Halfway Home

(Tuesday, September 23). It was another picture perfect morning at Crater Lake today, blue skies over a blue lake, with only a few wispy clouds above. Temperatures were still cool, although the forecast was for a high nearly 10 degrees over the mid-50's we'd had on Monday.
So we hated to leave, but, after breakfast, we finished packing up our gear and loading it into the car. The hour-plus drive south out of the park to Klamath Falls took us through a broad expanse of high-meadows north of Klamath Lake with lots of cattle munching away at the grasslands. Smoke from the forest fire burning itself into the southern edge of the National Park made views hazy and it wasn't until we had driven well into California a couple of hours later that we could make out Mt. Shasta.
After a decent enough meal at Elmer's coffee shop in Klamath Falls (hardly the culinary capitol of Oregon), we resumed our journey south. We got stuck for awhile on Highway 97 in one of the Sisters of Perpetual Highway Construction projects northeast of Weed, but reached McCloud shortly after 3 pm.
For the last ten miles of the trip we drove through an onslaught of "Kamikaze" butterflies sweeping low across the road to certain death on our windshield and front bumper. (We later learned that these winged critters perform this deadly ritual for two to three weeks every fall).
After checking into to the McCloud Hotel, we wandered into some of the shops down the block, and Dick chatted with some of the other hotel guests, enjoying a class of wine in the lobby at the end of the afternoon.
We're off to our last dinner on the road in a few minutes. Nothing in McCloud is open for dinner tonight, so we'll run uphill to Mt. Shasta City.