After my conference in Portland, Oregon, was over, we took a couple of days and drove south to visit a friend of mine in Ashland, a small town famous for its annual Shakespeare Theatre Festival. It was a scenic four-hour drive down the Oregon coast.

My friend Denise was a very talented artist I had met and become good friends with while in graduate school at UGA, some 15 or so years earlier. She was from Athens, GA, and I don’t remember exactly how she wound up in Ashland. I think she went to visit a friend, liked the area, and eventually settled there, marrying a fellow who worked for the forest service, and having a daughter. We had a good visit and a wonderful meal in a restaurant she and Don knew well.

We had planned on staying two days, before driving back to Portland to fly home. But on the way down, we had driven past Oregon’s only national monument, Crater Lake Park, and decided to stop by on the way back, so left a day early to do so. I am so glad we did. It was like nothing I have ever seen before.

It was early July, but the northwest part of the country is in a higher altitude in places, and as we drove up the mountain to where Crater Lake was, there were still snow drifts on the ground from the last winter snow, months later. Some of the drifts were 2-4 feet high. That was unexpected.

Crater Lake is called that because the lake formed in the cooled lava dome of what was a former volcano. Over many years, snow and rain filled up the concave dome of the crater, and eventually, we were told, the lake level never changed more than about twenty feet, between precipitation and evaporation.

It was an amazing place! We were so high up, the air was very clear.

As I remember, the lake was something like two miles, north-south, and seven miles, east-west, but it sure didn’t look like it.

Just as the air was so clear in Colorado, driving two hours west from Denver, that time, the Rockies never got any “closer,” but they still looked like they were about two hours away.

We came up through the southern access road, and found a small information post at the top, and a series of cabins along the rim of the lake that people could rent.

There was also an access road across the lake to the northern rim side, but snow and ice made that road impassable for most of the year.

The lake was about two miles deep, as I recall, so this was a really large body of water. There was a walkway from the top of the southern rim down to the lake itself, with a small boat ramp at the bottom, but the park was only open during the “warmer” months, so it was not like “going fishing on Lake Lanier.”

Besides the spectacular scenery, the one other truly memorable experience there was, while walking the rim trail, we happened to come behind a family: mother, father, grandmother, and two young kids, a boy of about 8 and a girl maybe 10 or 11. I clearly heard them speaking Russian (or at least Slavic), which was a big surprise.

I had studied Russian my last two years in high school, and still remembered some of it, so as the little boy went up a flight of stairs just in front of us, I had to ask him, (in Russian of course): Hello!

Are you Russian? (Da!)

How are you? (Fine!) And then off he went.

My wife didn’t understand a word of it, of course, so I had to laugh and then translate. I also told her I was glad he had run off when he did, as I could not have gone on any further. But what a trip that was – a fellow from coastal Georgia, gone clear across the country, running into a Russian family on a mountain in Oregon, and being able to say “hello” in their tongue. My teacher at Savannah High School would have been proud of me.

Our side trip to Crater Lake probably took us 4-5 hours, so we stopped for the night in a small town called Rosewood, and had a delicious dinner in a German restaurant downtown; then got back to Portland and flew home the next day.

What an amazing trip!

Full of surprises. But isn’t that what travel is all about?

Rafe Semmes is a Savannah native and UGA graduate who lives in east Liberty County. His local travels bring him through Richmond Hill often.