The Pacific

I think it is safe to say that yesterday we hit the wall. Our “six-hour” drive (we had driven extra the night before so we wouldn’t have an eight hour drive!) turned into nine hours. I was not mentally prepared for that. The novelty has worn off just a little bit and we are ready to sleep in one place for more than one night! It was another pretty day. We could not have been any luckier with the weather. With the exception of one big rainstorm on the highway while we drove and the unfortunate fog at Mount Rushmore, it has been beautiful. Oregon looked a lot like home. I think the mountains are bigger and there is Mount Hood in the distance, which is impressive, but it looked a lot like New England really. As we began to feel like we should be getting close to the beach we started driving into the mountains. This was the part of the drive that I thought would never end. It was twisty and turny and slow going and the huge, beautiful pine trees obscured any kind of view. We finally arrived at the Pacific Ocean at about 5:30 in a dense gray fog. You’ll never guess it, but our campsite was backed up to a main highway with lots of traffic noise! However, we were also lucky enough to have a path right to the beach. That path led us to a beach on the little bay and there is a nice bridge over the bay connecting Newport and Waldport. It was an ok because but we wanted ocean. So, we struck out in that direction and after a few minutes and a few side streets through the lucky peoples’ neighborhoods, there it was. Because of the fog, we could not see all that much. However, we could see the waves, which were about two feet and broke away from the shore and rushed in with that nice ocean sound.

We put our feet in and it was definitely cold, no question about it! I can’t decide how it relates to Nauset beach, which was 56 or 57 degrees when we swam in it last week. It was cold enough that we walked on the sand instead of in the water though. The sand was so hard and compact that Rich and Otis will take a jog this morning and Rich will wear his sneakers. We had a nice campfire last night and just relaxed a little bit but soon we just could not stay awake and had to go to bed. Good thing we did. This morning the neighbors began making noise at about 5:30 and that was the end of our sleeping. Luckily, we’re going to get a nice, early start to our day and be in Washington shortly. Stay tuned and have a nice day!