Oops! Managed to lose some text.
Wednesday (Cont)
The Motel that night had a decent sized pool, which was refreshing after the temperatures during the day. The lady on the reception desk took all my washing off me when I asked her where the nearest laundrette was, promising to have it done by the time we returned from our evening meal. We'd had a recommendation for a good Mexican style eatery in town, and after a brief walk we found it. A table for ten is not easily found, but they sorted one and fed us to bursting!
Thursday
Last night we had decided to leave in two groups, an early and a late start. I chose to go with the early start with Chris, John, Johno and Alex. Our early start was nearly sabotaged when Chris found a distinct lack of air in his rear tyre. Happily, there was a tyre shop just across the road, and with their compressor and some fairy liquid he soon found, and plugged, the offending hole.
My final drive was looking rather grubby now, with dust stuck to the oil mist that had spread. It didn't seem to be getting too hot, and I guessed there must still be plenty of oil in there?
Backtracking a couple of miles from yesterday we took Highway 26 westwards through the Fossil Beds canyon. There are three separate sites that make up the John Day Fossil
Beds National Monument, and they are famous for the huge amount of fossils that have been found there, but it stood out in my mind as a great place for a hoon!
Ok, so one of us is confused.....
The foliage on a tree at the side of the road struck me as a little odd as I rode towards it, and soon realised it was covered in shoes! I have seen a shoe tree before, but still don't understand why.
We pulled in at a place called Mitchell for breakfast, a small town straight out of the Wild West! The main road used to run through here, and you can see that it would have been a bottleneck. The breakfast was very good, marred slightly by my camelback leaking on the bench seat beside me and soaking my trousers. Looked like I'd wet myself.
From here the rest of the day was fairly boring, as far as the riding goes. Wide open roads and wide open spaces. We headed off Highway 26 towards Bend on Highway 97, where the roads got very busy with traffic. Chris had flagged up a supermarket stop, as we would be barbie queuing (iPad auto correct) that evening. At this point John realised he had left his camera behind at breakfast. A couple of phone calls later, he was headed back to Mitchell to be reunited with it, while we filled panniers with food.
Howdy pardner.
Highway 97 southwards didn't have a great deal to commend it, being fairly straight, but there were what looked like volcanic rock formations glimpsed through the trees. This was in keeping with where we were headed, Crater Lake, which had once been a volcano itself.
The afternoon milkshake stop gave everyone chance to catch up so that we all went into Crater Lake National Park together. Clive was missing, but he had been riding alone at the front for most of the day. As we rode up towards the Lake which gives the park it's name, there were patches of snow still in hollows and sheltered areas, reminding us of just how
high we were. The dry, open plain just before the lake had "snowmobile crossing" signs, which again is something you don't often see.
Chris pulled into a car park on the left and dismounted to walk the last few yards up to the fence that marks the edge of the crater. He had warned us beforehand that the view was astounding, and he wasn't wrong! Photos again show nothing of the beauty of the place, but it didn't stop us trying.
A North Wales favourite!
The road that circumnavigates the lake is my kind of road, twisty, bumpy, cambered and crumbling, but as it is a National Park, and it was busy, I bimbled around it enjoying the views.
Our destination for the night was the Aspen Inn, which was easily confused with the Aspen campsite not many miles away. When Clive turned up, after us, he was a tad miffed having misunderstood where we were going, and where we were to be staying. There was then another spate of "changing rooms", as the cabins available were two doubles and two triples.
Reminds me of one of those little weather vane type things.
There was also an unfortunate lack of beer, as no one had remembered to stop and buy some as Chris had suggested. I offered to go back while the rooms were being sorted, and had the good fortune to spot a handwritten sign on a store not two miles away saying "cold beer".
Fridge emptied and pannier filled I was back within ten minutes and helped Gaz set up the barbecue for our evening feast
Mark