Up the Pacific Coast

Wednesday (Aug 22)

Finally, I really, for sure did leave my happy family today, around 2 pm. Overall this was quite a successful visit, even though I stayed MUCH longer than my official three nights, and even slept inside on the sofa for a few nights. Monday morning was quite stressful, and Martha and I faced it bravely, but other than that it was great.

I ate at a little place at the south end of Hopland called Burger Me. The burger was very good, but the place was pretty ragged, a grimy little outbuilding behind a gas station.The clientele was pretty ragged also. Fieldworkers, creepy Harley riders and what I took to be gangbangers from Oakland. The Oakland dudes and others were actually pretty nice – hold the door open, that sort of thing … except for the Harley couple, they sucked.

My van is Running on Empty according to my warning light! The odometer sez I have another 50 miles or so, but the repair folks had it for four days (!!) and I don’t know how long they ran the engine. Better safe than sorry! I drove a few miles out of the way to get diesel tonight just so I don’t stress about it at the campground.

The first Army Corps campground, Kyen, was closed because it’s being used as a firefighter base. The second is, Bushay, is open.

I picked a nice spot, but a few minutes after I settled in my neighbors returned and they were loud and stupid, so I moved to a different nice spot. I had my choice of 80 or so sites in this giant, extremely well-engineered facility.

Thursday

I have mentioned before that the Army Corps has a distinctive, top-down approach to running a campground. If there is not a live human at the gate at the entrance, they seem to be at a loss for how to register campers. So I didn’t pay at all. Honestly I would have been happy to fork over my $12.50 if I had any idea how to do it, but I didn’t. Nobody came by last night, and by 9:30 nobody had come this morning. Hanging out waiting for someone to come is stressful, so I threw my chair and stuff in the back and drove about halfway down the access road and pulled off in a picnic area to finish the rest of my morning activities. Felt much better.

Willets always strikes me as a sad little town. I did find a sad-ish little bakery next to the Goodwill in a sad little shopping center. The almond croissant looked good on the shelf, but was decidedly NOT good. Instead of the flaky texture a croissant is supposed to have, it was the texture and density of a hamburger bun with (very little) almond paste in it – yeech. I love them, but I’ve got to stop ordering them in marginal places. There was wifi though, and get your own refill coffee, so it wasn’t all bad.

So, the report so far is: coffee place this morning was weird, the burger place was weird, the campground was weird … maybe it’s me, maybe I’m weird. Maybe I’m entering the “get off my lawn” phase of old age where everybody sucks. Not a good attitude for driving across the of the country.

The drive from here to Eureka is pretty familiar now. There’s the wide-open four lane parts, then the narrow, dark two lane parts, the small towns, the rivers, the bridges, the redwoods. I always try to not let myself get so jaded that I don’t stop to notice how awe-inspiring a redwood forest really is.

In Eureka, went straight to Because Coffee, where Katie was closing up for the day. Unfortunately I came on an awful, very bad day for her. This morning some dumbass kid from Florida broadsided her on her eight block commute straight down 6th Street to work. He stopped for his stop sign. There is no stop sign her direction, but “he thought there was”, so BOOM! Possibly totaled her car, gave her neck pain, ruined her week, a real clusterfuck.  She was still a great host, gave me a key to her place, hooked me up with my own room, but she had a lot of stuff to deal with. Blessings and good luck to her.

Friday

Drove Katie to work and hung out there till 1. Said my goodbyes and good lucks and drove a mile to The Chalet, my go-to greasy spoon when heading out of Eureka to the north.

Twenty miles on there was a road repair stop. About 40 cars backed up. This of course means that after the wait, when you finally get to go, you are traveling these narrow roads in a moving 40 car traffic jam. Fortunately, the wide parking areas of Big Lagoon came up pretty soon, so I dropped out of the scrum and took a little nap. Just a normal distribution of cars when I rejoined the stream … much better.

There was actually a substantial herd of Roosevelt Elk hanging out at the official elk-watching meadow today! I didn’t stop, but it was cool to glimpse them among the jammed up cars.

I did stop in the Crescent City park with the cool ocean overlook for a while. It seemed like a nicer place to while away some of the afternoon than the Lucky 7 parking lot.

Onward. Rejoin 101 and drive past the rear parking lot of the huge Pelican Bay complex, “hidden” by a skinny little bit of forest 20′ wide. It’s jarring every time in such a green, peaceful area, to think of the awfulness inside those walls.

Feeling lucky at the Lucky 7 tonight!

Gosh I like staying here. There’s nothing particularly awesome about it. You’re just hanging out in a parking lot after all. But it’s so easy! Just find the spot that works best for you and park, and that’s that. My preferred edge spots were all taken, so I parked a spot away from the backside of the RV parked at the edge. I got out my chair and hung in the shade of the van in the space between me and the RV till dark. No hiking the neighborhood tonight. It’s cloudy, so sunset was easily missable. I did a walk-through on the casino, but didn’t stay. My body has been saying eat a salad, but there was literally nothing green on the menu, not even a salad option instead of fries.

Saturday

A fifteen minute drive to a nice breakfast at Compass Rose, a very handy place in Brookings I’ve been to a couple of times before. Then the suckage started…

To cut to the chase, every campground on the Oregon Coast for the next 130 miles was FULL. Harris Beach, right outside Brookings was FULL at 1:30. Humbug Mountain was FULL, Cape Blanco is always FULL. The state campgrounds seem to have a policy of posting a FULL sign on the highway, which is great because it saves everybody the annoyance of driving in and milling around in their huge RVs. The National Forest campgrounds are more random about vacancy status. Most make you drive the mile or four on the access road to the sign-in board to see the FULL sign. I did for Eel Creek, Tahkenich, Tyee, Sutton, Alder Dunes … and they were indeed all FULL when I got there … having made myself ten minutes later to the next campground because of the fruitless detour.

The biggest defeat of the day was at Winchester Bay. I was sure that even if the Windy Cove campgrounds were full, there would certainly be spaces in that huge RV lot on the pier. Maybe that would be true on most weekends, but this weekend there is apparently some kind of vintage car rally going on. Bright yellow GTs and red Mustangs, and all manner of vintage trucks were driving around and around and around. The Windy Coves were both full-on parties, and yes, the pier had the now-familiar FULL sign out. Now I realize what I am up against, I am officially concerned.

There is a big campground behind Old Town Florence that is usually too pricy for me – FULL. aaarrgh. Rock Creek had a FULL sign which was saved me the eight mile detour. At Cape Perpetua I did have to get off the road to see the FULL sign. Finally in Yachats, it’s about 7:15, getting dark, and I hit rock bottom. I parked by the beach and started planning my night of sleeping in parking lots for a while and moving on.

The next town will be Waldport, at the mouth of the Alsea River. I took a flier on calling one of the private campgrounds which I usually ignore and got lucky!

It was a few miles inland. Take a right in downtown Waldport on the River Road, drive eight or so miles up the river to where there are three shabby river fisherman campgrounds in a row. My instructions are to drive to the second entrance (second from what?), then down to site 8 (sites are unmarked) and knock on the door and they’ll take me to my tent spot. Took some bumbling about, but I got there and the nice dude took me down to an amazing spot! A little plot of grass at the edge of the campground next to a field and 40 yards from the actual landing. Just a great little stopover. I couldn’t be happier with how a trying day ended so nicely.

Sunday

So the lesson of yesterday (there was a lesson?) is that it takes a little adversity to force you our of your rut to learn new things. No way I would have discovered this really cool place to stay at a shabby looking campground on the Alsea River if I wasn’t desperate. Good for me.

There’s a little breakfast place outside the Newport Harbor that serves seafood and eggs. The service is kind of “fuck you”, but the food is pretty good. They did not have the oysters and eggs today, but I still had a nice breakfast. Then I hung around the harbor for a while because it’s a really cool place. It was the wrong time of day lose myself at the Rogue Brewery for a few hours. I crossed the big bridge across the harbor and actually explored the town of Newport for a while. They have a long stretch of really nice beach! It’s not visible from the Coast Highway, so I had no idea it was there. The first part is a city park (very nice!), but then there are miles of neighborhoods a wide, clean-looking white sand beach.

There is a compact little state park tucked into the seven mile long urban that is Lincoln City, along the edge of Devil’s Lake, one of wonderful bodies of pure, fresh water right next to the beach. That’s my plan for tonight.

But first, I drove past a few miles to do a drive-by on Chinook Winds to make sure the rumors are true. Sadly they are. There is now stupid Casino bureaucracy required to stay there :( Chinook Winds is no longer here for me. So sad. It wasn’t that great a place to stay anyway, but it sure was handy to know that whatever else had happened that day, if you could make it to Chinook Winds, you had a place to sleep.  101 up here is quite tiresome, so I backtracked on residential streets close to the beach to return to Devil’s Lake

The check-in lady was a good one! Instead of assigning me a spot (which I hate) she marked the open ones and let me drive around and pick. The funny part is that when I went back to say I want Site A-18 she said “oh, that’s the one I was going to give you”. So there you are!

It rained all night. Well, all night for my purposes anyway. I settled into my spot and set up at the picnic table for some blogging around 4:15. Very soon little mist droplets started collecting. This happened yesterday, so my assumption was that it was just slightly thicker coastal fog. But it kept getting thicker. I moved inside but left the door open because it’s really very pretty at times like that. But by now it was actual steady rain, shit was getting wet. So I had to shut the door and hang out in the slightly muggy van. It rained till bedtime for sure.