That was a long drive...Crater Lake, OR to Missoula, MT.
We arrived at my friend Caitlin's house at about 2:30 am on Saturday morning. To our delight there was delicious spaghetti and fresh cookies waiting for us! Best welcome of the whole road trip. Thanks Caitlin!
Saturday started out with the famous Missoula farmers market...
Theo hugged the Grizzly bear along the way...
Delicious food for breakfast and plenty of good people watching here.
After the farmers market we went to our fourth brewery of the trip...next post...and then decided to go floating down the river. So we loaded up the tubes on the car, and went to the river.
It was a little tight inside...so we decided the tubes should go on the hood.
The float was a little chilly, but well worth it. Good clean fun.
There is a national park about an hour drive north of Klamath Falls.
We have an interagency annual national parks pass that gets us into the park for free.
Where do you think we went after breakfast with our Tanzanian friends?
What Minnesota boy could come to a lake on a 90 degree day and not jump in. Though there was still 3 feet of snow on the side of the road...though we didn't have the appropriate footwear to hike the 20 switchbacks down the 2 mile trail to the lake...though they told us the lake was fee zing cold...we thought, it can't be colder than Superior, right?
We were just going to climb down the final twenty feet to the rocky shore where other people were sitting and wade in...but then one of the park rangers, that's right, one of the RANGERS, saw us in our suits and said, "you guys gonna jump off the rock?"
"yup!!!"
Thanks ms. Ranger!
It was beautiful!
On the way out of the park we decided we couldn't just leave all the snow behind...so we filled our cooler with snow. First to keep our pop cold. Second, so we can have snowball fights in the heat of Montana tomorrow!
Two just about three hours from Missoula. Here we come!
Last night we stayed with some friends in Klamath Falls, OR. Ben met Terri this summer when he was back in Tanzania with a group of students from Saint John's and Terri was with a group of engineers without borders from Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls where she teaches Math! When Ben told Terri about the road trip later in the summer and that he would be passing through Oregon she said that he and his friend had to stay in K Falls. So we did :)
Thank you very much Terri and your family for your wonderful hospitality. It was a great stop! We are only sorry that we didn't even get a picture before we left.
But we did get to go over to meet another friend for breakfast.
Before we left Klamath Falls we stopped by to see some other friends from Hanga. There is a connection between this town in Oregon and Hanga monastery because Fr. Ildefonce is a parish priest in town and he is also a monk of Hanga Abbey! Also living in town is Br. Nolasco who is a monk of Hanga and just graduated from St. Martin's in Washington last May. Instead of going back to Tanzania after graduation, Nolasco was able to stay in Oregon to help Ildefonce with some projects.
Yup. That's really what it's called. We saw it on the map and decided we had to stop. Turns out the recreation site is operated by the national parks service. That means we got to use the place for free with our annual interagency pass. Sweet. A nice cool swim on a 106 degree day. Simply beautiful. I could see returning to this place. Our 30 minute swim wasn't quite enough.
Just about 8 miles west of Redding CA if you are looking at a map...