More Fun in Oregon

 

After hanging out at Oswald West and getting back to our car, we stopped at several other beaches. I'll admit, they all are running together now. I can't remember which is which from the photos. I do know, that every one was absolutely beautiful.

 I loved the spots where streams would come down from the forest out to the beach and right to the ocean. We also saw some jellyfish!

 We were waiting for low tide at most of the beaches so we could get a look at the tide pools. At one beach, I went out a ways and stood on a rock to try and look at some birds. One moment, there was no water around me...the next, there was water up above my ankles. Andrew managed to catch that sequence of events.

These next pictures are from Ecola State Park, I remember because of this log jam we tried to cross. It didn't work out.

 At almost all of the beaches, we had to walk through these misty, ethereal forests before getting to the beach. It was otherworldly, and wonderful.

 

 Ecola had wonderful tide pools- we time it just at low tide, and climbed over all the rocks so we could play. : ) Low tide didn't last very long, and one particularly large wave came in and Andrew in his 6 foot height was able to jump to a higher rock. I just had to turn around and cling to the rock while the wave crashed into my legs. It was pretty hilarious.

 

We finally knew we needed to get back on the road to head home, so I took a few last shots of the trees as we headed out of the state park.

 

This was a wonderful trip. It was only one night, but we managed to pack a lot of fun in, as usual. The drive home was much better, the weather mild and no snowstorm. We already cannot wait to visit the Oregon Coast again.

That Time we Drove to the Pacific Ocean

I have neglected writing down our adventures, and there have been many. I'll go back a little ways to before Christmas when we decided to drive to Oregon, all the way to the Pacific ocean. If I remember correctly we decided to do this in one day, there wasn't much planning. We wanted to do something over the weekend and this is what we chose. It's just so us. Well, who knew that come Saturday morning we'd be battling a snowstorm. We drove six hours at 40mph or less. It was mostly under 25. We drove right through the mountains that were getting hammered with snow. We took our time, and on the other side of the mountains, the weather cleared and there was a sigh of relief from both of us.

 

 We got closer to the coast, and this was our first spectacular view of Mt. Hood.

I forgot to say we brought our adventure dog, Dakota!!!

 

 We stayed in a town called Manzanita, right on the coast. Almost immediately we drove down to Cape Mearas National Wildlife Refuge in hope to see some birds.

 You can see whales from here, but we didn't see any. There were a bunch of Varied Thrushes, which was awesome!!

 

We went back to our place in Manzanita, ate our macaroni and cheese for dinner. We were right across from the ocean and it was full dark outside but we went for a walk along the beach. Dakota absolutely loves the ocean. It was his first visit, and it was so fun to watch him sniff the sea foam.

 

We went back to our room and we all promptly fell asleep. The next morning we woke up to rain (lots of rain out there). We wanted to hike through a rain forest and went down to Oswald West beach...the walk went right through a giant forest. Prehistoric looking.



Just a 1/4 mile through the trees we came out to the ocean.

 

 

This was just the first hours of our morning, there was so much more me packed into this day. But, this was enough of a photo overload!