Friday, August 4, 2006
I had driven with Sandy to Klamath Falls the day before to visit daughter Annie, husband Jason, and their daughter Samantha (6 months old). After staying overnight in a cheap (but decent) motel right on Highway 97, we visited through lunch. I then left Sandy there so she could enjoy being Grandma for another week.
I drove north on 97 to Bend, then veered left onto Highway 20. I followed 20 through Sisters and past Black Butte Ranch a couple of miles, then turned right for 5 miles to Camp Sherman. Joe met me at Camp Sherman store about 15 minutes after I arrived there. He had staked out a campsite a quarter of a mile away on the banks of the Metolius River. The location was a real gem with the tent about 10 feet from the river’s edge in the shade of the ponderosas. For dinner, Joe cooked hamburgers on his Coleman griddle. We played 3 games of cribbage, Joe winning 2 of them to lead 2-1.
This was my first experience with tent camping in several decades, so I had mixed feelings going in. However, I slept better than I ever do at home, and overall, it was great. With a lot of wide open spaces ahead of us on this project, I’m sure I will get lots of experience being in touch with the land.
One new feature of this trip was the addition of a good GPS device. Because of that, I will be giving some longitude and latitude coordinates which you can use with most mapping software programs to pinpoint a location. For example, our campsite at Camp Sherman was 44 27.876 N, 121 38.450 W . You can copy that location from the text here and enter it in the “Fly to” box in Google Earth (You can download this really cool software free at http://earth.google.com/ .) and zoom in on satellite photos of the area. It also allows you to ‘tilt’ the view so it is as if you are flying over in a plane, not just straight above. You can find your own house and view it from space also. I highly recommend that you do this before starting to read the journals from this trip.
