The joy of travel surprises

On September 10, 2019 I blogged about Visiting Crater Lake. Before we left I had researched the drive by looking both in an AAA TourBook for Oregon and an Oregon Road & Recreation Atlas. I looked at the web site for Crater Lake National Park, and for reviews of restaurants along our routes at TripAdvisor.

But some of our best travel experiences are surprises. On our way south from Bend, Oregon we stopped at the Lava Lands Visitor Center at the Newberry National Volcanic Monument. A graphic shown above let us put Crater Lake into a volcanic Cascade Range context along with Mount Hood, which we used to see east of us back when we lived in Portland.

In Klamath Falls we stayed for three nights at the Days Inn. The desk clerk told us that after we had visited Crater Lake we should see the half dozen waterfalls west from the north entrance  along Oregon Route 138 - the Rogue-Umpqua Scenic Byway to Roseberg as is shown above on a map. We took her advice on Thursday, September 5th after visiting the Collier Logging Museum. Views of Clearwater Falls and Whitehorse Falls are shown above. They are not very tall, but are located just off the Byway and sound very soothing.

Toketee Falls was another surprise. The road to its trailhead was flanked by a very leaky 12-foot diameter redwood pipeline for the North Umpqua Hydroelectric Project (shown above). We decided to skip the half-mile forest hike to those falls, which would have included going up 97 steps, and down another 125.

On Friday we drove down to Crescent City, California and then north along the Pacific Coast Highway to Florence, Oregon. In late afternoon we stopped north of Reedsport at the Oregon Dunes Overlook shown above.

Saturday we drove home to Boise. From Florence we went east on Oregon 126 and then took what our Garmin GPS recommended for getting through Eugene and Springfield. East of McKenzie Bridge we also followed the GPS and took the very scenic Old McKenzie Highway (Oregon 242) over to Sisters. The Dee Wright Observatory surrounded by black lava rock at the summit (as shown above) is a striking landmark on this route. Then we took U.S. Route 20 back to Boise.

We had two other surprises in our room at the Days Inn in Klamath Falls. Most motel rooms come with a rarely-used land line telephone and a cheap LED AM-FM clock radio on the nightstand. The Days Inn had neither. But the microwave oven had a clock display, so we didn’t miss the clock on that radio. I haven't used a motel room phone very often.