May 14th, a warm sunny day, we set out on a 10 day vacation to Oregon. We headed to the coast, landing there later that day.
That was the ONLY warm day of our vacation! We enjoyed exploring
Cape Perpetua for a day, camped north of there a few nights, then headed south, through dune country, enjoying an afternoon stroll to some of the bigger dunes, eventually ending up at
Cape Blanco State Park - many of you may be familar with this lovely park south of Bullards Beach. It is truly a wonderful place to camp! It's small, very quiet, so quiet when we where there, it felt like we were on a retreat! All sites private. First day there we had the windy beach to ourselves. The next day - winds picked up, rain came down in buckets, we managed one walk to a different beach where we saw about 70 seals, moms with pups. The prediction was for a storm to hit with 55 mph wind gusts, so our third day there we headed east, driving inland in the pouring rain just as high winds hit the coast. Driving through beautiful country side to Roseburg, we kept going east to camp in a wonderful small BLM campground near the Umpqua River -
Cavitt Creek Campgound. Next day we thought we'd continue to eastern OR, but snow in the passes, night temps in the 20s, and cloudy days in the low 40s didn't sound like spring to us! Instead we took walks to many of the beautiful falls in the Umpqua River area, between rain showers. After two pouring rain nights, we just got on I-5 and headed north, spending our last two nights in a brand new county park on the south Santiam River, east of Sweethome. Again, we managed a walk, between showers, on a lovely trail in the day use area of one of the oldest State Parks in Oregon,
Cascadia State Park (we would of stayed there, but it is in heavy forest and all the sites were very muddy - no one was there!) On the way home we stopped at the
Oregon Gardens SE of Portland, even there it was cold and very windy, with some showers! A wonderful place though - highly recommend it.
You can see photos of our wet vacation and the lovely places we went at
Oregon, there are links to other photo pages.
We had a lot of condensation, something we have not had in our
Escape at all, it added to the stress of the cold and wet weather, as we felt we could never dry out and things in cupboards were getting wet. Any suggestions for that would be appreciated.
In retrospect it was not a bad vacation, we saw a lot of beautiful places, some special Nature moments, like the seals, a gray whale and calf, there were wild irises and other wildflowers everywhere - BUT, we were so cold, and it was so wet, can't help but wish it had been a bit nicer weather!
We highly recommend Cape Blanco State Park, and the Umpqua River area - hope to go back to both some drier year!
Pacific Iris
beach at Cape Perpetua
Lighthouse at Cape Blanco
camp site at BLM campground - Cavitt Creek
Many more pics at the link mentioned above.....
Penney