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:
