Weekend Recap
This weekend we stayed in a motel room on the Oregon Coast. It was at the Ocean Cove Inn in Yachats. On Saturday we visited the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport. It had a beautiful exhibit of "Odd" fishes. These included seahorses and weird puffer and boxfishes, but the really cool thing about it was that were all swimming amongst very colorful pieces of blown-glass. Andrea really enjoyed this exhibit
On Sunday, after having breakfast at a very nice little seafood place across the street from the motel, we drove North to Lincoln City. There I tried to find access to a hiking trail to Hart's Cove on Cascade Head. But the road there is closed in the winter, and the hiking trail that I decided to take us on initially was completely ravaged by the December 2007 windstorm. We ended up doing a lot of crawling underneath and over tree trunks of various diameters, which Beefia thought was very interesting initially, but then several things made us decide to turn back. There wasn't a single other car parked at the trailhead, but the trail had some recent footprints on it. When we started climbing uphill we saw a single-person green tent pitched on the trail with remains of a small fire in front of it. That creeped us out a bit. Then we reached several washed out areas, and then Beefia started complaining mightily. All these factors combined made us go back to the car in a hurry. We tried to show Andrea a salamander on our way back, but I'm not sure that she actually saw it. She was too busy grasping at branches of all the downed trees. She thought that this was quite fun.
Our next hiking attempt - on the Nature Conservancy trail - was a lot more successful as pictures can attest. We saw a few very large deer on our way up, and the views from the top were just spectacular. This is probably one of the best views on the Oregon Coast, because it's completely unobstructed by trees and overlooks a wide estuary.
On Sunday, after having breakfast at a very nice little seafood place across the street from the motel, we drove North to Lincoln City. There I tried to find access to a hiking trail to Hart's Cove on Cascade Head. But the road there is closed in the winter, and the hiking trail that I decided to take us on initially was completely ravaged by the December 2007 windstorm. We ended up doing a lot of crawling underneath and over tree trunks of various diameters, which Beefia thought was very interesting initially, but then several things made us decide to turn back. There wasn't a single other car parked at the trailhead, but the trail had some recent footprints on it. When we started climbing uphill we saw a single-person green tent pitched on the trail with remains of a small fire in front of it. That creeped us out a bit. Then we reached several washed out areas, and then Beefia started complaining mightily. All these factors combined made us go back to the car in a hurry. We tried to show Andrea a salamander on our way back, but I'm not sure that she actually saw it. She was too busy grasping at branches of all the downed trees. She thought that this was quite fun.
Our next hiking attempt - on the Nature Conservancy trail - was a lot more successful as pictures can attest. We saw a few very large deer on our way up, and the views from the top were just spectacular. This is probably one of the best views on the Oregon Coast, because it's completely unobstructed by trees and overlooks a wide estuary.