Oregon Coast - day 1

We took a week's vacation and flew northwest to Oregon last week. I have lots of photos from this trip, so I'm going to break this into several blog postings. The first two days we drove from Portland down the Oregon coastline as far south as Florence. The first day we stopped at the first beach we reached, appropriately named Road's End Beach and took a walk along the sandy beach to stretch our legs. Despite a record-setting heat wave inland, the beach was wonderfully cool and windy. Much too cool for swimming! The only people out in the water had on wet suits.

We had reached Newport by lunchtime so we stopped for a bowl of clam chowder and an excellent blackberry barbecue sauced salmon on salad at a restaurant that had a view over the ocean. The old port town lines a quiet harbor away from the ocean side. Along with many other tourists we strolled past the shops and down along the piers. There are still several working seafood processing plants right along the harbor and along one low dock a colony of sea lions basked in the sun. They must all be closely tracked because many had letters and numbers shaved in their fur or ear tags.

In the afternoon we visited the Oregon Coast Aquarium just south of Newport, http://www.aquarium.org/. The aquarium has several indoor exhibits and just as much outdoor exhibit area. Outside are sea lions, sea otters, seals and an aviary. Also a nice "nature walk" with views over the harbor and many native plants labeled. Indoors there was a great jellyfish exhibit and another special exhibit called Oddwater that featured odd sea creatures in tanks with abstract glass sculputures created by a local artist. They have 2 tunnels that go through giant aquaria as well.

We camped at Beachside State Park, which would have been nice except that our campsite was about 15 feet from the road. It is very close to the beach though, so you could try to focus on the beach noises rather than the road noises. When we got there they were in the final stages of fixing a 3 day septic failure, but they got it done by the time we got back from dinner! For dinner we went into Yachats and stopped for a drink and appetizer at a nice little restaurant that had a wine store. I had an excellent Washington State Cabernet Sauvignon from the Nelms Road winery (I think - swore we would remember the name and it did start with an N). We had passed dozens of Oregon wineries on the way to the coast in the morning, but this bar didn't have that many choices in Oregon wines. The appetizer was a wonderful little plate of roasted garlic cloves with blue cheese, toasted hazelnuts and focaccia to spread it all on. We went to a more casual restaurant next door for dinner that had a nice view over the harbor, but the food wasn't that great. My crab cakes were bready and Jake's cippolino soup was more like a pasta sauce in thickness.