Our RV Adventures

After a nice, quiet morning Jan and I headed out about 2pm up to Bend to have “linner” at Boston’ The Gourmet Pizza, that along with Grimaldi’s Pizzeria is one of our favorite pizza places.

We first ate at a Boston’s in Dawson Creek, B.C., Canada in 2008 on our way to Alaska. Since then we’ve eaten at them everywhere from Jacksonville, FL, to Antigonish, N.S., Canada on our way to Newfoundland. And from Tucson, AZ to Fairbanks, AK, and a number of places in between. And it’s always good.

We both love their crust. It’s made in-house every day and is dusted with cornmeal that gives it a crispy crunch on the outside and a slightly chewy inside. The perfect mix.

We always get the Mama Meetza with pepperoni, spicy Italian sausage, ham, and ground beef, and cheddar and mozzarella cheeses. Very good.

We got the big Family size so we’d have plenty of leftovers, and to finish it off, we each had one of those ‘mini’ desserts that many restaurants now serve. Jan had the Strawberry Cheesecake and I had the Hot Apple Crisp, the perfect end to a very nice meal.

Heading back toward the park, we stopped off at a couple of RV parks along the way to drop off some bundles of Gypsy Journals newspapers. One of them, Crown Villa RV Resort, was very nice. Every site had a lockable storage building, as well as a shielded area for the hookups and a garbage can with on-site garbage pickup every day. Very classy. Guess they don’t want you to have to look at your neighbors sewer hose.

Getting back to our park area, we stopped off at the hardware store so I could get some more compression ferrules to redo a couple of the tubing connections on my new water filter install.

Then afterwards we went next door to the Shell station for cappuccinos. I had noticed the other that they had Jan’s favorite Pumpkin Spice flavor, so we decided to finish off the night that way.

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The High Desert Museum and Lava Butte . . .

Originally posted June 19, 2011

We drove back through Bend to The High Desert Museum, about 5 miles south of town.

They’ve got a number of inside and outside animal exhibits, including this Chuckwalla desert lizard,

a Gila Monster,

Bald Eagles,

a Grey Fox (OK, why are grey foxes red? What color are red foxes?),

a Prairie Falcon,

and a River Otter.

It turns out that this Bobcat

and this Lynx

are sitting like this, patiently staring at their access doors, waiting to be fed. They know when it’s feeding time.

Beautiful animals.

In another building, they had this highly-detailed 1920’s era sawmill, It took the builder 25 years to build it, and it even works.

Jan really enjoy the display of old quilts. This ‘Star’ quilt dates from 1875,

and this ‘Silk Fan’ quilt is from 1890.

We spent a couple of hours wandering through all the many exhibits, and really enjoyed it. The High Desert Museum is small, but very well done.

Leaving the Museum, we drove a couple of miles down the road to the Lava Lands National Forest. We’d been driving past here for the last week or so, and this was our chance to explore further.

We drove up to the entrance gate, and found out something the tourist brochure or the website hadn’t told us.

You have to have an appointment to drive to the top of the butte. There are only 10 parking spaces up there, so they ration access.

We got there about 3:10, and the time given us was 3:45. The gate guard gave us slip of paper with our time on it, and told us we could start up at 3:40. So we parked in the nearby lot and read. Jan always has a book at the ready, and I had my new Kindle with me.

At 3:40 we started our 8% grade climb up the narrow road. They don’t allow buses or RV’s up here, and meeting oncoming vehicles was very interesting.

Getting to the top, we found a nicely laid out parking area, and a Ranger checking our appointment slips. In fact, as we were getting out of our truck, the ranger was sending someone back down the road who had come up too early.

Since our slip said we had to leave at 4:15, we started our climb up to the top of the hill. It was a steep 100 foot trek.

It was interesting to see all the ground squirrels zipping around the lava fields, and although you weren’t supposed to feed them, it was obvious that they were expecting to be fed.

Getting to the top, and still a little breathless, we were able to look back at the parking lot,

and down into the crater itself.

You can get a better idea from this aerial view that shows the roadway spiraling up the butte. The visitor’s center is located about 1 o’clock in this photo, along the rim of the crater.

Looking around we could see other examples of other volcanoes in the area.

Coming back down the butte with 5 minutes to spare, we were able to look out over the lava fields that still surround the area from the eruption over 7000 years ago.

Reaching the bottom a little after 4 pm, we decided to head back into Bend to have dinner once more at Red Robin. This is one of the best places around to get a burger, and even better, the delicious steak fries that come with your burger are unlimited. Of course the burgers are so big, you really don’t have any room for more fries, or dessert, for that matter.

While I was there, I tried logging in to their free Wi-Fi signal with my Kindle, and it worked with no problems. More and more it looks like the problem may be with my Cradlepoint router. Of course, my Blackberry and HP laptop can log in to it just fine.

Nick Russell can log in to his Cradlepoint just fine, too, although he has a CTR-1000 and I have a 500. The tell may be when we getting together with Nick and Terry later this week, and I try to log in to his router, and he tries to log in to mine.

We’ll see what happens.

We finally got home about 6 pm, a great last tourist day here in central Oregon.

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Thought for the Day:

Never try to outsmart your common sense.

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