We get out of the room and start to pack the car and notice a stereotypical cult van. White van with blacked out windows and GUESS WHO IS IN IT? YUP! The mom and her 4 kids who called us wasteful gluttons. Things start to make a bit more sense, EXCEPT, why was a woman allowed to travel on her own? This hardly seems safe - a woman driving? Alone? Staying in a hotel? Alone? This must be a progressive cult.
We grab a breakfast that Gideon adores, McDonald's. We are then off for the ride. I beg Adam to let us get a car wash. He agrees and navigator Gideon looks up a carwash on our route and finds one! He leads us there and does a fabulous job with directions. We get "the works" and get to the front of the carwash. The kids are both more excited for this car wash than anything we've done on the trip. Abby is screaming "hula girl!!!" from the backseat. (I used to be scared of car washes when I was little and my mom told me the end part with the long rectangular rags that smack the car were from a HUGE Hula Girl's skirt. This calmed me down and I used it on my kids and clearly it worked too). The workers start doing a manual scrub on the front of our car which is covered in no less than 5,000 bug carcasses. They shake their heads at each other. They use the power washer, they scrub, they power wash, they scrub again. Now two of them are scrubbing. I finally look at them and just give the thumbs up. Honestly, anything is better than what we came in here looking like. We get out of the car wash with less than 200 bug bodies and splats. Shiny and new!
We get to Crater Lake and weather says it may be tough visibility due to local area fires. We get there and it is tough visibility. You can see from the pictures that it looks like a faded picture but nope, just fog and smoke. Still the crater is beautiful. It was created by a volcano explosion and the ground melted underneath itself creating this huge crater. Then over time, snow and rainfall filled the crater with greenish blue water creating a gorgeous lake. Then another volcanic explosion created a little island in the middle of the lake called Wizard island.
The path in the park basically covers views of the lake from all sides. We stop at a ton of vistas. They are all covered in hot sand/ash from the volcano. The sand was really hot. How hot was it? Welp, the bottom layer of my flip flop melted and started coming off my shoe! Hahaha. Not many people can say their shoes have been destroyed by volcanic ash. The roads on the park are so small and high up and we are right up against an edge where you could fall down 50 to 100 feet, maybe more. Adam drives waaay too close to the edge for my comfort. Of course if I were driving everything would be perfect. Ha. Anyways, after a couple of screams, Gideon asks how many people we think have died in the park. I look it up and come across the weirdest Website Ever. It entertained us for the rest of the drive. This website explains all the strange and mysterious deaths in the park over the years beginning in the early 1900s. And the deaths are so odd and extreme. And the way the deaths are written about are really entertaining. For example, when explaining that a body had to be recovered on the mountain, it was written that "The retrieval operation pretty much killed the Park's Halloween party that Saturday night." Get it? "killed"? Also, how rude. We decided the site could become a TV show, each death a different episode. I would watch it for sure.
We end the park with the usual gift shop adventure. Gideon gets another stuffed animal and so does Abby at this point. We play a game where the kids give me the stuffed guys and I pretend to perform surgery to remove their tags (a symbol of finding a forever home). Gideon always picks stuffed animals that are a bit...broken? He is worried no one else will buy them and they'll get thrown out. Guggie, if you are reading this, you have a huge line of stuffed animals that need your hospital help. Chilly needs his scarf sewed on again, another one needs his leg tightened on, another one needs a pocket fixed and etc.
We get back to the room pretty early and in time for plenty of laundry. Abby and Adam graciously do 4 loads of laundry while I rest my leg/hip. Then we get pizza from a place we've been seeing everywhere called "Abby's Legendary Pizza". It wasn't legendary. Gideon hops in the shower and when he comes out he says "I'm not sure if you'll be impressed or mad". Not a great start. He says "I forgot I had my mask on and showered the entire time with the mask on". Impressed, Gideon. I'm impressed. Whenever I have that thing on, I am plotting the moment I can take it off. But I guess weeks of wearing it in school made him and Abby unaware of even wearing it. Sometimes we turn around in the car and both kids are still wearing their masks 1 or 2 hours into the car ride. We remind them they have it on and they go "oh!"
We get to bed and get some sleep to get ready for yet another park tomorrow. A busy time but a really fun time.
Summary: Foggy days shroud views but we can still see the beauty, we are now outnumbered by stuffed animals in the van, everyone is clean and showered including our clothes. Ended the day at Holiday Inn, Klamath Falls, OR.