Day 7 2016
Laundry Day!! Our morning started with us letting everyone sleep in a bit after pushing pretty hard for a few days. We had Trey take Harvey to a laundromat while I was at the hotel with the other kids. WIth only one bathroom for seven people, we have to do things in shifts. We all got ready and ate breakfast. When Trey got back, we packed up the room and checked out. We stopped for some local, amazing, and, might I add, inexpensive coffee to go and then met Harvey at the laundromat in time to help him fold the clothes!
Rebekah made a mini snowman!
Amazing hot cocoa in adorable to go cups! Rebekah is anxiously waiting for her coffee ;).
The yummiest coffee bean I have ever tasted, served on the top of every cup of coffee!
Sorry for the cheesy photos, but good coffee just deserves to be photographed!
With seven of us folding, we were able to get everything done pretty quickly. We all took our suitcases in and loaded them up to get ready for the next 5-6 days of the trip.
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Our main goal after laundry today was to see Crater Lake in Oregon. We spent hours in the car and watched the temperature continue to drop. We stopped at the only restaurant around, a local place called "Beckie's Cafe." Most of the food was made fresh and was delicious. Later, we stopped by again for homemade pie to go that was AMAZING. When we finally arrived at Crater Lake, we stopped at the Visitor Center and watched a short movie about the formation of Crater Lake. It was once a volcano that erupted and collapsed and is the deepest fresh water lake in the U.S., with no rivers feeding into it! The water comes from the melted snow in the surrounding mountains. After watching the movie, we were even more excited to see this beautiful lake! Apparently in our excitement upon seeing an "Avalanche" road sign (seriously!), Harvey must have crossed a yellow line. Before we knew it, we saw flashing blue lights. Again (if you don't know about our last road trip police experience, look on the blog the story of when we got pulled over in Canada for almost "stunt driving")! Two policemen pulled us over and must have thought we were crazy with our California tag, when I was saying we were from NC. I was trying to explain Harvey's Lower 48 Road Trip plan while Harvey kept digging through his bag of papers to find the rental insurance papers. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was in the backseat crying, "Please don't arrest me. Please don't arrest me." Jonathan kept saying, "Police. Get away. Police." Not our finest family moment to be sure. Fortunately, the policemen were nice and told us to be more careful. When we finally got out at the top to see the view, it was foggy and snowing pretty hard. Sooooo...sadly, after all of that, we did not get to see Crater Lake. Rebekah saw a faint trace of it when she walked up. But the view vanished quickly. We actually ended up trying two different times to see it but because of the fog and snow, it could not be seen. It was a bummer, but what we DID see was an amazing snowfall that was beautiful.
Our one picture of Crater Lake (courtesy of Rebekah). On a clear day, apparently it is bright blue and beautiful.
Snowball fights...not what we anticipated on this road trip!
You can see that there is not much visibility. Crater Lake is behind and below us.
Our snow baby!
The roads started to make me a little nervous, as the snow was sticking by the time we left! We all laughed because we had snow on our first road trip also! So, what a way to end our road trip adventures :).
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On our way back down, we stopped for the pie (as I already mentioned). It was a good consolation prize ;). We then headed for a short half mile hike to Toketee Falls (there was no snow in this area). The hike had some climbing, but we all made it and it the view was beautiful! It was cool, but was not as cold as Crater Lake!
This was definitely a full day of driving. Around 9pm, we found a pizza restaurant and stopped for some dinner. We arrived at our hotel around midnight. Whew! We were glad to finally get some sleep :).
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