As usual, there's a fair amount of nuttiness in leaving. I'm leaving from youth group, and not only are we doing youth group, but we're serving lunch to the church afterward. It's a fundraiser for us, but it means I've got two pots of soup sitting in the back of my car. Just what I want for a week on the road.
Anyway. I take off from church about 12:30 and made it Portland at 3:30. I get to visit my friend Johnny and have some gelato... yum. I haven't seen Johnny in a long time - over a year or so - and it's good to reconnect. We chat for an hour before I head off to Ward & Jen's, my destination for the evening. En route, I see lots of townhouses in Portland and on the way to Hillsboro... they're so much better here than in Seattle. I love the neighborhoody feel here. When you enter Oregon, you see a Mega Millions billboard, and I started dreaming about what I'd do if I won it... townhome in the Pearl District, check!
I get to Ward & Jen's house in Hillsboro, just a couple of blocks off the Hillsboro downtown. It's a fabulous place - originally built in the 1920s, with all the glorious wood built-in furniture that implies. They also had built an add-on apartment for Ward's dad, who wound up not living there. I wind up having the nicest "guest room" I've ever been in...
We walked downtown and hit up a restaurant with pretty good pizza. The town is just at the end of a light rail line. It's the kind of place I'd like to live, if such a suburb existed in the puget sound area - near to a suburban downtown, easy to get your needs met without a car, and on light rail to get to the big city. Well, Proposition 1 passed this week; perhaps it will exist some day soon.
We spend a lot of time just shooting the bull and talking about Unitarian stuff. Jen is pregnant and heads off to bed about 9:30... I follow soon after. It's been a long week...
Monday dawns rainy. It is November, of course. I have breakfast with Ward and Jen and head off about 9 a.m. I head south through some beautiful agricultural countryside.
I forget I'm in Oregon, it's so similar to Washington. It makes me think things, like:
The shades of green are worth the price of rain.
I love the shades of grays in the sky. Is that wrong?
The weather is changeable, and I get a pretty incredible rainbow:
In spite of having had breakfast already, I stop in to the Otis Cafe just before reaching the coast in Otis, OR. The Otis Cafe has been written up for its food and its atmosphere, and it's justly popular. In spite of it not quite being 11 a.m. yet, the place is still packed. There's only 4 booths and one table in the place, and they are all full. I get a seat at the counter and order the German potatoes - potatoes, cheddar cheese, peppers, onions, and sausage. A half-order is still enough such that I take half of it for dinner. I also have to get a loaf of pumpkin bread for the road...and spend the rest of my drive smelling the pumpkin aroma.
On to the coast. The Oregon coast seems somewhat of a hybrid between Washington and California... not as sandy as California, not as driftwood strewn-and rocky as Washington. It's beautiful, all the way down.
Not to mention entertaining:
I don't really have far to go today, but on the other hand, it'll be dark by 5:30. I stop off for a moderate walk on a random beach. While the weather was changeable on the other side of the coastal range, out here it's sunny. Sunny! In November. Sometimes you get lucky. I walk as far as a headland that is close to the water... the water looks like perhaps it is nearing low tide or starting to come back up, so I don't want to get too far and get caught on the other side. Coming back, I can see fog starting to form, and clouds that are coming along... sigh. But I eked out a gorgeous day at the beach.
I only have about another hour drive down the coast. The road dodges near and away from the water. I pass through Florence, at the top end of the Dunes. I want to go walking here on Tuesday, but not quite sure where. I think the last time I was here was 1991 and I remember walking many many dunes and never making it to the actual ocean. I stop into a visitor center in Reedsport, OR and check out the maps. Winchester Bay looks like a good option - just at the north end of the southern portion of the dunes. It's another 2-3 miles south, so I head to the Winchester Bay Inn where it looks like there might be 4 people staying at a 50-unit hotel tonight... for $50 a room. Yay November! Yay Monday night! And just on the other side of the harbor is the beach. Let's hope the weather holds...
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