From Beverly Beach, OR

Before I start writing about our activities, I have some thoughts about state parks vs. commercial parks.

Beverly Beach State Park is about 90 miles south of Nehalem, on the Oregon coast. The drive on Thursday went smoothly.

The RV campground is very large and full of beautiful trees. Unfortunately that means no Verizon and no satellite TV.  I knew satellite reception would be unlikely, but find lack of the phone and internet access a bit of a bother. 

We drive out of the park every day, and park where we can get service for as long as it takes to check mail and read the news. Anything can be worked around. I’m trying to have a good attitude, comparing this to the days before the internet, but I also admit I am a bit addicted to instant connections. 

 I looked at several of the commercial RV parks in the area, and not to sound to “sour grapes,” they are all much more expensive, and more like parking lots. There is one up the way, Ocean Shores, that is beautiful but runs almost $100 per night!

We will be here six nights. We are paying $31 per night.

Upon arrival, I checked out the parking area of our pull through site and noticed a large “pot hole.” I thought that it would not be good to hit it with either of our tires or leveling jacks. 

Craig carefully directed my parking so I missed the pot hole, but that put us very close to a large bush on the driver’s side of the coach. 

With the slide out, we are really “one with nature”, but the branches are flexible and moved when we pushed into them. This is something we are always on the look out for. If the greenery had been a tree trunk our had thick branches, we would have reconsidered our placement or tried to cut them back with our pruner, before putting the slides out. 

Speaking of trees:

I call these cannibal trees, because a new tree gets its nourishment from the decaying stump of an old one that has been cut down. It is typically a seedling rather than a sprout.  In the image to the right, the old stump has completely rotted away from under the new tree, and then at some point the new tree was also cut down. 

On Friday we went over to see the lighthouse at Yaquina Head.

Did I mention that it was another beautiful day?

Because we arrived at the Visitors Center early in the day, we were able to get two of the last three available spots on the free guided tour at 2 pm. We looked at displays, watched the movie, and relaxed by a window with our computers while we waited.

Sixteen people are allowed inside the lighthouse with the costumed guide several times a day. This was our guide, who gave us a nice description of some of the aspects of living there in the past.

There were only 116 steps to the top of this lighthouse, less than the Astoria lighthouse by far. One of the things I liked about this trek up was that there was no one going the other way, and there were railings on both sides. This made the spiral stairs feel less scary.

We all got a good look at the light from the top step, but were not allowed to go any further out onto the platform around it. The view was, needless to say, amazing! 

On this leg of our summer travels, we will be staying in parks for a week or so and taking day trips with our Jeep. On Saturday we drove about 35 miles south on Highway 101 to Cape Perpetua.

It is 3 miles south of Yachats. This picture was taken at the Scenic Overlook, which is the highest viewpoint that you can drive to on the Oregon Coast. 

In this picture you can see parts of Highway 101. We will be driving the Alfa this way on Thursday. Eek!

On the picture above, you can also see the parking area for our next destination on Saturday, a place called the Devils Churn. 

Over the eons, wherever the water finds its way into a crack in the rocks, it will eat away and widen it in a violent churn. 

Between that and washing away the sandstone bluffs, the coast is constantly being changed by the sea.

This was a calm day.

On the rocks

Of course we shot dozens more pictures, but I try to exercise restraint in how many I post.

Lest you think that all we are doing is going on walks and looking at the ocean and the trees, I have a few more images from our Saturday drive to share.

Sometimes the free newspapers given to tourists actually yield some good things. In this week's issue of Oregon Coast Today, I found an article about a Renaissance music concert to be held at the Little Log Church in Yachats on Saturday afternoon. 

The timing couldn’t have been better!

The five person group Byrdsong was from Eugene, and played a selection of music from the British Isles. They were very good.

The inside of the church was small, holding about 60 people, but was impeccably maintained and had terrific acoustics.  




I really feel lucky to have paged through that little newspaper. I probably wouldn’t have if we had the internet or satellite TV.

Good things are often serendipitous,

and simple.