Where in the World are Jeff and Sue?: Day 8, Monday, June 20th: I Totally Get It…

I totally understand why someone would want to live here. There isn’t really a word that can describe the Oregon coastline. Beautiful… awe inspiring… wondrous… rugged… humbling… breath taking… peaceful… fearsome.

Today we continued our trek down HWY 101. Some highlights:

This is a story about one segment of our day. It’s longer than most but, I think, worth it.

We left Tillamook this morning and ventured off HWY 101 on a scenic road closer to the ocean. Since we figured we needed to make better time, we looked for a way to cross back. I noticed a little town called Beaver (right on 101) and put it into our navigation system figuring it would find us a way the there. And that she did (she is Carmen, our Garmin). She told us to take the next road, Buzzard Creek Rd. Deciding immediately that we had to take this road (c’mon… Buzzard Creek Rd?), we watched for the road sign. Carmen said the turn would come in 300 ft… 200 ft… 100 ft… 30 ft… no road sign. We turned around and tried again and still didn’t see the sign. Then we thought we’d just listen to the directions and watched for an un-named road. When Carman told us to turn there was a small, winding dirt road and we turned.

Although it took about 2 hours and by the time we finally got to HWY 101 Carman had led us down 2 other roads, the drive was amazing! Most of this one lane dirt road was so remote; we only saw houses in the first and last mile, for parts of it there was grass in the road, and we never saw another car. What we did experience was an almost rain forest like environment. There were ferns and other moisture loving plants everywhere and amazing thick moss growth on the trees (some were so covered that they were transformed into looking almost alien like creatures). It was also cloudy, a mist filled the air, and for a lot of the time we spent there, there was the sound of trickling water from creeks, adding to the rain forest affect. The air smelled like pine, it was filled with the sound of birds, and it was so peaceful! We got out of our car many times to look, listen, take ton’s of pix, and just take a deep breath and enjoy God’s creation! We watched for wild life and we did spot a group of elk moving quickly through the forest (about 5). They moved to quickly and were too far away into the thick woods for me to get pix (I tried), but it was thrilling to see them. We have to say that this experience goes down as one of the most unique and enjoyable that we’ve ever had. We’re so glad we took Buzzard Creek Rd!

Other highlights:

We saw so many scenic over-looks; too many to count and more beautiful and awesome than I can describe! 500 ft cliffs, cliffs that were much higher than that with waves crashing into rocks at the bottom. We also saw so many beautiful sugar-sand beaches and one black cobblestone beach (lighthouse state park). We walked on ancient lava flows at one Federal park (Cape Perpetua) and took our shoes off and walked down one of the sand beaches and let the ocean waves (it was in the evening) run over our feet. By the way… brrrrrrr! Cape Perpetua has something called The Devils Churn which is an area where the waves go back into a cave with a long (3 hundred ft?), deep, and wide (probably 10 ft?) crevice type entrance. The water in there goes crazy and makes loud pounding noises and splashes up the walls. That was amazing!

At one of the scenic over-looks we watched a bunch of sea lions lounging around on some rocks!

We are crashing tonight in Florence (still in OR) and we will continue this amazing journey tomorrow! Oh, I will mention that we are extending our trip by a couple of days so we can take a little more time to see what we want to see.