Day two

Today started at 6am, which is actually quite late for me. It's was a beautiful sunny morning. It promised candy and rainbows and unicorns. It delivered coffee and shopping and wind. Oh, and a whole lotta smoke from a 7000 acre wildfire nearby. And where there is smoke, there are cute firefighters. Yum!
We headed towards Sisters, and stopped for a couple of hours to play tourist, pick up some gifts, and by a cup of coffee. Then we headed into Bend, picking up a cooler, ice, and a bottle of wine. Now that our supplies were complete, we continued down toward our goal; Newberry Volcanic National Park. I had been here once before with 'the man who's name we shall not speak' and it had been a disaster(of course). It was nice to drive in with Dad, who doesn't mind seeing where the road goes, and doesn't freak out if there is no plan beyond seeing where the road goes.
The nice Ranger told us which campgrounds we were still allowed to have a campfire in, and then we hit the visitor center for a quick peek. That nice ranger told us it would be worth our while to walk the Trail of the Molten Land. She was right. The view was spectacular, the trail was easy, and the informational markers were informative. Plus, there was a crap-ton load of adorable little chipmunks everywhere, making my squee meter read off the charts! After our little jaunt through the now not molten lava beds, we headed up the road to find a place to camp. Found a lovely spot right on Lake Pauline. Set up the tent, took a few pictures, and finished following the road up to the end, which was about another 5 miles. Chatted up the girls at the resort to find that everything was closing down for the season. This waa fine with us, since it meant no crowds. We drove through the last campground on the road, which had over 100 sites. They were all very lovey, and I think I would feel safe enough coming up here on my own. Might have to do me some camping next year.
We headed back to camp and started getting supper ready. That was when the wind decided to pick up. It was warm and felt nice after a day in the sun. However, it was on a mission, and that mission was to see if it could launch our tent into outer space like a kite. We spent a lot of time holding onto the tent for dear life (and this is with our stuff IN the tent, mind you) and laughing our asses off. We finally used a break in the wind to empty the tent and move it behind some trees. That made absolutely no difference. Dad pulled the car in front off it to use as a wind break. The wind simply laughed. We dragged the tent across the road to another site away from the lake. The wind said, "Ha!" We finally figured out that if we took the rainfly off, the tent became a tent again. We positioned it in the best place we could find, staked it down, and lined the inside with rocks. The wind got pissed off and invited the rain to join in the game. It started raining. We put the rain fly up. The rain would stop and let the wind have at it. We'd take the rain fly off. The wind would hoot and holler as the rain would get us. We finally decided that those two hoolagins were NOT going to vote US off the island, and we took the rain fly down for good and went back to making supper. Apparently, this decision annoyed them both, and they wandered off to torment some other souls. We had a good laugh and decided that we would tie the tent to the trees in the morning in case they both snuck back when we were out. Dinner commenced, followed by a few games of dominos, and then we took ourselves to bed and away from the hungery mosquitos. But not before I found and held a cuuute little froggy! Squeeeeeee!!!