American Road Trip Journal, Entry #1: Cascade Lakes

Monday, October 16th, 2017

This is the first in a new series about our upcoming road trip across the United States. We are going to be on the road for around 3 months (I'll post more details about it soon), and I'll be sharing our experiences here, daily (as long as I have service to upload the post, this is).

And while our official departure will be on Sunday, November 5th, I'm taking advantage of being unemployed to road trip Oregon and Washington during these 2 remaining weeks that we have here in the PNW.

Right now, it's 9:33pm and I'm sitting on the driver's seat at Lava Lake Campground, in the Deschutes National Forest. It's 30 degrees out here and it's been dark for more than two hours. It's going to be a cold night, hopefully two sleeping bags will be enough :)

But today was a long day. You see, I should be camping at La Push as of right now, but the forecast had some heavy rain followed by even heavier rain for this week in Western Washington. So I improvised a road trip to Central Oregon instead.

My first stop was Smith Rock, of course. It was sunny and hot, and there I was complaining about the weather again. But I tried to make the best out of it and took a few shots. Actually, 10 shots with the Bronica.

After that I headed towards the mountains, where I was planning to spend the night. Maybe on a forest road, maybe in a campground if there was still any open at this time of the year.

Along the Cascade Lakes Highway, I found Lava Lake Campground. A snowed and empty one, but open. And here I am.

I'm going through the photos I took today (with my digital camera of course) and the footage. My laptop's battery won't last much longer, and then it will be time to go to sleep.

And this is it for entry #1 of the American Road Trip Journal.

Update: video about this day, below.