The Oregon Coast

We continued up Highway 101 all day today.  It is a beautiful road along here, 4 lane a lot of the way, gently winding and hardly any traffic.  It goes through the redwood forests, and we stopped a few times to take pictures like this:

That tree on the left is fairly large, as you can see in this next picture:

It was foggy in the morning when we got up, but then the sun came out for the rest of the day, although you didn't see much of it in the redwood forests.  We managed to clear ourselves of California today, and got just into the southern coast of Oregon, to Harris Beach State Park (N42 04 06.7, W124 18 29.5). 

6 December, Tuesday

We went down to the beach in the morning.  Tanner likes to run in the sand:

I don't know whether this will work, but I've downloaded a movie - it may be too big; I couldn't figure out a way to make it smaller:

We drove up the Oregon coast all day, stopping to look at the view quite a few times:

And we ended up at South Beach State Park (N44 36 22.0, W124 03 38.1) just south of Newport, after trying out another park which was not as suitable.  After we got parked, I notices a streak of liquid along the road where we had just gone, and I got to thinking there must be some problem with the motorhome.  However, after worrying about this all night, I figured out the next morning that some campers just a few campsites down from us had a boat, and it must have been water coming out of the boat as they rounded a curve just where we were.

The campsite fire ring here was completely unsuitable for a fire, and it was a really cold evening after getting in late because of our running around looking for a good campground.  So we just went inside, and Doreen listened to a banjo concert.  It's going down to about freezing during the night along here.

7 December, Wednesday

I thought from the forecasts we might get rain today, but it turned out sunny all day.  The bad weather seemed to be further north (in Victoria?)  We went for a long walk down to the beach.  In 1831, they built a couple of long stone jetties out into the ocean to provide a passage for ships into the harbour at Newport.  As a result, sand keeps piling up along the beach here, which is just south of the jetties.  The beach keeps extending outwards quite quickly - probably about 1/4 mile or so since the jetties were built.  Tanner had another good run in the sand!

After we got back, we drove to Tillamook, and of course, visited the cheese factory:

I have a lot of pictures with Doreen facing the other way;  she doesn't like getting her picture taken!

Compared to being an astronomer, working in a cheese factory looks like a really boring job:

Those big hunks of cheese on the right are being sliced up into little chunks on the left.

We continued on to the very upper end of the Oregon Coast to Fort Stevens State Park (N46 10 56.5, W123 57 54.8), another campground near the beach.