Crater lake - Gods gift to mankind..
Wednesday, September 7, 2005 at 10:36PM We went to crater lake over the long weekend. Covered Ashland (cute little town where shakespear festival is held), Medford (a place with no attractions that happens to have nice hotels and is close to Crater Lake) , Crater Lake and Klamath Falls , Upper Klamath Lake.
1200 miles travel spread over three days. Needless to say, we took lots of pictures.
The secret of the great pictures will be revealed later! On the way we saw many interesting places.. 
When we saw the sign which said "Weed : Next 3 exits" we were confused.. We knew the stuff was legal in California.. but this ..
Here are some shots including panoramic stitched photos.. (we take 10-12 photos in sequence and stitch them digitally with software)
It was absolutley breathtaking. We drove around the entire rim of crater lake for almost an hour. It used to be a volcano 8000 years ago. Blew its top, got filled with water and subsequently volcanic activity developed another little volcanic top within the water. You get to see a little volcano in the middle of a lake which is on top of a big volcano.
A view from the far side .. 
The happy family at crater lake..
Our daughter had some quality entertainment at crater lake, thanks to a Mayan lady and her talking parrot Guacamayo!! She was explaining to us that Guacamayo literally means parrot in mayan language and he was the smallest of the andean macaw's. He said "hola" to the little one and she was thrilled ! 
Finally, the highlight of the trip was watching the pelicans at Klamath Lake. We have never seen this many pelicans in one place. They were so graceful when they flew and landed.. looked like Pterodactyls in the Jurassic park movies. 
Reader Comments (3)
sundar, those panoramic shots r awesome. looks like it wasnt too crowded either... cool!
thanks balaji. surprisingly the entire trip was traffic less.. hardly anyone on the entire highway between shasta and crater lake. when we came out of the national park at 2:00 there were 100 + cars lined up to enter the park !! guess we beat the traffic by going early.
'twas just about exactly eight years ago, when we made our 'most recent' cross-country trip. we (i)planned on driving to crater falls via klamath falls, and had just re-entered i-5 from mt. lassen.
just about near weed, driving in the upper 70s on the left lane, i spot a buck ready to leap off the right hand side of the road (it was off the road). fortunately, i braked the car just about right. uncle buck smacked into the hood of the car and ricocheted off. once i had wrestled the car to a stop and we pinched ourselves, we learned that the buck had bounced right back into the bushes (proving newton's third law). of course, it was dead as a dodo and/or a doornail.
that night was spent at the closest motel that a cop could drop us off at. we resumed the journey the next day, but had only enough time to make a wild dash to crater lake and back.
we haven't been back yet (though i don't blame the dead buck)!
- s.b.