We left Oroville CA on highway 99 until we got to Chico at which point we headed north north west up highway 32 towards Lassen Volcanic National Park.

Pretty quickly you start to travel up out of the broad flat Sacramento Valley and climb the foothills of the cascade range. You also start to see evidence of volcanic activity in this part of the world. The grassland between the trees is littered with chunks of jagged rock which landed there after being ejected from one of the volcanoes of this area at sometime in the past.

Its a wonderfully scenic drive but it is very isolated and we started to think we would not come across anywhere to have lunch. The names alongside the road on the map kept turning out to be one or two houses and not the town we hoped to see. With a sense of relief we pulled into a place at the side of the road about 10 miles ar so away from Lassen advertised as 'Groceries, Bait, Camping and Restaurant'. With dismay we found that the restaurant was open Friday, Saturday and Sunday only (it was Tuesday). However, the people in the shop were very friendly and pointed us to a place just off the main road ahead - Mill Creek. What a find, an absolutely idillic setting for a meal on a veranda surrounded by pine trees on a hillside overlooking a meadow with kids swings and slides in it surrounded by woods in the valley below. Humming birds whizzed around as we watched the boys play in the meadow below.

Fortified we set off for Lassen. We much enjoyed the park as we drove through and stopped a few times for a walk around and to see (and smell - Hydrogen Sulphide - bad eggs!) some of the views and geothermal sights including snow still on the ground in August. However, our pre holiday planning had let us down. To see the best the park has to offer you have to be able to spend 3 housr or so walking the trail to Bumpass Hell where the most active geothermal
areas are and/or you need to be able to spend a similar amount of time hiking up to the summit of the volcano Mount Lassen. Our itinerary did not allow anything like the time to do either, let alone both. Nevertheless, we enjoyed what we did see and it was probably the least crowded National Park I have ever visited.

So in the late afternoon we headed north out of Lassen with no place to stay. We had been unable to find anywhere close to Lassen on the internet or by me posting questions on various internet message lists and notice boards so we took the chance that we would find somewhere and ended up in Burney on highway 299. We were lucky to get in there, several motels were full when we arrived and the motel we got in was full shortly after we got there.