Day 10 - High Desert

We spent the morning driving round the rim of Crater Lake, stopping frequently to make sure we didn't miss any views. Along the side of the road are snow drifts several feet thick that have been ploughed to allow cars through. At one point we saw some children sledging, unusual for June.

From the north end of crater lake it was a 250 mile drive through what's known as the High Desert, a huge plateau 2-3000ft above sea level that stretches all the way up to the Columbia river gorge. We stopped off at the High Desert Museum, a strange hybrid of a museum and a zoo (although half the animal enclosures are currently empty) that wouldn't be worth a visit unless you happened to be driving past.

Approaching the Columbia Gorge the scenery starts to get more interesting, and the towns become more picturesque (in the high desert the towns are strewn with rusting cars and other junk). Our first view of the gorge however was rather disappointing, we met the river in a town called The Dalles which is essentially an industrial centre, with a big dam and not much else of note. We had originally intended to stay in The Dalles but it was only 5pm and the prospect of settling into a motel that early with no other entertainment was less than attractive so we headed a bit further downstream to a place called Hood River.

Hood River is a small, quiet town that looks exactly like you'd hope a small American town would. There's a small park, the police station, a couple of hotels and one row of shops. Due to a geographical-cum-meteorological oddity there's almost always a strong wind blowing along the Columbia Gorge so the town is popular with wind-surfers, hence almost all the shops are surfing related.

Anyway, we were lucky enough to get the last room at the historic Hood River Hotel. Historic by local standards anyway, it dates back to the early 20th century and looks like it hasn't been redecorated since it was new. Once we'd checked in we wandered back through reception (where I half expected to hear the check-in girl telling some other guests being told how lucky they were to get the last room too) and out into the town to find some dinner.

It was still a little early (when you eat an American sized lunch it takes a while to work up an appetite for dinner) so we popped into a wine tasting room first to sample some of the local grape varieties. The standard was high so inevitably we ended up purchasing a bottle.

Having worked up an appetite, we went for dinner at a bar overlooking the town and river. It was lucky that the bar was at the top of the hill really, we've eaten so much recently we could practically roll back down to the hotel.