Oregon Coast is Bomb Ass

Those are Tricia's terms but they are so true. We wish that we could report mileage to you but we don't know how many miles we are going each day, or total on this trip. We prefer not to know. It is better this way, no agenda.

Today, Saturday, we wake up knowing only that we do not want to leave Oregon so we can't drive too much. We leave early in the a.m., pack up our tent from our dumpster campsite, toss out the $3.14 wine bottle that the park ranger made fun of the night before when Tricia asked him to open it (no foresight=no corkscrew), and hit the road.

As soon as we start driving, we have to stop, because it looks like this:





Then we keep driving, all along the coast, totally in awe & happy, until there is a lighthouse park and obviously have to stop again. This time, we actually get to walk barefoot in the warm white Oregon sand and splash in the water, and be almost alone with so many birds. I'm sure these photos don't do this beach justice:





So. Back in the Rabbit, we listened to all of our six CDs again, and stopped for lunch in a small town. We are now obsessed with small towns and want to live in one forever. Or in two, separately. That would also be fine. We were excited about stopping at a country diner, so we stopped at something that we both agreed fit this description and ate fish sandwiches and tater tots and did not bother with their famous pies. We doubt they were really that famous anyway. We decided to leave when the smiley waitress assured us that we were welcome to sit there all day drinking coffee. We remembered we had an agenda, sort of.

Our next stop along the coast was at an anti-Semitic fruit stand. Fish sandwiches and tater tots cannot keep you happy forever. Especially if you are Tricia or Sam. First, we went to a fancy blueberry farm and realized that we could not afford anything and did not want to. It was pretty though:




But anyway, at the actual fruit stand across the street that we found after tooling around this honey store/blueberry farm, we got sesame sticks, blueberries, and peaches. We went inside and this middle-aged Asian couple was running the store. The man claimed that all of his wood carvings were made from Myrtle, a tree that only grows in Oregon and Israel. "She's a Jew," Tricia said, gesturing, obvs, to me. The man and his wife laughed, sort of confusingly. When it was time to pay, I handed over my credit card to foot the six dollar tab. "See?" The man said, "She's not as Jewish as you think." He then looked at me and added with a wink, "I've been accused of being a Jew before, too."

This story is being left open to interpretation.

We listened to our CDs again. And around four, pulled into Cape Blanco State Park, again with the permanent "Campground Full" sign. We are beginning to see how this works. This time we quickly found our own campsite, which was a great campsite!



We went and checked in and got wood. Here we are with the park ranger, getting wood:



This wood was for a campfire. Before starting this campfire, we went to the beach and grocery shopping. At the grocery store, we bought Amy's frozen burritos and beer. Tricia started a ragin' fire and we cooked the burritos. They looked like this:


At least we can make a fire. We totally ate them.

Then, alas, our fire went out. This was tragic and we balled up an entire pad of note paper trying to get it back but nothing caught. So we went to the campsite next door to ask for help, temporary home to a 60-year-old couple in an RV, and Tricia asked them for kindling. As though they were about to go into their RV and pull out a bundle of sticks and some dried leaves. They gave us lighter fluid.

After many attempts, we (mostly Tricia) got the fire going again.






Then Sam got lost going back from the bathroom. She walked down many different paths, and then circled the washroom nervously for ten minutes before finding a path that worked. Tricia, afraid Sam had gotten snatched, became a personal rescue mission, blazing dark trails with only a pen light she'd gotten for free at the Pitchfork festival.

We shouted each other's names down dark trails until, eventually, we found one another again. We sat by the fire some more. And then went to sleep. Sam slept. Tricia, unfortunately, got her last sleep in the Motel 6 because the tent is so cold...