RV and headed out on the trike to see what we could find.  Man, I hope he outgrows this......

First stop was for gas.  We pulled into this little gas station; heard the "bing bing" of the bell that we just drove over and out came Gomer Pyle.  He had aged a bit, charged us $3.41 a gallon, pumped our gas for us (it's law here in Oregon)  and sent us on our way.  I was still fuming over having just paid $3.41 a gallon when Chuck reminded me it was a motorcycle we just filled up; it only has a 6 gallon tank and we weren't on empty, so quit complaining.  

We headed down the road to find some waterfalls we had read about when we hit a huge swarm of some huge foreign Oregon yellow bugs.....splat splat splat....all over the newly cleaned windshield.  I just had enough time to tell Chuck to close his mouth before we hit them.  Seriously gross folks.  I think I might have ate one.  Not sure.  I have felt like something was stuck in my throat all day today.

We did indeed find the waterfall and it was stunning......about half way through taking pictures, my batteries expired.  So I whipped out the trusty little rechargeable camcorder, took about 90 seconds of video and it too died.  Errrrrrr.....why does this always happen to me???  So back to the RV we went to get fresh batteries and to recharge the camcorder.   

After waiting an hour for the camcorder to recharge, we headed cautiously back outside through the infestation of mosquitoes to the trike and headed out as fast as we could; we were hoping to out-fly them.  Arrived at Crater Lake National Park which was so much more than I ever expected.  I can't even describe it to you.  While coming down the mountain, we stopped to take some more pictures and saw a family that looked like they needed their picture taken.  So, I hopped off the trike and volunteered to take their picture.  I think I might have misread the fact that they wanted their picture taken, but nonetheless, they appeased me and allowed me to take their picture with their camera.  We all got to talking and found out we were camping in the same park.  So we made plans to get together this evening and visit some more which we did. Super nice family from Washington with a dear friend of the family, Paul, along on the trip with them.  Paul used to live in Garland  for my Texas friends reading this.  How about that??!!!  Small world!

We then went in search of more waterfalls and some crazy road Chuck was just sure was going to be the "road of a lifetime" called Dread and Terror Ridge.  Well, Dread and Terror Ridge turned out to be an old, gravel, logging road that went to Alaska, so we finally turned around and headed out of there......  We then found Watson Falls which is one of the tallest waterfalls in the state of Oregon.  Since it was a "little" hike up to the Falls, Chuck stayed at the trike and I headed up the steep path to the waterfall.  I wanted him to feel like he was there, so I videotaped the hike up there.  I was so grateful for the benches along the path as I found myself turning the volume off on the camcorder so he couldn't hear my heavy breathing and hyperventilating.  Finally, FINALLY made it to the falls.  Whoa!  So worth the heavy panting I was doing.....Such beauty.  God was definitely in a good mood the day he made Diamond Lake State Park and Crater Lake National Park!

And folks, that was our wonderful, wonderful day.  Tomorrow, we don't know where we're going, but we're going.........we'll decide in the morning... 

 Oh ya, Murphy is STILL humping that monkey......