The Oregon Coast

After white-knuckling the Enterprise out of Petrolia, we spent two nights in Eureka and had dinner with Mara and Chris before heading up the coast of Oregon.  Mara is a friend of Cherie's from middle school.  Memorable moment:  We were talking about our visit to Petrolia and I asked Chris if he'd ever been there.  He replied that he'd ridden his bike over the route we had just driven many times!  That was amazing enough, but then he added that there is a 95-mile bike race every year around the loop from Ferndale to Weott to Petrolia and back to Ferndale in which he had competed often.  Wow.  There's no way I could ever cycle that course in under 24 hours, because I'd be walking quite a ways.

Anyway, we took three days driving the nearly 400 miles of the Oregon Coast.  The scenery was spectacular, as advertised.  In this blog thus far, I haven't been posting lots of photos, but given that a picture is worth a thousand words, I think I will save some space by changing style here and letting you see something of what we saw.

The first night we camped at Sunset Bay State Park, just south of Coos Bay:

I have to say that the State of Oregon does a great job with their parks.  The RV campground at Sunset Bay had full hookups, which is unusual in state parks and unheard of in national parks.  For the uninitiated, "full hookups" in RVspeak means that you can connect to water, electricity, and sewer.  The alternative is called "dry camping" which means that your water comes from your own fresh water tank and your power comes from either your batteries or your generator.  The Enterprise has pretty small tanks, so we can only dry camp for a day or two without dumping our waste water and refilling our fresh water.  

Sunset Bay had some pretty interesting geology:

I think what has happened here is that the Pacific Plate has pushed underneath the North American Plate.  But that's just a guess.  I will have to defer to the geologists.

Immediately adjacent to Sunset Bay, we visited Shore Acres State Park, which features a beautiful flower garden:

with some spectacular dahlias:

The next day we drove up the coast to Salishan, a rather elegant golf resort.  We took a break from the Enterprise, had a good dinner at the restaurant, and spent the night.  On our third and final day, we happened to notice a turnoff for the "Three Capes Scenic Byway" which we fortunately decided to take.  The most spectacular of the three was Cape Mears:

which sported an interesting decommissioned lighthouse:

The light ran on kerosene until the 1930's.  There were 5 wicks which put out enough light to be seen 18 miles offshore! This was possible because of a clever Fresnel lens which focused the beam:

I'll spare you the interesting optical details, which I only partly understood myself.   Suffice it to say that these lighthouses were miracles of engineering in their day.

Our last campground on the coast was at Fort Stevens State Park at the mouth of the Columbia river:

As you can see, the Columbia gets pretty wide by the time it reaches the Pacific.  The campground is truly huge -- over 500 campsites.  And once again we had water and electric connections.

Fort Stevens was built during the Civil War, for some reason.  Perhaps they feared that the Confederates might send a fleet around Cape Horn and invade the Pacific Northwest.  Who knows.  There's really no telling what strange things people are motivated to do when they feel threatened.  Just consider, for example, all of the wacky things we have done since 9/11,  such as invading Iraq.  This disaster will almost certainly go into the books as the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the United States.  So I suppose it's only fitting that it was committed by the worst president in the history of the United States.  Iraq alone would definitely earn him the title, but to cement his standing,  after inheriting a $230 billion surplus from President Clinton he managed to leave office with an astronomical deficit and the economy in total shambles.  Way to go, W!