Days 11 and 12: Lakes and Falls

About half an hour out of Portland, we were following our GPS to a Shell servo when we spotted the holy grail: outlet shops. Unfortunately, Matt didn’t find anything, but I ended up with two pairs of sneakers, a pair of heels and two dresses (bring on the races)!



Our next stop was for some delicious pizza and salad, then we continued our drive to Roseburg. This drive took us through wine country, and we made a bit of a detour to Kings Estate Winery, which I’d read some good reviews about:



The wineries over here seem to charge a fee of ~$5 to taste a set list of wines, which I quite like because you don’t feel obliged to buy anything afterwards. But if you do, you get your $5 back. The bar guy at King’s Estate was nice and swapped the Syrah for a white wine since I’m not a fan of red. I told him I’d never seen a Syrah before, and he said “it’s really popular in Australia and South Africa”. I was thinking I must have seriously been missing something, until he told me it’s also known as Shiraz. Anyway, I tried a nice Riesling which ended up being $12 a bottle, so I got two of those and one bottle of Riesling ice wine. Mmmmm, delicious!

We finished our day in Roseburg, where Matt got a hideous pizza from a place called Abby’s, and I got a roasted veggie sub, which was pretty damned tasty.

On day 12, we did a long drive through Crater Lake National Park. There were so many campsites, lakes and hikes in the park – it would be a great place to live near! We went on a walk to Toketee Falls:



We then continued on to Crater Lake, which is a real natural wonder. It was formed 7700 years ago when a volcano called Mount Mazama erupted and collapsed in on itself. The crater filled with rain and melted snow, and is now almost 600m deep! It’s the deepest lake in the US and one of the deepest in the world. It’s about 10km wide at its widest point, and holds some of the purest water in the country. The water is amazingly blue, as you can see in these photos:





It was pretty cold up there, and we even saw some snow. Another highlight was seeing heaps of these Eastern Chipmunks foraging for food on the slopes of the crater:





That night we stayed in Klamath Falls, a couple of hours south of Crater Lake. Klamath Falls marked our first visit to Denny’s – a diner chain that we’d seen a few times in our travels – and also Dollar Tree, where EVERYTHING is $1. I didn’t really believe it, until I got a bag of pistachios, some chips and a pair of socks for $3. Amazing!