If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

Day 2 (7/12) Started with breakfast at the Blue Ox Cafe before packing up the van and crossing the street to Trees of Mystery. Benefit of sleeping across the street: it wasn’t busy / crowded yet.

Trees of Mystery is a patch of redwoods with trails, a gondola ride, a skywalk, and an obsession with Paul Bunyan. Take a picture with Paul and Babe out front; enjoy the peaceful quiet of the towering trees.

Our walkabout through the redwoods came to an end with the requisite exit through the gift shop. I decided I liked this wooden owl; he now watches over the family room from his perch on top of the bookshelf in the corner.

Now began our long drive up the coast on highway 101. We passed through a foggy section and I stopped so we could enjoy the ocean for a bit. Shortly after we said, “Goodbye” to California and crossed into Oregon.

Next stop, the Thomas Creek Bridge–the highest bridge in Oregon at 345 feet. There is a parking lot and some trails near the bridge, but there’s not really anywhere you can get a good picture, but I tried. We followed the trail down to an overlook of an isolated strip of coast as well. Turns out there is a lot of empty coastline from northern California up through Washington.

At some point along the drive we stopped for lunch at McDonald’s and we passed a myrtlewood gallery and took a look around, but didn’t buy anything.

Another ~30 miles up the coast we stopped at Prehistoric Gardens. This features life-size dinosaur sculptures along a trail through the forest. The girls enjoyed imitating the dinosaurs. To properly set the mood I played the theme from Jurassic Park on my phone when we started our walk.

Our home for the night was the Sea Crest Motel on the southern outskirts of Port Orford. Port Orford really didn’t have anything to offer in terms of dinner, so I took the girls to the provincially-named “Ray’s Food Place” grocery store and we bought some things to eat at the hotel, augmented it with the supplies from the van, and called it dinner. This included the world’s saddest “baguette.” It was soft, lightly baked, and inconsistently shaped with a consistency of sandwich bread. It would have made a French baker cry.

In the hotel the girls stayed in cozy bunk beds:

I’ve been wanting to take a trip through the Pacific Northwest for years, but it just never worked out amongst various family functions and COVID. But, this year was the year. We drove up the coast and took a ferry into Canada and then came back down I-5.

(I’m back-dating these posts to the day of the events for convenience of using the blog as a journal.)

Day 1, July 11, was packing up the car with enough supplies to trek the Oregon Trail and getting to the northern coast of California which required more than 7 hours of driving with a stop for lunch at a Wendy’s. Our destination for the night was Motel Trees across the street from Trees of Mystery. We had tried to visit Trees of Mystery back in 2017, but their power was out from a storm and they were closed.

We tried a couple of new things with the girls on this trip. First was entertainment. Although I prepared the Raspberry Pi with TV shows and movies as we’ve used on previous trips it only got used once. Instead, the focus of our driving entertainment was listening to the audiobooks of the first arc of the Wings of Fire series. Both girls had already read these books and like them. Jess and I were only familiar with whatever snippets we had read to the girls during bedtime reading. This worked out really well. Heather did some drawing while listening and Corinne mainly looked out the window. It passed the time and the car stayed calm.

The second was handling purchases. Rather than listen to the constant refrain of, “Can I get this?” at every gift shop and dealing with sulky kids whenever the answer was, “No;” we gave each of them $60 and explained that this was their money for both souvenirs and gas-station snacks along the way. They could spend it however they like, but once it was gone it was gone. This also worked out really well. They considered what things cost, how that related to how much trip was still ahead of them, and how much they liked the thing. They each ended up with souvenirs they were enamored by, snacks they enjoyed, and a little bit of money still in their pocket by the end.

But back to the trip.

Jess took some pictures along the drive of views that she liked. We stopped to watch some elk. And once we finally arrived at the motel, and after dinner at the Blue Ox Cafe, we walked down to “Hidden Beach” with hot chocolate. I got some pictures I really like on the beach. There were a lot of pelicans flying along the shore.