The night wasn’t too bad at that little TA truck stop in Redding. I think it was the quietest of all the truck stops that we’ve stopped at so far.
After getting ourselves organized and ready to go, we drove up the road just a wee bit to a nearby exit in order to grab the water pump that we were unable to get while still in clear Lake.
The commercial manager at the AutoZone was nice. It was funny, she had to go through a whole bunch of steps to verify that I was allowed to use the commercial account. Fortunately, I had my business phone with me, so after she called and got in touch with the commercial manager at my home store in Arkansas, she called the business phone, which I had right in front of me, so it rang right in front of her. 🙂
She was grateful that we were patient and kind about it, saying that most people get annoyed and frustrated with her for verifying that the particular person is authorized to use the account.
I guess Mom said that she mentioned that someone got away just a few weeks ago with $4,000 worth of stuff.
😬
So we bought a water pump. The info about the water pump said something about it being a press on bearing, so… I actually haven’t looked in the box closely enough to know what on earth they have in there. It’s sort of a moot point, though, unless I wanted to just preempt the water pump going out and do the job in an autozone parking lot somewhere. I guess if I did that, and I had to press in a bearing, I could probably rent the tool from the autozone. I certainly won’t have a bearing press on the road, as I left all of my specialty tools at home, just bringing the basics on the road trip.
The ride north on I-5 was decent, but it got a heck of a lot better when we took off on the highway that goes past Mount Shasta and on up to Klamath Falls. We stopped along the side of the highway several times to take pictures of Mount Shasta at different angles, culminating in a really gorgeous view of the north slopes with the light glimmering off the glaciers.
Super beautiful. 😊
It was I think both of our first time in Klamath Falls. I remember a long long time ago, I think back when I was a teenager and first using eBay and looking at real estate, that there was a heck of a lot of land in the Klamath Falls area for absolutely dirt cheap. It’s probably not that way anymore, as we saw some pretty massive houses up on the hills, but hey, who knows.
Not that it really matters anyway because I don’t much care for the northern California dead grass most of the year-round look.
Still, there was definitely beauty to be beheld.
Initially, we drove past Klamath Falls, well I did, and stopped off at a gas station, but then we realized that we had already passed all the grocery stores without seeing anything at all from the freeway. So I got on Google maps and found a grocery outlet about 5 mi back the way we had come but on the side of town and not where the freeway runs through.
Gratefully, grocery outlet turned out to be a fabulous place to shop. I decided to splurge, and we bought all sorts of different things from just regular old chips and salsa to frozen avocado chunks and popsicles and vegan ice cream and all sorts of stuff. I even bought some cold cereal that was the kind I used to eat decades ago or so. 😅
What was my shock when we finished checking out, the total came to $48 even.
😶
That probably should have been over $100 at any Walmart. It was pretty nutty. Prices were so cheap. The vegan ice cream was $2, instead of the regular five-ish or six-ish or whatever it is. The cocoa pebbles cold cereal jumbo box was only a $1.99 instead of probably $5 or more. The jar of Pace salsa was only 99 cents.
And granola bars, and crackers, and biscoff cookies, and all sorts of things, apples, ice, all sorts of stuff.
48 bucks! 🥳🥳🥳
When she handed us the receipt, she said we had saved something like $66. Usually, I take those kinds of things on receipts with a grain of salt because They compare to super-inflated prices., And yes, I think the prices were possibly slightly more inflated, but I certainly didn’t take it with a grain of salt this time. We saved a heck a ton of money. 😁
Go grocery outlet!!! 🥳
Since the next stop after Klamath Falls was Crater Lake and the middle of nowhere, we decided to go ahead and get gas. We ended up right back at the same gas station where we had turned around from to go back and find the grocery store. But we got gas, and we headed north into the wild.
The drive to Crater Lake was beautiful. We stopped many times on the side of the Little country road to take pictures. At first, it took us past upper Klamath Lake, which is an absolutely massive lake. Then it took us winding through the hills, up, up, and up toward Crater Lake.
The road ran by a creek coming from higher up in the mountains, and it had beautiful sharp colorful cliffs and volcanic formations above on each side of the creek.
It was also awesome to see The absolutely massive evergreen trees. We saw I a lot of what we think we’re probably ponderosa pines. There might have been a lot of logical pines as well. I’m not exactly sure what the trees were officially, but I think those two were probably the majority of what we saw?
Finally, somewhere around 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon, we made it all the way up to Crater Lake. It definitely wasn’t what I had expected. I was picturing this big huge volcanic cone that was all rocky that you saw driving up to it. But it wasn’t. We basically drove through the trees, until we got to the top and found ourselves right there just a handful of yards from the gorgeous lookout overlooking pretty much the entirety of Crater Lake.
It was gorgeous.
Absolutely gorgeous.
Since we arrived later in the afternoon, we didn’t get really much of any direct sunlight beating down on the lake, so we didn’t see the brightest and deepest blues that we could have had we arrived a couple hours earlier, we also missed the rain that made it impossible to see anything at all the previous day and the rain that made it impossible to see anything at all the following day. And it was still absolutely beautiful.
We took several pictures at that first little stop-off, and I saw what I think was some kind of a ferret or muskrat or something. That was kind of cool.
After taking our original batch of pictures while eating our vegan ice cream, we took the West rim road all the way around, stopping here and there and all over the place to take pictures. Pictures of Crater Lake from high up on the rim of the caldera, and pictures of the many mountain in hill ranges to the west of us. It seems like a never-ending sea of wave after wave of pills off into the distance.
It was super beautiful.
As we started coming around the north side of Crater Lake, it having snowed quite recently, there was a big old snowman that someone had built in one of the overlook parking lots, complete with volcanic black rocks as eyes and a carrot as a nose. 😆
We posed for pictures with the snowman before taking pictures of the beautiful scenery to the north.
After that, we started around the east rim trail road as far as we could take it before we arrived at the section that was closed off for repairs. Once we got to that point, we used the bathroom that was in the parking lot there, decided to omit the hike all the way down to the water itself (the rim m trail is far above the actual level of the water way way down below, so it’s a pretty strenuous hike down and then back up if you want to actually go to the water.).
Given that it was late in the day, and given the state of my body, we decided not to do it, though I really would have loved to have taken a dip in Crater Lake! 🙃
From there, we drove all the way back around to the other east side rim trail road, and we drove that one, stopping a couple times for some pictures of the waterfall and one of the overlooks on the east side of Crater Lake looking out west across as the sun began to set.
Everywhere was beautiful. And it was super awesome that because school was in session, and it was later in the season, and it was a weekday, it was honestly a pretty empty park for the most part.
I really love going places off season. The weather might not be the absolute greatest that it could be, but I love it when you can actually feel a sense of solitude in one of the most popular parks in the United States.
After finishing up on the east side, going as far as we wanted to go (as we would have run into the closed section shortly anyway had we kept up to going), we headed back to the west side of the lake in the hopes that the sunset might turn into a beautiful array of vibrant colors.
The sunset was beautiful, though unfortunately, we didn’t luck out with one of those stellar multi-colored vibrant displays.
Still, we took several pictures, and it was beautiful.
Then something happened that was completely unexpected. We missed what we had hoped was going to be an absolutely gorgeous sunset, but just as the sun was going down and the last light of day was starting to fade, I looked south, and coming up between two trees was an absolutely massive full moon.
It was spectacular. Both my mom and I grabbed our cameras to try and capture the amazing beauty of the moment, but neither of us were experienced enough with our phones to know how to take pictures in that particular light. The automated light features on the camera kept making the whole sky a heck of a lot brighter than it was supposed to be. I tried and tried and tried everything I could think of to darken the picture so that it looked like what I was actually seeing, but it just kept washing everything out.
I took several pictures, and it was this amazing moon. At first completely bear and absolutely massive, and then with little wisps of clouds going through it like you would see in cartoons or movies.
We both kept trying and trying and trying, but every single picture we took didn’t just not quite capture what we were seeing, it wasn’t even an inkling of what we were seeing.
Sunset So we tried to take mental snapshots of the picturesque scene that we saw before us, absolutely wowed by its beauty well it’s the same time disappointed that we couldn’t capture it to clearly remember and show others.
From there, we headed north, as there was a northern route for leaving the park. We headed back to where we took pictures with the snowman, but before we even got to the road out of the park, we pulled off in a couple of places with more absolutely beautiful vistas of the massive full moon coming up.
Again, I tried and fiddled with my camera trying to figure out how to reduce the light, and then boom! I figured it out!
What I had never noticed was that if I tapped on the screen before actually tapping the little button to take a picture, then three different tweaking tools popped up. One to change the warmth of the photo. And then two two mess around with lighting.
So I started messing around with him, snapping pictures, messing around some more, and snapping more pictures. And before long, I was able to take at least a few that seemed like they might turn out.
After that, we had one more stop where the road popped up into a parking lot that was looking out immediately over the entire Crater Lake. By that point, it was almost completely dark, except for the light of the huge full moon.
Because it was so bright, there was a pretty strong reflection of the moon across the water on the lake below, so I messed around again with the settings, taking a handful of more pictures, including at least one or two, I think, that will be really great. Cross your fingers. 🤞
After that last little photo session, we headed north out of the park, finding that one of our next destinations, Clearwater Falls, had a campground right next to it. We weren’t anywhere near any kind of a truck stop, so we needed to make sure that we could find a campground that would have a bathroom.
First of all, it was pretty awesome that we were able to find a campground at the first stopping point that we had on our list of places to see on our way out of the national Forest. Second of all, it was fabulous that as we showed up to the campgrounds, the little self-serve fee box had a little sticker over the top that said that no fees were required at this time. So not only did we get to have a campground right where we were planning on going to visit anyway, it was all free! 🥳
We pulled into the campground, finding ourselves an open camping spot immediately next to the bathroom, so that was super awesome.
We also found ourselves, apparently, alone. I wasn’t 100% positive that we were alone, but I couldn’t see any other campers in any of the other campground slots available.
We parked the van, and mom pulled out the fake vegan meat, frozen avocado chunks, and sauerkraut, along with the mustard and vegan mayo, and she made us sandwiches for the evening, which we ate gladly and happily before making up our beds to crash for the evening.
Before closing our eyes and passing off into Dreamland, we had a conversation about expectations and their relationship to anger.
One of my brothers ex-father-in-law used to say that all frustration comes from unmet expectations.
I believe that’s true.
Anyway, I talked about how in order for me to overcome my frustration and anger, I’m going to begin listing all of the underlying expectations that I have for each of my frustrations. Then I will replace those expectations with expectations that cannot be unmet. It will be hard, and I will likely have to, at the very least, educate my desires, if not change many of them outright, but I believe it will be possible, and I will be making that a significant part of my effort to grow personally in the coming days/weeks/months/years.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 