Central Oregon Vacation-Duncan Lake Reservoir Edition

After we were done in Sunriver we headed off to extend our vacation a little bit longer and explore parts of Oregon we'd never seen before.  We headed off to the Christmas Valley area.  Due to it's crazy high income tax the State of Oregon is not one of my favorite places in the world. I realize it's unfair to write a whole state off because of idiotic political things, but well, I never claimed to be reasonable. I will say that Oregon went up several notches on Naomi's personal scorecard after this trip. I LOVED everything we saw, and I can't wait to go back and explore more.

Garrett has spent a lot of time this summer working in the Land Rover, and making it more packing-friendly for all the camping/overland travel we do, and also making it so our new sweet blessed refrigerator of joy fits back there. (More on that sweet thing later.) So, I assumed while he was busy gleefully loading stuff into the back of the Rover that he would naturally grab all the stuff we needed and put it in there. He assumed that since I always get everything ready and put it by the door he didn't need to pack anything that wasn't by the door. (I will grudgingly admit his point of view makes sense. My point of view only makes sense to me because I may occasionally forget that he can't read my mind.) Anyway, I should also state that when we packed for this, I was NOT in my right frame of mind. It's so hard to pack for two different vacations, and keep the bulk down. The more things that go into my bags, the grumpier I get, so I under packed us by a just a leeeetle bit. I also pretty spacey because I'd jumped straight from household projects into packing, and I couldn't get any sort of groove for myself.  Now that I've made far more excuses than I need, we were about 2 1/2 hours down the road when I said with this great dread in the pit of my stomach... "Did you pack the sleeping bags?

So, we took a side trip to REI in Bend, and got some new bags. Turns out this was a bit of a blessing in disguise, because our other bags are 15 degree bags, and that's pretty hot for most of the summer camping we do. Except--in the area of Oregon we were camping, of course--it is high desert, and it gets REALLY REALLY cold at night, even in the summer. Thankfully, the 27 degree night was when we were in the house, and it warmed up just enough for all the other nights. I was nervous about the kids being cold all night long. They were, of course, just fine. And, it all ended up ok. We keep a fleece blanket in the Land Rover at all times, so we had that, and our camping kitchen kit is always packed and ready to go, so we did very well with a little making do considering how spacey I was when we started the trip. The fridge has transformed my camping (and errand running) life already--I am SO thankful for that thing. 

We headed off down to the Christmas Valley area to set up camp and explore. And we hit our next little snafu when we discovered that the BLM website had their internal website links messed up when we got directions, and when you clicked on the campsite we wanted to camp at, it gave us directions to another campsite... by the time we figured this out, we didn't care anymore. So, we set up camp at the Duncan Reservoir. It's not really something to complain about--it was a proper campsite, but it was very nice.

 Dashboards make good sock dryers. :-)

 Lake front property.

 Clint fishing with two little tag-alongs.

 Sara taking pictures. It was fun to take pictures all weekend with someone else--neat to see what the same stuff looks like through someone else's lens.

 It really was beautiful and relaxing. The hawks were busy busy birds.

 As the evening wore on, I headed off to find firewood. I found firewood, and this amazing little spot that was one of those magical places in the forest when the light hits it just right, and everything is so perfect it wouldn't be the slightest bit weird if there were fairies slipping in and out of the trees, and the lovely evening glow strikes just right so all the textures and colors are illuminated perfectly. So, I went back and got my Brie, and my camera.

 Ah. I loved this spot.

 You had to clamber down this steep sandy/rocky hill and go over this lava creek bed to get to it. This creek bed was a bit other-worldly. Very cool.

After this trip I think it's safe to say we have some Canyoneering/Bouldering fans in the making.

 A lot of the trees in this area were Cedar. Wow, did they ever make an AMAZING smelling campfire. Next time we come down here, we are eating salmon over the campfire every night. Not only because we have a fridge, and we could keep it cold, (Sorry, but that's not going to get old for me anytime soon.) but because it would taste amazing cooked in the cedar smoke.

 And, our friendly fire-side lizard who made several appearances during our stay.

So, that was our campsite... I'll be back soon with another Oregon post! Hopefully I'll get these all up before a whole month goes by!