Great week; we finally reached the ocean. This is my family literally running to the water as soon as we arrived:
Our campground was not exactly high class (I saw one trailer with a plywood door), but it had a good feel to it.
Had a couple windshield chips fixed this week:
I had a pretty busy work week, so the only side-trip I went on was to the Tillamook cheese factory a few miles away:
After trying some samples, we had to get some Tillamook cheese for ourselves. Especially their “squeaky cheese”…that stuff will change your life.
It was cold and windy most of the time on the beach, but still quite beautiful.
Friday night we took a final walk at sunset.
Emily and I walked out on this long jetty to see the fog horn that we had been hearing all week. It was sort of eerie, this odd piece of equipment connected to a battery pack, a quarter of a mile out from shore, emitting a very loud tone every 30 seconds.
I half expected to hear a message in French playing in a continuous loop. (LOST reference 🙂
The next morning Amy and I drug everyone out of bed for a walk on the beach.
Emily and Natalie collect shells and crab carcasses, and Carrie found a starfish.
Speaking of starfish, there were tons of them stuck to the rocks of the jetty, along with mussels, anemones and barnacles. It’s cool all the stuff you find at low tide.
After all that, we hit the road and drove along the Oregon coast.
We stopped at a little farmers market to pick up some fruit and such.
Our official destination for the day was Fort Clatsop, which was where Lewis and Clark wintered before their return trip across the continent.
Having been immersed in Lewis and Clark history for the last month and a half, I thought it was a pretty cool place. This guy did a musket demonstration, which was also pretty cool:
(For any of my family reading this, we had to get our picture taken with the musket guy. He could have been Uncle Emil’s twin. His sense of humor, his mannerisms, and his engaging storytelling voice was so much like Emil’s. You would have loved him.)
At the end of the day, we picked a random campground to stay for the night. Don’t let these Las Vegas-esque lights fool you…it was a very forgettable campground. We were happy to leave first thing this morning.
We just made it to Forks, Washington, which is apparently where they filmed the Twilight movies. Seriously, here are their trucks:
Now we’re trying to find a place to stay for the week. Our intended destination has no internet.