Transportation and engineering are cool, but geology and topography turn out to be pretty cool as well.
I rushed through the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, OR, just south of Portland, when it opened, and then hustled down to Crater Lake, which I was able to enjoy at a more leisurely pace.
The Spruce Goose is so large it’s difficult to get a good picture of it from inside the building.
Taking the tour of the flight deck was especially impressive. I’ve ridden on a C-5 Galaxy full of heavy equipment and that was big. The Spruce Goose is bigger.
The blues are blue, the slopes are steep, there’s snow in August, and everything is right where it’s supposed to be.
In the absence of actual data I always envisioned Crater Lake as being eleven or twelve thousand feet up and only a half a mile or a mile across, but it turns out to be seven thousand feet up and five or six miles across. It looked just like the pictures, the drive around the rim road was a lot longer then I expected, and the reality was both more and less impressive than I imagined–with respect to elevation. The scenery is stunning, well worth a look.