Southwards on the Oregon Coast 5&6 Oct

And so our Southwards journey began. Amazing coastline, fabulous sunshine. Such a diversity of landscapes from bare rock to cloud forest with mosses and ferns; spindly aggressive pines bent by the coastal winds to majestic; tall and straight Spruce trees; gentle swirling estuary waters to the crashing Pacific waves; damp forests to bone dry sand dunes.
We left Cannon beach and headed up and up until we had a view back over the beach and the Haystack. After about a half hour of wending our way through thick damp forest with mossy tree trunks and enormous ferns (like a scene from a Jurassic Park film) we made our way back down to sea level and stopped for a quick look on the beach where some rock formations had formed an arch just off the beach. Then on again repeating the up and down and the twisting and turning with a new view around each turn. Finally we turned of the 101 (the road that goes all down the coast) onto some smaller roads (a bit hairy, narrow and even more bendy than the 101) to go to Cape Mears and the enormous Spruce forests... and we weren't disappointed by the effort, the trees were amazing, mind boggling how enormous a tree can get just from absorbing water and minerals from the ground and carbon dioxide from the air!!!
Then, just as we were thinking it was time to be stopping, a campsite appeared ahead and we stopped about 50 metres from the Netart Estuary. We spent the rest of the afternoon watching seals flopping about on the sandbanks that appeared as the tide went out; Grey Pelicans who put on a show dashing about a few cm about the water and then looping upwards to then fall and crash diving into the water to catch fish; and the ever present cormorants gliding about the surface of the water and then silently ducking under to emerge with their prize. Earlier on in the day we had stopped and bought some binoculars which came in very handy!
Today we didn't leave the campsite until midday because we were doing the tedious laundry and bed making (Tristan's bed in the bit over the cabin is incredibly difficult to make, completely exhausting, as you have to kneel on the bed whilst also trying to make it!!!!), giving the inside of the camper the once over etc.
But our continued journey southward was no less full of surprises than yesterday; once past the first high point which was in more cloud forest we descended into a desert... an inland system of sand dunes where the coastal features had created a sort of passageway down which a relentless wind blows so that no plants manage to take hold and so have left an enormous barren section which now is split between an area for locals to go 'off-Roading' on sand buggies, motorbikes and all other types of loud and fast contraptions, and the other half is protected and studied and inaccessible to the likes of us. We sat and pondered the sand for a while and then watched a few 'off roaders' who seemed to be playing some sort of motorized tag game as they whizzed around and then hid behind various outcrops of trees for a while and then whizzed off again - very odd.
We continued our journey winding our way around the coast and stopped for lunch at another estuary where the water was rushing in under a bridge and a mass of white egrets and grey herons waited on the sandbanks for a passing feast (I suppose). Tristan and I sat in our deck chairs with a table laden with cheese and biscuits, tacos and salsa and a huge fruit salad and basked in the sunshine as we ate, watched very carefully and with a great deal of suspicion by a very large seagull! Where was Celso?? Obviously he had gone fishing! (Nothing more to be said about that - he didn't catch anything... again!)
Further south we stopped at another beach just outside Lincoln City that we had spied from up on a hill and appeared to have loads of seals on it. It turned out to be an enormous number of tree trunks that had been washed up onto the beach. I asked a woman who was beach combing amongst the logs why they were all there. She told me that some where ones that had escaped from loggers further up the rivers that flowed down into the bay, and some were whole trees that were swept into the rivers by the snow melt and huge storms that occur from December through February and sometimes into March. She added that people were sometimes killed by the trunks that crashed up onto the beaches during the storms! Across from the beach was the spit of land that made the bay so treacherous as it narrowed the exit of 3 rivers to about a hundred metres and you could see the rip tide at that point. On the spit were an enormous number of Grey Pelicans strutting their stuff and occasionally all swooping up into the sky together to go and dive into the sea with great splashes sounding every few seconds.
Then up and up again to the ridiculously named Cape Foulweather which was named by Captain Cook; it was the first place he stopped when he came to map the west coast and apparently on the day that he arrived there were 100mph winds and lashing rain; and so it came to have its name. Nice view from the top though!
Now we are camped at South Beach State Park just south of Newport. Tristan has been learning all about reproduction so the van has been rocking and rolling from his embarrassed laughter about the finer details of the process and the joys of puberty!!!