Day 18

July 4 (Farewell Bend State Park, OR)

It was really hard leaving our campsite today, but our friends came by to send us off and that kept our spirits high and excited. We shared information and look forward to keeping in touch with them and helping Ev and Til cultivate penpal relationships with Nathan and Lucy because they all just got along so naturally well with each other. Cassandra and I hope to reconnect with this crew when we plan to be out west again. 

We left pretty early and drove 450 miles to Farewell Bend State Park, OR. This was a long, beautiful drive through Idaho. We didn't do any sightseeing, and hadn’t really planned to, until we came upon Craters of the Moon National Monument on our map in central Idaho and decided it would be a good place to stop for a picnic. We grabbed food at The Deli Sandwich Shop in Arco, ID (parking in front of this cool old building)...

...then continued westward until we arrived in the huge, otherworldly remnant of volcanic activity from over 2000 years ago called Craters of the Moon.

We learned about different types of lava flow and then we on a drive, with a couple hikes mixed in. One hike was up a huge cinder hill of volcanic ash. It wasn't terribly long, yet we were all out of breath by the time we made it to the top (we started running as some point, for some reason)! It was an expansive overlook of the park. The ground was soft and sandy and crumbly.

The second hike was into a cave formed by collapsed lava flow and formations.

The cave was so neat and cool, which was refreshing because it was hot outside - much of the landscape is black, so the earth absorbs so much heat in the summer that surface temperatures can reach 140 degrees. We climbed over rocks, saw multicolored lichen, and had an absolutely blast.

We stayed at Craters of the Moon for a couple hours and marked this as a place to visit again (and perhaps even camp next time).The drive was long, but the kids crushed the car time, again!

We arrived at Farewell Bend in the late evening. This was the last stop on the Oregon Trail before the last push west toward the Oregon coast. It was pretty remote and a relatively rugged campground.

We were all pretty beat and happy to get to chill at this spot overlooking the Snake River (our last remnant of the Tetons), but we couldn't rest too long because we had to eat dinner and make it to fireworks. We were shocked to learn from a campsite neighbor that the fireworks started at 10:15pm; that seemed really late to us! As it turned out, although our cellphones readjusted to Pacific time, the Oregon county where we (and the other people at this campground) were planning on seeing fireworks observes Mountain time, so we had to be careful to add an hour to the time reading on our phones (which was incredibly disorienting for the time we were at Farewell Bend).

We smashed some ramen, then drove to the Malheur County Fairgrounds for a firework treat! Fireworks were on display in all directions. We parked on a street where a bunch of locals were parked and observed the fireworks all around us, until they started right in front of us - shooting off about 100 yards away. They were incredible and beautiful and went on for a while. Tilda had never seen real fireworks like these before, and she was in for the show of a lifetime! They sat on the car, leaned on the side, and just enjoyed a glorious 4th of July firework celebration.

What a cool 4th of July - we started in the Tetons, travelled through the Moon, ended in Oregon an hour later, and saw and lifetime's worth of fireworks.