Day 2: Crater Lake

So here's where the wheels went off the wagon.

Literally.

Oops...	Uh oh...	Not good...

	Not good at all...

So much for my plans...	Maybe it's not so bad...	Then again, maybe it is...

Basically, I came around this corner, and there was just a bit of ice at just the right place, which sent me into the embankment. I hit that rock on the right in the second photo right on my left headlight, which spun me about 90 degrees and landed me on top of those other rocks.

After things stopped spinning and the dust (literally) settled, I tried moving around, and I heard a crunching noise in my seat. Great, I thought, one of the windows shattered. So I looked around, and no, they were all intact. So I looked down. Oh. Tortilla chips. Everywhere.

I got out and checked, no bumps, no bruises, not a scratch. In fact, if the airbag had deployed, I actually would have been hurt. But it was a corner impact and not a head-on, so it didn't deploy. So I called 911. They sent the park rangers and a tow truck, and two hours later, they hauled my car out of the embankment and on to a flatbed. An hour later, my car was unloaded at a body shop in Klamath Falls. After the tow truck driver lowered it down and unhooked it, I looked it over, glared at the driver, and said "you scratched my car!". Oh, and only when I was riding down the mountain in the tow truck did I notice that most of the roads had large drops on either side - off the mountain on one side or into the lake on the other. So if I needed to pick a place to crash, I picked a good one, I guess.

It turns out that not only aren't body shops open on Sundays in Klamath Falls, but you can't rent a car on a Sunday either. That meant I couldn't get back to Crater Lake to actually do something, but I was pretty much done with Crater Lake at this point anywhere. So I hauled my luggage a mile to the nearest motel, called everyone that I know, and waited until morning. The body shop and insurance company had already gotten in touch with each other. "Totalled" is considered to be 50% damage or more. The engine and passenger compartment are completely intact, and most of the damage is bodywork - ¾ of the body needed to be replaced, plus most of the front end, and the damage was estimated at 33%.

So the body shop got to work tracking down the parts, and I got a rental car. The problem with the rental car is that they restricted me to at most three additional states, no further east than Idaho, and one-way returns only within Oregon. OK, so that screwed me over pretty thoroughly - no Glacier, no Rushmore, no Tetons, no Arches. But my reservations at Mt. Rainier were still good, so I had to get going. And time for a new plan.

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