Apparently we saw Crater Lake

Our 2013 summer adventure was a road trip to Oregon for a family reunion with my mom, dad, and brothers.  It was awesome.  And someday I might post about it.  Ha!  :)

But before I get to the pictures of the actual reunion (or lack thereof), I have to mention on the good ol' blog about our trip to see Crater Lake.

A bit of background info--the drive from Vegas to where we were going in Oregon was going to be about 15 hours.  I had told Brandon all along that I wanted to split the drive up into two days, stopping at Reno for a night.  He wasn't so thrilled with this idea and said we should just make a go of it.  One Sunday about a month before our trip he changed his mind.  And what produced such a miracle?  The fact that we would be driving right near Crater Lake and only adding about a half hour to our total drive time.  Excellent.

So here's my cute hubby all excited for the chance to see a bit of seriously beautiful nature.  

We got to Reno, spent the night, and then started the next morning for the rest of our drive.  

And then it started to rain.  If you are a Crater Lake expert, you know that the lake can totally disappear on a day like we were having due to fog and low clouds.  Brandon, being a Crater Lake expert, knew this and was starting to rethink our detour even though it made him pretty bummed out to be so close and not actually see it.  In the end we decided to go--we had made great time and weren't going to be able to get into the vacation house before four o'clock, so we had time to kill.

Up we drove to the lake.  

At this point I must mention that Reggie was asleep.  If we haven't talked in person for awhile, you will have missed out on our Lake Arrowhead adventure that we had had a few weekends earlier.  I'll spare you details, but it involved winding roads, Reggie, Penny, Brandon, lots of baby wipes, not nearly enough plastic bags, and a heck of a lot of puke.  For like 2 hours.  So anyways, Reggie, who had the worst of the carsickness coming home from Arrowhead, slept through the twisty roads up to Crater Lake.  Hallelujah.

So we finally got up to the lookout point, gazed down, and saw this.

And we took this picture.

I swear it was snowing.  And for Vegas loving people, we were freezing!  Brandon was in shorts.

At this point, P really needed to use the bathroom, so I left the boys to take her to the restroom.  And I'm sorry if bathroom stories on blogs are gross, but P was needing to do something a bit more substantial.  We were in there for about fifteen minutes with her grunting and groaning for all to hear.  I was kind of silently laughing my head off as she worked at things and people came and went through the bathroom.

And when we finally made it out of the bathroom, the view of the lake was no better.  Darn.

So then we started our drive back down.  The above picture doesn't even do justice to the visibility we were dealing with.  I was kind of creeped out and claustrophobic with all the fog.  Thank heavens for Brandon's driving skills.

And this is the snow piled up out our windows on our way down.  In late June.

Weird.

So we were bummed we couldn't see the glory of the lake, but not crazy enough to get back in the car after 15 hours and with 15 more hours to get back home to go see it again during the week of our vacation.

I guess we'll have to hit it up next time and pray for clear skies.  We hear it's pretty.