Epic Road Trip Recap: Part 1

Oh dear.  It's been over a month since I updated.  That was not at all on purpose.  Since my last post, I worked like a madwoman until July 31st, when I submitted an abstract to our big annual linguist conference.  I haven't heard back about it yet, but I should very soon (tomorrow, maybe?).  Around that time, I got the awful news that my grandpa passed away, and despite the fact that I had just been in Illinois, it seemed like the right thing to go back again, for another week.  I just wanted to be with my family some more, and especially since my dad and brother were out of town when I visited in July, I was happy to go back for a bit longer, even given the sad circumstances.

All those feelings can be for another post, though, since there's a lot I could say... and anyway, I'm not sure this is the right place to air them out.

This post is intended to be the first in my recap of our Epic Road Trip, from July.  We had such an excellent trip!  Oh my gosh, it was all so so cool.  I've been kind of putting off writing about it, though, because I just have so very many pictures, and there's so much to say, that it makes the prospect of writing it up seem daunting.  So I decided to break it up into multiple (smaller, more manageable) posts.  There will be one post per leg of the trip, or thereabouts.

The first leg of the trip was from Berkeley up to Jevon's mom's house, in Medford, Oregon.  It was about 6 hours, I think, so we left on Thursday morning, June 28th, and made it there in the afternoon.  Southwest Oregon was really beautiful, and Jevon's mom lives in a really rural, very cute little neighborhood outside of Medford, with his sister and a totally awesome dog named Toad.  I loved Toad.  But more importantly, his family was pretty great too!

Taking Toad for a walk around the neighborhood.

We stayed with his mom and sister on Thursday and Friday night, and decided to head out on Saturday afternoon.  When we originally planned this trip, we were already planning to check out Yellowstone National Park, and make a few other stops along the way, but I realized when we were headed up to Oregon that we were so close to Crater Lake National Park.  It was almost perfectly on our way to Yellowstone anyway, so we basically had to go there.

So here we are at Crater Lake National Park, in southwest Oregon!  Oh my gosh, I'm so glad we went. It was phenomenal, and such a great start to our sightseeing trip.

I am so cold in this picture.

Jevon is less cold, and not yet tired of me taking pictures of him.

We ascended all the way up into the mountains, and the whole top was covered in cold, cold fog.  We tried to stop and go for a hike at the top, but the trail we had wanted to do was snowed over (in late June!), so we decided to cut our losses and head out of the park.  Man, but that lake was amazing, though.  It's so crystal blue, and deep, and perfectly round, and rimmed with awesome mountains and trees.  Such a cool place!

So here we are headed out of the park.  We had to drive for quite a ways before we left the fog and snow, but eventually we got out of the mountains, it cleared up, and we were in a desert!

Now, I for one did not know that the eastern two thirds of Oregon is desert, and basically completely deserted.  There are very few towns once you leave the Oregon coast, and the landscape becomes very dry and somewhat desolate, but very beautiful.

We drove for a few more hours after we left the park, until it started to get dark and we started looking for a campsite.  And just in the nick of time, we found one!  A little county park next to a reservoir, right smack dab in the middle of the state.  These pictures are from where we set up camp on that first night.

Here's the car on Sunday morning, when we woke up and were ready to hit the road.  One thing I loved about this trip is we were incredibly lucky with respect to our campsites.  We pretty much always found a campsite right when we needed one, usually only had to pay $10 - $20 for some pretty excellent campgrounds, and we got to see some gorgeous landscapes, in some really cool parts of the country where neither of us had ever been before.

Another nice aspect was that sleeping in the wide open country, we went to bed shortly after it got dark, and we woke up when the sun rose every morning.  I really enjoy being on a totally natural schedule like that; it's the way my body prefers it, and it's what I default to when things like grad school and friends and wasting time on the internet don't get in the way.

Speaking of being on the internet when I should be asleep... this concludes Part 1 of the Recap.  Tune in next time to hear and see the next leg of the journey: from the middle of nowhere in Oregon, through Boise, and to the middle of nowhere in Idaho!