Life of Brian

From 6:30pm to 9:00pm on Saturday night the city closes a loop on Main Street and Klamath Avenue between 4th and 12th downtown. Any car that was in the show (and I think a few locals sneak in) is free to come and run circles and rev their engines like it was 1962. Hard to say who has the best time at this event, the owners of the classic cars getting to showcase their ride as they cruise downtown or the spectators who get to see them in action!

We knew about the Kruise of Klamath, a several hundred classic car gathering in its 14th year, and planned our trip to be here just so we could see it. Today was the first big day of activities, through out today there were 4 mini Show & Shine events scattered around town that ran for 2 hours each. Tonight there is a Sock Hop at a downtown theater. We only visited the 8:00 to 10:00 one because we knew tomorrow we were going to the big one in a local park.

After the car thing we headed back into the hills south of downtown to do some more geocaching. We found five in a row, numbers 3 & 4 twice, and on the 6th were stymied. We walked a total of 4.2 miles in three separate loops, two of them overlapping.

On loop #1 we got to the first cache and realized we didn’t have a pen to write in the log book. Fortunately there was a pencil in the container. At cache #2 there also was a pencil. Number #3 had zero writing utensils. We headed over to cache #4 hoping it held something to write with, ideally it would have two, so we could take one with us. If it had just one we would borrow it, walk back to cache #3, sign that log and then return the writing thing back to #4. All that was for naught as the fourth container was too small to hold any kind of writing utensil. We contemplated just packing it in or driving the 3 miles one way back to the AirBnB. Then I remembered the Visit Klamath Info Center was right down the hill, 1/4 mile from the trail head, they’d have free pens.

As we pulled into the visitor center we saw a couple pop up tents right next door with a sign that said Gambler 500. After using the rest rooms and grabbing a few Visit Klamath pens we walked over to see what that was all about. Think 24 Hours of Lemons but off-road. You spend $500 on your race vehicle and get from Point A to Point B, 500 miles away, traveling on as few paved roads as possible. Looks like it is absolute insanity, so you know it is a blast. I didn’t think it would be wise to try and do it in the rental Chevy Malibu.

So we drove back up the hill to the trail head and went back to both cache 3 & 4 to sign the logs. From there we headed further into the park to look for more, but after one more cache and another quarter of a mile walk one-way, it was past noon and time for lunch. And we knew just where to get a free lunch. One of the Gambler 500 check points, Uglade Precision Driveshafts, was offering free hot dogs and hamburgers for participants and the public alike. We got to chat with company owners, several knuckleheads who were doing the Gambler and had lunch.

Being as it was still early afternoon and the sun was shining we decided to do a little more geocaching. This time we went to a different trail head for a couple of reasons, one was to find some caches and the second was because it would bring us near a cache we found on Tuesday that was a book cache. When we found it, Donna grabbed a book that she would read and then we could return it. Well, she read part of it, but couldn’t finish it so we wanted to put it back. After doing that we headed off to the next one, but after searching for about 10 minutes and having no luck we decided to go get some ice cream and call it a day.

We were done house hunting and didn’t plan on geocaching today either, so we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do, when Donna saw in the local paper that something called the Great Race had a lunch stop planned at Crater Lake. The Great Race is a timed rally of vintage automobiles that started in 1983 for pre World War II (since changed to pre 1967) automobiles. The route varies each year and this year’s event started in Riverside, CA and after 9 days will finish in Tacoma, WA.

Their lunch stop was planned for noon and it was already 9:30 and we hadn’t really started moving yet. Crater Lake is about an hour and a quarter north of where were sitting, so we jumped into high gear, getting dressed and packing some snacks. When we arrived at the south entrance of the park at 11:30 there was a line to get in, that had traffic backed up to the main road so that people coming from both directions had to alternate getting off Oregon 62 into line. We sat there for a few minutes barely moving before changing our plans on the fly.

We knew that the cars were coming from Grants Pass so the only way the could get to the park is via OR62, so if the cars hadn’t made it into the park yet, we could catch them on their way up. We got out of line and headed west on 62. And if they were already in the park, we could loop around on OR230 to the north entrance of the park and catch them on the way out, when they started to their overnight spot in Bend, OR. About five miles later we passed by a large parking area for a sno-park and there was a small sign on the side of the road that read, Great Race, and sitting there was a minivan with its back hatch up. I pulled a U-turn and parked near the minivan.

There was a couple of folks sitting behind it, facing the road, with a small table set up, they we official timers for a running check point. We asked if all the cars had been through already. They said that none had been there yet and as a matter of fact, the first car, if it was running on time, would be here in 10 minutes. It was our lucky day. We peppered them with questions for awhile and then left them be to carry out their duties as the cars came by. One hundred and six cars, out of 150 starters in Riverside, started that morning at one minute intervals and they started coming by at pretty close to that pace.

We hung around and watched a couple dozen cars before continuing west passing more race cars as they headed towards their lunch stop in the national park. We stopped a couple more times along the side of the road to watch a few cars go by before turning back east to Klamath Falls.

I took about 15 or so photos using the cell phone camera, but because of shutter lag and my ineptitude maybe 5 had the whole car in them. The best one is probably the one above which was the first or second photo I took. But do your self a favor and click on this link – Great Race – and check out the professional photographers pictures from this leg.