Holiday!

Oh Oregonia, how we love you. How amazing it was, to jaunt off on our first vacation day (Vacay, I say in my fake British accent, or Holiday is even better!) and borrow the fabulous "Scamper" of Rick and Linnea's. This contraption may look like a tiny camper on the back of a truck, but it has the most marvelous design with stove top, microwave, and sleeping loft. And everything is so small and well designed that you can still go driving curvy roads up mountains and along rivers as we were prone to do.

We took off south, towards Crater Lake, our only somewhat concrete goal. It really is a sort of Northwest Wonder of the World. The most blue water, set into a huge Caldera, a volcano created-elliptical cavity for water. Absolutely breathtaking. Our circuitous path to the lake itself was marvelous......slow motion stops alongside sparkling rivers. Joe would put on his waders and go fly fishing, which I must say is a very graceful sport even to watch. Me, I sat along the river in the pure sunshine and fluffy clouds, reading happily. Flight Lessons by Patricia Gaffney a delightful tale of reconciliation amidst a family run Italian restaurant, and Hercule Poirot's Casebook, the collection of my favorite of Agatha Christie's character detectives. I am not sure why I love mysteries so much, but I have been reading numerous mystery series off and on now for about probably three or four years.

The ride around the lake: epic to say the least. As Joe would put it, we went "from couch legs" to climbing 3500 total feet of elevation gain over 33 miles. The views of the stunning blue lake were so rewarding, that the tears my legs shed over the burning (it burns us hobbitsies!) disappears now into rosy colored memory.

The little tiny bit of island visible through the trees is called Pirate Ship. Well, truthfully it is called Phantom ship, but Joe agreed with me that the world Pirate is so much more evocative. It even has tiny craggy spires of rock that look like multiple masts of a ship. How I longs to be a pirate somedays, sailing off to the world's edge, sleeping out on open deck on calm seas with billions of stars overhead. The pure adventure is alluring.

I feel refreshed, like a less pale version of myself in every way. I am hungry for more books, for writing, even for working. Not for the working itself, but for the amazing progress of making it alllllmooooooost halfway through residency. And that in and of itself feels like such a reward.