One Lap

Date: 10/02/2013

Day: 6

Location: Newport, OR

Miles Today: 100

Total Miles:  1021

A Soft Day on 101, a Map, Winchester Bay, the Dunes, TEOTWAWKI, Required Silliness, How to Comment on this BLOG

 

Raining, mostly

A quiet day was had on highway 101.  It was raining gently most of the way, so only 100 miles passed under the front  bumper today.  We did not remark yesterday that Coos Bay has, as one of its attractions, free citywide Wi-Fi.  Everything's up to date in Coos Bay, but not where the Colonel comes from.

A map is a good thing to have on a journey, even -- or particularly -- for those participating vicariously.

Newport is about in the middle of this map.

 

Winchester Bay

Not far north of Coos Bay is the commercial tourist town Winchester Bay (as opposed to the charming town of Trinidad visited yesterday).  Touristic Oregon begins closing for the winter on October first, but the Colonel found a purveyor of coffee with a large bean roasting device in his front window.  Not bad stuff, but no where near as good as the home brew which, alas, is exhausted.  This guy also pushes salt water taffy, which is about as cloying as you remember it to be.  Now one can get jalapeno and wasabi salt water taffy, another sign that the apocalypse is immanent.

Required coffee in hand and thermos, the Colonel discovered boat slips and ramps, several places to get fish and chips, an operating (thank goodness) Coast Guard facility, and lots of places to park your RV.  It costs $20 to pump the holding tank on a RV; the things you learn when you travel.

Dunes

This part of the Oregon coast is famous for big surf and very big sand dunes.  Although the surf looks scary when you stand there looking at it, the pictures the Colonel was able to get look tame.

The dunes, too, resisted our amateur photography.  These dunes are frequently more than 100' high and run for miles along the coast.  The scale is hard to capture.  Most of the access to them was behind locked gates -- darn that unreliable Federal government!  Sand dunes you have seen; what is unique here is that these have pine trees growing in them.  You can see where the dunes have invaded a stand of trees and killed them, leaving phone pole fingers reaching for the sky.  You can also see where the trees have arrested the movement of the sand.  The battle goes on.

 

The End of the World as We Know It

Reference has been made herein to Tsunami warning signs.  They are ubiquitous along this coast.  If fact they are as much part of the mythos of the place as are earthquakes in Northern California.  Proof?

It would appear to be a close run thing between the earthquake and the tsunami as to who gets to this building first.

 

Beginning about Crescent City California and running north to Alaska, the Juan de Fuca (a name with which you do not fool) tectonic plate subducts (or sinks) beneath the North American continent.  Our home grown plates, as you know, slide properly if jerkily past one another.  The beautiful north coast will see, one day, a magnitude 9 earthquake not unlike the recent very big event in Japan, followed almost immediately by an equally very big Tsunami.  Oregon and Washington: beautiful, enjoy them while you can.

Silliness

Yes there is silliness on the road.  I did not stop at the Trees of Mystery any longer than necessary to take this image:

Say hey to Paul and Babe

Comments

If you would like to make a comment on this blog, scurrilous or otherwise, there are two ways to do so. 

BlogSpot provides a box in which you can type remarks.  Your words are editable by the Colonel and visible to anyone reading the blog.  To make this work you must register with the site.  The claim is that this prevents spam and makes it easier for my antislander lawyers to get at you; it also gives Blogspot your contact info and exposes you to wheedling requests that you begin blogging away immediately.  This if fair enough; there is no charge for using this service.

You can also, of course just send the Colonel an email in the normal way.  Like maps of Moscow during the cold war, you already have that information is you are supposed to have it.

The Colonel would like to hear from you; something to do on the long lonely nights on the road.  (What a pathetic remark by someone having a damn good time!)

Tomorrow we aim to get at least as far as Astoria and the mighty Columbia river.  When the Colonels' sister and he were young, (it was 1962,) their father took them to the Seattle Worlds Fair.  Nothing at the fair (even the $1,000,000 in cash safe behind bullet proof glass!!) impressed the young Colonel-to-be as much as the Columbia rolling into the Pacific.  So much fresh water and not in a concrete ditch! 

Wellington Boot, Col