After the week I and the fall I'm likely to have (and with all the excessive PTO we've banked this past decade), we are so glad we had a few days off work before public school starts to take another short escape to Oregon, which has been our friendly neighborly destination for many short road trips during the COVID pandemic. Kelvin's parents had taken advantage of the budget airline (Avelo) flights from SoCal to come up for a couple of weeks and joined us for the trip.
Klamath Falls is a town (~41,000 people) in South-Central Oregon a little over an hour east of Medford which sits on Oregon's largest (25 x 8 miles) lake and which we've seen on maps but never visited. It's a little over five hours from our house without road closures (currently, with one-way traffic on the Hwy-101 north of us due to roadwork to clear a rockslide and reinforce the hillside, it took us close to six hours to get here on Tuesday) and is a good place to launch trips to stunning Crater Lake (where we stopped by last summer) as well as explore the outdoors (the large Oregon Bootleg fire is north of here, and the afternoon skies were slightly but not terribly smoky, not much worse than in Humboldt from the fires east of our home).
We booked a vacation rental house at the Running Y Resort just outside of town, which is a lovely place to stay a few days for R&R-- it includes lots of walking/biking trails, a pool, playground, and even horseback riding (although that's not available this season). The kids have loved the rental, which includes the highlight of stairs (which they don't have at home), three bedrooms, a TV, deck, and full kitchen. Kelly is watching Pepper again for us.
The first day, we took peaceful morning stroll on the Link River trail, which connects Upper Klamath and Lake Ewauna.
Iver walked the whole way (about theee miles out and back) while Niall either got stroller-pushed or carried.
The area is home to a lot of migratory birds, and we noticed this tree swallow (?)...
... as well as this American White Pelican. We think we saw a river otter bobbing its head but didn't get a picture.
The kids and I spent some time at Moore Park on Lakeshore Drive while Kelvin picked up some some groceries in town. This park even had a piano, which was an odd thing to see and a first for me (as you can imagine, it was pretty out of tune).
In the afternoon, we headed to the Lake of the Woods, a small lake (with its own resort) west of where we were staying.
We rented a motor boat and (after some brief instruction!) cruised around the lake for a couple of hours, which was pleasant, but with weather a bit cooler than we were expecting (apparently the forecast changed between when I checked it last week and Monday! It was close to 70 but chilly with the wind!).
The kids had fun "driving"
The kids enjoyed some heated pool (and sauna!) time before we all fell asleep, exhausted!
Niall said, “When I’m an adult, I’ll become a swim instructor and I’ll teach (three years older) Iver how to swim!”
"Starfish breath-holding" (anti-drowning maneuver)
Learning to swim (splash!)
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