Yesterday, we came close to running out of gas. We missed filling up in Klamath Falls but fortunately we found a tiny gas station at a place that doesn’t have a name, at the junction of Hwy 97 and 138. The gas price was better than we expected for such a remote place.
Arriving at Diamond Lake campground, we changed our site from a reserved one to one that was a first come first serve kind of site. This new site is more shady and private and it was easier to back into. It is for a larger group and has a double wide parking spot.
We love this campground it is so beautiful with all the trees and lush carpet of waist high greenery, dotted with wild flowers including: Indian Paintbrush, Yarrow, Buttercups, orange/yellow Columbine, and something that looks similar to Golden Rod, all around the campsites. The site we turn down has a beautiful water front view but was a lot more open to provide that view and thus less private.
In the evening the lake sparkles and glitters, which, Heather guesses that it may be why they call it Diamond Lake. It is peaceful here. We decide we are going to stay here another night and give up a night in a Portland hotel. It will mean not seeing Portland but I think the kids are happy to do that.
An eleven mile bike goes around the lake. It is supposed to be generally level to make a nice ride. After riding my bike to the ranger station, about a mile, I decide to stay at the campsite and take it easy while everyone else goes ahead and ride around the lake. Maybe it is the elevation that is wearing me out. Plus it is nice to just relax after getting everything ready all week.
This is a place that we would defiantly stay at again.
Last night we did dinner real easy, Mountain House meals. Tonight we will cook tin foil dinners, beef, potatoes, carrots, onions, cream of mushroom soup, and seasonings wrapped in aluminum foil and cooked in the coals. We will fry up some doughnuts for lunch.
Continued…
We fried the doughnuts for dinner. They were a hit! Only they were made into drop doughnuts of a sort as there was no way to roll the dough out and they were a bit sticky.
The campground here in Oregon is about three miles long and runs between hwy 138 and Diamond Lake. There are two country stores at each end. The north store has a lot more to offer, but the south store has a counter to serve scoops of ice cream. There is only carton ice cream at the north store.
Five miles was the length I covered today riding up to the north store. That makes about seven miles total today if you count riding down to the ranger stop. It was a good day. Everybody else did the eleven mile loop around the lake. Then the boys continued to ride because eleven miles was not enough. They ran errands to and from the store. One errand was back to the north store for a carton of ice cream that we didn’t pick up because we figured we would pick it up at the south store, but they didn’t carry any cartons of ice cream so o back to the north store they went.
Around the campfire this blog came up and so I asked what things they thought I should make sure to include. One was the bear the other the explosion. First the bear story, along the lake bike ride, Jacob came across a bear. Not a large bear, but not so small that you would be concerned about a momma bear. The bear apparently ran across Jacob’s path, not too far from Jacob and climbed a tree. All the other riders saw the bear, less than ten feet away, though, not as close as Jacob. He mentions that it is weird because on another bike ride not too long ago he saw a different bear. Bears must mean something to him.
The other experience the children wanted me to share is the exploding ice cream. When H opened the ice cream the ice cream literally popped out of the container. There must have been quite some pressure in that carton.
Now it is getting cold. It is time to hit the sack.
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