Another Oregon August

Saturday (Aug 22)

Fuck yeah! I’m living the camping life now! I’m on a gravel bar on the Chetco River, 13 miles upriver from Brookings. Turn left after the bridge over the Chetco. Cruise a few miles up the river, past the placid little Alfred Loeb State Park ($26/night), past the dismayingly huge gravel mine, which thankfully stops at the National Forest boundary. By now we’ve climbed pretty high, driving long the edge of a heavily forested bluff 400(?)’ above the river. A narrow, blacktopped road labeled “Miller Bar Boat Access” veers off at a pretty sharp angle towards the river. Since my destination is Miller Bar Dispersed Campground, that must be my turn. I angle straight down the slope in the upriver direction for 1/2 mile, then one big switchback, so we hit the large gravel bed that is Miller Bar pointing downriver, towards Brookings and the Pacific. It’s mighty bumpy driving down here on the gravel bed, so I don’t explore too far, I pull off at the far end of the first open space, aim my door-view straight at the river, get out my lawn chair, and commence some high quality hanging out.

I discovered on my little “swim” that the sound I hear is a small stream gurgling into the river right across from me, so in addition to all the other beauties of the place I have the restful sound of falling water piped into my luxury site!

[January 2016] If you read the posts of the next couple of months – October-November – you will notice I seem to be thinking about pooping more than is quite normal – picking a site near the toilet etc. It turns out I got giardia, and my favorite culprit for where I got it is the strangely bright green Chetco River. So, be forewarned!

Also, new rule: the the water your’e gonna swim in has newts, maybe think again!

I am sharing Miller Bar with some retirees, some Humboldt drug lords (or so I choose to believe), and a very energetic legion of participants in the Northwest Youth Corps. The first thing I heard when I got down here was many lusty teenage voices in group cheering. Still dunno what it’s about, but they’re still doing it off and on, and whatever it is, I’ve so far actually only seen one of them. I see tents and trucks, but what ever rituals of group bonding they are loudly doing, they are doing it in the woods, not out here on the gravel.

Sunday

Driving out noon-ish, as the road goes up I can look down into the group camping area, and there’s still a bunch of them at some picnic tables. They are amazingly quiet and unobtrusive for a bunch of teenagers.

Back to the Brookings Harbor pier for coffee at the Bell and Whistle. The place is hard to find, tucked around the corner in one of those harbor multipurpose buildings, I probably would’ve missed it if I hadn’t made a point to find it yesterday afternoon when I was walking around. A good place once I got there. Nice guy, great wifi, good coffee with a great view across the harbor, but no goodies!  They were cleaned out of cookies and such on Sunday morning, so my need for something to nibble with my coffee was unmet.

Another customer had the great intelligence that the Fred Meyer had a stack of Sunday SF Chronicles!  I so was pleased to hear it that I went straight there and got one! … and discovered that Fred Meyer is open to everyone, not a Costco-style members only store as I had thought. A productive little trip.

The Brookings restaurants I’ve been to have failed to impress, so I plan to drive to the next town up, Gold Beach, at the mouth of the mighty Rogue River. Yelp shows a couple of promising breakfast spots. But on closer reading, many are closed on Sunday, and the best of the rest had closed at 2PM, 20 minutes before I got there. They recommend the Port Hole, a harborside dive that was just about the way you picture it. And yes it is the “Port Hole”, not the “Porthole” – there must be a good story about that. They did have passable fish&chips and a view of the harbor, so I ate and read my Sunday paper and felt pretty good about life.

Onward and northward. Humbug Mountain – the campground looked quite inviting, as indeed it was when I stayed last time. Next Port Orford, a kind of useless little town, all my experiences there have been distinctly average. Past the turnoff to Cape Blanco ($26) on the left and Edson CG ($5) inland on the right. I trying a new experience tonight, priced in the middle at $15 for a tent site, Boice-Cope County Park.

Really excellent little find. It’s your basic oval layout. To localize the expense of laying out RV infrastructure, the fancy, expensive hookup sites are inside the oval, and the low tech, no tech tent sites (me) are around the outside of the oval. Perfectly sensible, but it means the RVers are paying top dollar to look at each other and some worn out grass, while we tenters get the tree-shaded private spots looking directly out over the lake.

For whatever reason (the lake not muffling the sound?), from my campsite I can hear the sound of the surf very clearly, like I was standing on the beach looking at it. But I’m not, I’m 1/2 mile away looking at placid little Floras Lake, with the sunset reflecting off it’s calm waters, while the sound of the Pacific surf is playing in the background. pretty cool.

Monday

Beautiful day here, the fog has burned off. I now see why this is a popular windsurfing place, because it’s quite windy! There’s a number of tall, serious, Nordic looking white people seriously going about their high tech recreation. Looks like fun … for the alpha person, dominant paradigm set.

Very easy day today, cruise past Bandon to Coos Bay, hang out at the Toyota dealer/restaurant – Smiling Dog Cafe – for quite a while, then make it to Winchester Bay for the evening.

I take two longish walks. For sunset I take a left, away from town around the bend of the point. I didn’t go as far as I’d planned because of the damned OHVs. The good news is that the shoulder is very wide. The bad news is that it is so wide to accommodate the OHVs that go roaring past all too frequently. Those stinky, noisy, dust-raising contraptions could not be more annoying to my sensibility. But there is a cute little park with a cute little pier at the point of the headland, which was a nice place to hang. Looking at a map later I realize that I am looking across the mouth of the mighty Umpqua River. I thought Reedsport was the port, but I guess both towns are. Lots of serious crab trapping going on at the pier.

Back to the van on the pink glow of sunset, then head out the other direction to find the little bar I went to last time – Double D On the Rocks, ha ha. It’s a longer walk than I remembered, but the place is just as goofy as it was last time. I order fish & chips, my goto travel meal when I’m around water. It was not great, chips were waaay too salty. But it got me fed and I enjoyed the ambiance – the woman who could not stop laughing insanely and loudly, the gloomy muttering old fisherman and his strange-eyed buddy. Finally, as the evening rolled to a close, the only survivors were me and the cackling lady discussing the meaning of life with the muttering fisherman. Last Call indeed.

Tuesday

OOPS!  Checkout time 11:00, and I am waking up at 11:39! I spring up and hop into a speeded-up version of my morning preparations. I am ready to roll by noonish, … but nobody seemed to give a hoot either way. Really, 11am is a pretty f–ing early checkout time.

Drive-thru on Reedsport, a big-ish town at the mouth of the mighty Umpqua River where I’ve eaten a few times. Things have never worked well for me here, so I’m glad to be passing through without needing to stop. Florence is only 25 minutes away and and things always work much better for me there!

North of the Umpqua starts the sand dune portion of the Oregon Coast … also the National Forest portion – a strategic fact for my overnight planning. Much of the day will be spent on Suislaw National Forest land. Before Florence I drive past Eel Creek and Waxmyrtle, a couple of my fave campgrounds from other trips.  Coffee and wifi at Suislaw Roasters, under the lee of the beautiful Florence Bridge. Thence to Safeway to restock.

Drive past more great campgrounds – Rock Creek and Perpetua (“FULL”!), through Yachats to my hoped for destination Tillicum. It also is FULL, so I plod onward 3-4 miles to happy success at the pricier Beachside State Park.

I’m having a good party here. Arrive 2:30, eat a bagel, read the paper, reorganize my brochures (the endless job …), mosey down to the beach for a while, come back, eat, drink, nap, mosey back down to the beach for sunset, back to read and shower – pretty darned nice!

Wednesday

Foggy and quiet this morning. Checkout time is 1pm. Since I’ll be sleeping in a parking lot tonight, I will spend all the time I can in this restful place. I dawdled for most of it, but towards the end I cleaned out the passenger door pocket where I toss all random pieces of paper, mostly store and restaurant receipts. They have “everything” recycling here, a giant blue container for all paper/plastic/glass/metal. Since that giant blue bin was so close I was inspired to do this cleanup, since I could recycle all those little scraps of paper (such is the way my mind works).

A very short drive to Waldport, where Yelp had identified a coffee+wifi place, One Street Down.  I liked it very much. but further Yelping showed that the breakfast place I enjoyed so much last time in south Newport closes at 3pm, and it’s 2:05 right now. So in the service of making it to a quality meal I didn’t linger.

Another short drive to the south side of Newport Harbor, called South Beach, to Fishtails Restaurant. They made me a Hangtown Fry last time, but my rather dim waiter wasn’t up to that, so I just had the straight up Yaquina Bay oyster breakfast, and am glad I did! I now wish I took a food pic of it, because it was magnificent! Oysters, eggs, perfect red potatoes, and a biscuit with a huge bowl of homemade jam for it. The meal would have been perfectly filling, but I had to clean up that biscuit and jam, and that finished me off.

Next stop was to be the Rogue Brewery. It’s only like a mile from the restaurant. So I drove over and parked, but was way too stuffed with biscuit and jam to contemplate beer just yet, so I crawled into the back to digest. That turned into a deep sleep where I didn’t wake up till almost 6. Rogue is open till 8, so I still executed my plan. I got the four beer sampler, 3 IPAs and this nice Belgian that they had given me to try. I was still half asleep, but it was a nice stop.

I crossed the huge bridge and did a little driving tour of Newport proper, on the north side of the harbor. It’s got a real nice little tourist trappy waterfront drag that I had no idea existed. It has a Deco District that I couldn’t quite navigate to, but which I would like to see. I like Newport. It, Florence and Brrokings are on my internal list of places I could move to – along with Flagstaff, Prescott AZ, Missoula, and any number of other western college towns.

The late afternoon beaches looked beautiful as I was driving past, and I decided I should use the rest of my daylight to enjoy one before I settle in to the casino parking lot. One of my saved brochures (Bird Watching near Lincoln City) FINALLY comes in handy, it points me to a beach access at the southern end of Lincoln City, that allows me to walk out to where the outflow of Stilitz Bay meets the Pacific. Cool spot, just what I was hoping for! I even saw a seal bobbing about in the choppy waters of the bay. He was really close the first time he popped his head up, then farther away later.

I like my parking spot a lot, best I’ve had here. I have a panoramic view of the casino and it’s bright lights, I can watch people walk in an out. In the morning there’s the even bigger panorama of the mighty Pacific behind it. Only downside turned out to be that it’s right next to the doggie poop bag dispenser, so in the morning I had a few visitors.