Two Days in Bend, Oregon: Tumalo State Park, the High Desert Museum, and Cousins

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Travel dates: June 25-27, 2017

First a quick shout out to Vale Trails RV Park, our overnight stop on the way from Arco to Bend. The owners were super friendly (they loaned us a can opener and gave us chips and salsa!) and the campground was nothing special, but it was clean and safe and made for a great stopover. And then on to Bend!

Some version of our itinerary had us making it to the coast of Oregon, but eventually that plan fell victim to You Can’t See Everything, and we settled for a couple of days in Bend before making our way, roughly, down the Volcanic Scenic Byway. And Dave’s sister, Amy, and her family (her husband, Craig, and their kids, Benjamin and Louis) decided to join us for this trip segment.

Tumalo State Park Campground

There are quite a few campground options in and near Bend. We considered one super fancy private park and looked at a few others, but we ended up at Tumalo because it’s WAY cheaper than the fancy private option and because it has yurts that you can rent, so our RVless in-laws could stay, too.

Tumalo is right on the Deschutes River and only about 15 minutes from downtown Bend. It’s open for camping year round, with 23 full hook-up RV sites, 7 yurts, and 54 tent sites. RV sites are $33/night (our first introduction to how relatively super cheap Oregon state parks are).

The campground was easy to get to, though some of the roads there are a little hilly. Check-in was a little confusing; there’s no office; instead, you find your reservation on a board that’s posted next to the camp host’s site and then fill out a non-intuitive card (with payment if you haven’t pre-paid) and drop it in a box before finding your site.

We were in loop C, in site 60, a nice long site that backed up to plenty of rocks to climb on and woods to explore:

The sites are paved and are nicely angled and easy to get into (all are back-ins). Each has a fire pit and a picnic table, and good separation between sites (not always a lot of visual separation, but we had some trees, as you can see). We were really pleased with our site and with the campground overall.

The kids had a lot of fun scrambling on rocks and exploring the area behind our campsite one evening while the adults had a lot of fun sitting in chairs, drinking beer, and roasting marshmallows:

Well, maybe Ari wasn’t having much fun. Or maybe he was just pretending not to:

We didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the bathhouse, since we had full hook-ups, but there was one right across from us and it seemed very clean and well-kept:

Deschutes River

Aside from the campground, the main thing Tumalo State Park has going for it is that it’s right on the Deschutes River. River access is across the street from the campground in a separate day use area.

We happened to be in Bend during a big heat wave and our arrival day fell on a Sunday, so when we headed down to the river after getting set up, we found that the entire city of Bend had beat us there. We weren’t sure how far the walk to the day use area would be, so we drove, and parking was a little tricky. We did the walk later and it wasn’t bad at all, for the record.

The river is lovely, and not warm at all no matter how hot it is outside. The kids spent awhile that first afternoon just hanging out and wading. The next morning we came back better equipped and they did some swimming and tubing (it was less crowded on Monday morning, but there were a ton of kids there with day camp groups and the like). The tubing was of the very low key variety: the kids jumped in at one point, floated just a little ways down the river, then got out and carried the tubes back to the starting point. At one point we had to walk down to look for them and I realized that the river got a little faster in that section than I had realized….but everyone survived!

Beer

There’s an awful lot of beer in Bend. We are not experts on beer in Bend, because we weren’t there long enough to drink much of it, but we did our best and would gladly recommend either of the two breweries with food that we tried out: Cascade Lakes Brewing Company (which I have no picture of) and Deschutes Brewery.

High Desert Museum

In between cooling off in the river and drinking beer, we paid a visit to the High Desert Museum, a sort of zoo/natural history/history museum in Bend. Admission is $15 for adults, $9 for kids 5-12, and free for kids 4 and under.

We really enjoyed this place; there’s a ton to see here, and it’s a great way to learn about the area. We spent awhile staring at this porcupine:

And checked out the other inside exhibits, including one that takes you through the history of human settlement in the area:

There’s an indoor play area that Abe liked a lot:

And then we headed outside to see the extensive exhibits out there. Sadly, the otters were resting, and we only got to see this statue of otters instead of the real thing: