Northern coast of Oregon

Hello from the northern coast of Oregon!

This blog may be seriously lacking in photos, which is a shame as Oregon is amazingly beautiful, but my internet quality is quite lacking.  So, here's a description of Fort Stevens State Park, and our time in this area.

We arrived at Fort Stevens Park, which is an wonderful park.  There's ocean beach with great sand dunes to somersault down and carve into random creations.  At the bottom of the dunes, there's great sand to walk along the ocean, and you can also see a sunken ship.  It's rusty metal, huge and imposing, and it's a great attraction to play on if your kids believe they might be pirates.  The coast is rather misty, but it's so pleasant, when you've spent the last 3 months and 3 days without any rain.  I love the rain!  It's cooler here, which made me look up the average temperature for the area.  In the summer, the average high for the day is 70, and in the winter the average high is 50.  It's an area with perpetual spring weather, and in my mind, nothing could be better than that!

We've driven around the area to get to some sights.  There's a lot of Lewis and Clark exhibits around here, as this is where they made their winter home.  (Insert a mental picture of our family dressed in colonial and Indian garb from the visitor center.)  Lewis and Clark weren't quite as enamored with the place as I am.  One of the places we visited they'd named "Cape Disappointment."  I found Cape Disappointment to be one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.  There's lots of lush, green rain forest with the best wildflowers to walk through to get to a nice lighthouse.  There was also a coast guard station there, and the workers allowed us to use their binoculars to look at the ocean and river, and look at their charts as they kept watch over the area.  The Columbia River enters here, and sailing it is declared to be the most dangerous way to enter the U.S.  It was really neat to kind of patrol the area ourselves.  And so beautiful!  There's another area called "Dismal Nitch," where Lewis and Clark were stuck for five days in a rainy cove, trying to escape the raging sea.  Driving the whole area was gorgeous!

The people here are very friendly, which is nice!  While we were in the desert in the southwest, we'd noticed that no matter how many times we said "hi" to people, no one would reply.  Here, we feel very welcomed.  We enjoyed the church we attended on Sunday, so tonight we'll be going to their worship, campfire and s'mores on the beach.  Should be nice!

Overall, we choose to live in Ohio because of the people, but if I were to choose a place to live based on the beauty, the springtime weather, the little towns and nice people, I think I'd choose the northern coast in Oregon.  Of course, we still get to see the northern part of the U.S. on our eight-month tour, so we'll see if this remains my favorite, but so far, I love Oregon!

Speaking of the eight-month tour, we are planning on buying a house back in our old town in Ohio.  The home inspection will be done tomorrow, and things are moving forward well, so we intend to be back in August.

As for next week, we'd intended to be at a state park in Washington.  However, they called and had double-booked the campsite, so we were without any plans for next week.  It's really hard to find campsites around here for a week, when so many reservations are made so far in advance!  I wasn't finding anywhere for us to stay at all.  Finally, as we like this area so much, I looked into staying here another week.  The weekend times were, of course, booked solid.  When I went up to the ranger station, someone had just canceled for the exact dates we needed, so we'll be staying here for another great week.  Making this news even better, our "scooter friends," as our kids call the family we met in New Orleans, will be joining us and camping with us next week.  Should be great!

Hopefully sometime, I'll be able to post some pictures of beautiful Oregon!  And some birthday pictures of our cute birthday Y!  We had fun celebrating his birthday at an indoor water park.  (Insert a mental picture of Y looking like a surfer in his birthday wet suit, which we bought him along with tons of legos, since he's always the coldest every time we get in the water.)  He was not cold and had a great birthday!

Hopefully you're having a great week!