7-4-17

Once again, I was up before my 6:00 alarm. It was so nice to sleep in a real bed and have a warm shower 5 feet from the bed. We dressed and ate breakfast and got on the road towards Oregon Caves.  It was a nice drive through national forests and we arrived about 10:00. 

We managed to get 11:00 cave tour tickets and Lorelei finished her junior ranger by 10:30. We had a great chat with a ranger who is helping out for the summer but regularly in DC. We compared Parks, our 240+ to his 178 and had a really lovely conversation all the way up until time for our tour. Another ranger gave the tour and he was from the Ozarks which was the first cave tour we did on the trip. He was really great. I cannot say enough for most of the people who work for the parks service, 99% top notch people. 

Our cave tour ended and we were right on schedule for leaving at 1:00. We made sandwiches and ate those on the drive to Redwoods National Park. Unfortunately, about 3 miles from the visitor center we came to a complete stop. I didn't walk all the way to the wreck but I heard it was an RV and several cars or a semi. This was the only two lane road through the national forest so all we could do was wait. If I had known we were so close, I would have had Lorelei walk and just picked her up when I finally got through. We sat there for just shy of 3 hours while they cleared the wreckage and after about the first hour we got out my computer and watched a movie. 

Once we were through, the visitor center was closed so we grabbed a park map from the kiosk and went exploring along the state and national parks. We had a hotel room in Eureka so we drove there and we will back track about an hour tomorrow morning to get our stamps and junior ranger. We did manage to find movie entertainment on tv and I was able to get caught up in some work while people lit off fireworks nearby. Hoping for no traffic issues tomorrow.