Arcatapet.net travels - Oregon 7-2003

Bend, Oregon July 9-24, 2003 This trip is planned around 2 events, the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show on July 12th, and the Southern Oregon Kite Festival, the weekend of July 19th. We left Eureka on the 9th, headed for Bend via Medford and Crater Lake. The first night was spent at Cypress Grove RV Park in Gold Hill. We had a good visit with one of our former sales reps who is a Medford resident, and met her young son. Thursday we climbed to Crater Lake, spending the night in the Mazama Campground. Holly enjoyed watching the ground squirrels cavorting just outside the windshield.

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		Friday we moseyed up to Bend, for three days. Holly got to add the Deschutes to her resume of rivers swum. Saturday was the 28th annual Sisters outdoor quilt show. Sisters sits below the Three Sisters mountains, and is a community of about 1000 that swells to 25000 or so for this event. Over 1000 quilts are displayed, mostly hanging from the outside of local businesses. Here is a page of pictures of some of the quilts.

Monday we headed for the cooler coast, with a one night stop in Eugene. After a day getting some suspension work we continued on to the Lakeside area, where we spent 2 nights at Osprey Point RV Park (courtesy of a gift certificate door prize at a Safari rally). Thursday night we stayed at Bandon RV in Bandon, where we also stocked up on Jams, Jellies, Syrups etc. at Misty Meadows.


In Brookings for the weekend, we stayed at Portside RV. The kite festival is a two-day event, Saturday and Sunday. A few pictures for starters above, but I realized that it would take video to capture the spirit of the festival, so I've added some video links. These are short videos taken with my regular camera (Olympus C-2100) which can only do up to 35 seconds at a time. The camera puts out Quicktime, rather large files, so they've been converted and re-encoded with Windows Media 9 - your player or browser will need to download the WMV9 codec if it is not already on your computer, and may prompt you to allow that download (which comes from Microsoft). If you are on a slow connection you may want to right click, then save the target file to your computer, so that it can play more smoothly. The first video on the left below shows three kites flown simultaneously by Carl Bragel. The photo above left shows how he manages this. The second is a short piece of an excellently choreographed 4-line Revolution show by John Barresi, and the third is crowd-pleaser "Dancin' Al" Washington. Then another Revolution flown by Penny Lingenfelter and a Delta-wing with tail.
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In the video below left, John Barresi performs another routine. In the center photo above, he gets in some photography in his role as webmaster for Kite Life. Next is another 3-kite extravaganza by Carl Bragel. Next are two pair examples by a husband-and-wife team. At the right is Miguel Rodriguez, designer of the popular California Wasp stunt kite.
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Below left, the Bay Area Sundowners perform precision routines with 4 kite trains. Next is Ron Despojado. My short clip doesn't do real justice to this skit, performed with 6 music changes and 3 kites, but hopefully you will get the idea. As the festival came to a close, there was an impromptu group flying of Revolutions, that was pretty good considering it was choreographed in about 10 minutes. Finally are a couple of kites that display better in motion than in still shots.
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