We escaped town on a Friday afternoon in August and made our way over to the North Umpqua River. We attempted to camp at Susan Creek, a nice campground we discovered last year but we found it full so we moved upriver to Bogus Creek for the night.
In the morning, we moved on to the main purpose of the trip, a visit to the Umpqua Valley Viticultural Area. Also known as a winery tour.
Did you ever just want to get away from the crowds, boats, hikers and noise? Living in the chaos that is Bend gets you thinking about that kind of stuff all the time. A bit of a trip east or south usually is a good cure. This weekend we went south and found Deadhorse Lake. It wasn't the ultimate cure, as it seemed that water, in a place that has very little, is still a…
A while back now, while perusing some guidebook or other I ran across a list of scenic drives to take in Oregon. A lot of them were your standard (yes, scenic, but still standard) state highways. But one in particular caught my eye as it linked together some very developed but a bit more out of the normal flow of traffic roads to create a route up the western side of the Cascades in Oregon from Oakridge to Estacada. Portions of it have been closed by landslides and wildfires ever since. Until July 1 that is. It just so happened we didn’t have any other plans for the following weekend, and off we went.
We didn’t quite make it to the byway on Friday night, but we did make it just to the west side of the Cascades, and spent the night at Gold Lake. The mosquitoes were still alive and well, but not as bad as our trip to Miller Lake a couple weeks back.
