It was
pretty magical to wake up in the Agatha Christie room this morning. Waking up
in a new place each day it is easy to forget where you are, so getting to
experience it all again when I woke up was fun. I wanted to maximize the short
amount of time we had left there, so I read for a few minutes in bed, went up
to wake up Julia in Hogwarts upstairs (who wanted to be woken up to go on a
run), read a few minutes in the library on the third floor (that had been full
of readers when we arrived the night before), and then went for a walk with
Rachel on the beach. We ran into Julia
on the way back from her run and all returned to the hotel for breakfast. We had filled our plates with continental
breakfast items before we realized that we were also being brought a hot
breakfast of eggs and grilled toast. Our
dinner companions joined us again for breakfast and we got into a more lengthy
discussion about their four adopted daughters and the difficulties associated
with adopting toddlers. They now range
in age from 17 to 22, but it certainly sounds like a challenge every step of
the way. 
Erin and
Bonnie recommended we stop at the tide pools at Strawberry Hill, south of
Yachats. On our 25th day in
the Pacific Northwest it was finally drizzling.
We have been spoiled by blue skies the whole way, but today we finally got to use the rain
jackets I’ve been lugging around for almost a month. The grey, cloudy skies
were scenic in their own way, but not in the way that makes you want to run
around on the beach. We also have quite
a bit of distance to cover every day since we are going down three times as
fast as we came up, so we did a lot of viewing from the comfort of our
car. Thankfully we decided to brave the
drizzle, get out of our car, and go down to the tide pools. They were absolutely the best tide pools I
have ever been to! You always see sea
anemones at every tide pool, but this time the rocks were covered so densely
with them you had to look closely to tell they were blankets of anemones and
not just rock. Usually we are thrilled
to find a starfish or two, but today sea stars and muscles lined the sides of
rocks. It really felt like we were
getting a glimpse into the bottom of a very lively ocean. We were so busy looking down into the pools
at the tons and tons of sea life that it made us laugh when we realized that we hadn’t even noticed
the main attraction just a few feet off shore: at least 20 harbor seals were
resting on the rocks and swimming in the water. It was an ocean wonderland!
 |
| can you see all the muscles? |
The other
place we’ve heard about often are the sand dunes outside of Florence. We stopped for a lunch in Florence, choosing
a place that sounded like just what we needed and had great Yelp reviews: Nature’s
Corner Café and Market. It was TERRIBLE.
My soup was actually inedible. Must have just been an off day, but don’t go
there. A block later we saw that
Florence does have a cute downtown center that we had totally missed. Oh well.
We continued on to the Oregon Sand Dunes National Recreation Area and stopped
to run on a sand dune. We’ve recently
run on the sand dunes at Death Valley so were a little jaded but it is always
fun to climb up and run down big piles of sand. The girls tried to knock Jim
down but were completely unsuccessful.
After our
terrible lunch we needed a sweet treat to make it through the car ride. (If you’ve been following along, the last thing
we actually needed was a sweet treat.) Thankfully every town we go through has
a homemade candy store, and Bandon was no exception. We picked up some sugar sustenance and drove
another hour to our stop for the night in Gold Beach. Along the way the views of the rocky beaches
got really beautiful. We were discussing
our dinner spot for the night and looking at our options as we rolled through
Gold Beach. When we checked in to the
Pacific Reef hotel we discovered that the family room I had reserved (a great
deal btw!) was a huge two room suite with kitchen and living room with DVD
players and movies you can borrow for free.
That decided it for us – we ordered great pizza delivered by Sunset Family Pizza and watched Beverly Hills Cop. Just before closing, we sent Jim out to pick up some Dairy Queen Blizzards for us. Just because.
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