Cross Country Trip Day 2

The second day of our trip began with a delicious breakfast at Elmers (which seems to be a chain in the northwest, we also had lunch there at some point later in the trip) then a little drive up to Crater Lake.

Crater Lake was just as beautiful as I remembered from 1987, and the water is still unbelieveably blue, just gorgeous! There was still snow around and part of the drive around the rim was still closed (it might have been for snow) so we drove around the west side of the lake stopping to take pictures several times.







After Crater Lake our goal was to make it up to Portland, which we did by early that evening. We drove around a little looking for a hotel (we hadn't made reservations which by the way I don't recommend for planner people like me, it drove me crazy the whole trip when I didn't know where we were staying!). We ended up at a fancy marriot downtown (very $$$ but very nice!). The front desk gave us a recommendation of a free rail thing to ride over to the Pearl District to have some dinner. It was unseasonably hot in Portland that weekend (100+F) which made walking around rather unbearable but we did walk around a little once we got over there.

We got off near Powell's bookstore and wandered around in there for a while, I found 3 things to buy in just the 30 minutes we spent in there (a book on Yellowstone, a map/book on Chicago and a 1989 Smithsonian guide to the northeast which I HAD to buy because it had an image of a painting of Bethlehem in 1757) I could have spent hours in there!

We went back out into the heat and walked around looking for a resturant. We went to find one place, and it appeared that it no longer existed, by that time I was dehydrated and cranky so we stopped in Starbucks to get some water, they were all out! But the nice barista gave us both cups of ice water for free! That really saved me, I don't do well when I am hot and dehydrated. That gave us the energy to walk a little more looking for another place, we checked out a brewery but their kitchen was down and they were only offering salads etc. We wanted more dinner than that so we kept looking and ended up at Jake's Famous Crawfish. The food was delicious, and we were both stuffed when we left.

After that we wanted to head back to the hotel to plan what we wanted to see the next day before it got too hot and get to bed so we could get up early. We hopped back on the free rail thing and started the ride back to the hotel. About two stops in I see some really dirty/hippie looking people waiting at the stop. They get on and of course sit right behind us. HOLY CRAP I don't know if I have ever smelled stinkier people. And they thought it was funny that people were getting off because they couldn't handle the smell yelling "I hope our stink isn't driving you away ha ha ha . . ." There is NOTHING funny about smelling that bad! We got off a stop early too because we just couldn't handle it anymore, and we both had to take showers at the hotel to get the smell off. So for that reason Portland is not a city we really want to go back to, I didn't think you could find worse crunchy granola hippie people than Berkeley, but I was quite wrong!