Days 11-13: Eugene, Crater Lake, & Oregon Caves

Thursday, May 6th - Saturday, May 8th

• Had dinner in Eugene on Thursday evening with Aaron Shumway (college band mate), his wife Kate, and their two cute daughters. Good visit with good friends. Debated politics until midnight...I was unable to convince Aaron to get out the bass guitar and jam.

• Breakfast Friday morning with John Lucas (college team mate) and his wife Molly at the Original Pancake House. I was sad to hear that the old breakfast standard Studio One Cafe is just not what it used to be. John will be running the Olympic Marathon Trials in Houston, TX in January of 2012 - maybe we'll make it down there to cheer him on.

• Made the 2nd of 8 planned National Park visits on Friday - Crater Lake. The only other time I had been there, the fog and clouds were so low that the lake wasn't visible. This time, we saw the lake, but there wasn't much else to do - most of the park roads are still closed with snow. I'd like to visit Crater Lake someday to do a boat ride or at least hike down to the lake. We stayed at the Union Creek Lodge outside the park.

• Who knew that Prospect, OR had such a wealth of cool waterfalls? Not us. We hiked to a few good lookouts, a natural bridge, and a gorge on the Rogue River.

• Saturday we visited the Medford, OR temple and eventually made our way to the Oregon Caves National Monument. We had a lengthy argument with our GPS system about how to get there from Medford. See the following clip from The Office for an idea of how it went: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yyKrS8jwSY

• OK, so we didn't drive into a lake, but we did drive over a mountain on a rocky dirt road. The GPS lost satellite reception for most of the drive, but I didn't for a second doubt its accuracy in leading us down such a harrowing path in the Mazda.

• The Oregon Caves tour was nice, but we were not as impressed with the formations as we have been in other caves we've toured. We camped next to Sucker Creek outside of Cave Junction, OR - our first of seven consecutive nights of camping...