jinian | Trip Report, part three

Everyone was pretty tired after all the digging, so the plan to go to the lava tube was summarily discarded, and nobody brought up the way #3 had wanted to go to a museum that afternoon. I lobbied for the lava tube, and Mom decided to go with me; everyone else was headed back to the motel for a swim. What ever. On the drive back, though, Mom nearly fell asleep a few times, so she had to take a nap before we went anywhere. I sat on the meager motel grass and ate cherries and read Memory and Dream.
Around 4:30, Mom woke up and was ready to go. We drove south about ten miles, only to find that all the volcanic parks seemed to close at 5 pm. Ridiculous. We did find one, though, the Lava Flow Forest (I think), which didn't seem to have a gate or time limit. We drove up 9 miles of washboard road, past more manzanitas than I could count in a year, to find a parking lot which demanded that we have a permit to park there. %$&#*@. Mom is just not cut out to be a scofflaw, so around we turned. We did find a scenic turnout and get some video of the vast fields of black pumice, at least, and I got a wand of dead manzanita and a sample of a flower I'd never seen before. Whee, back down the road from hell. There were many, many chipmunks, and one mule deer.
In our quest for parks, we saw a man standing in a field by the firehouse flying one of those kites that's controlled with two handles. He was pretty good with it. We stopped a while and watched him. I want a kite like that.
We went to Izzy's Pizza Buffet Thingy for dinner. (Yes, I know, we kept going to crap places. Bend has 50,000 people -- it only appeared to have crap places.) I wasn't impressed, but it wasn't bad or anything. Back at the lovely motel, we played Scattergories for a while. The game was marred by only one incident pointing up yet again just how much I am not like my family -- that would be when Cousin #3 tried to make a case for "Jesus" and "God" as "historical figures". (The one I was questioning was Anne of Green Gables; I don't even know how he got onto that topic. Of course, it would've come up anyway, because I voted against "Adam" too.) He muttered something meant to sound dire about "well, unless you don't believe..." and then said he wasn't going to argue. I said brightly "good!" and we moved on. (Both Anne and Adam were allowed as point-scoring answers by the group.)
Eventually Mom got tired and we kicked everyone out of the room. I sat and worked on my Delphiniums necklace for a while and then went to bed to read some more. Eventually, sleep happened, at least somewhat.