Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area

Well, the ranger was wrong about the sun. It was misty and cloudy all morning, but finally by 3 the sun came out. We spent a few hours working on various things. Got a new Alltell data card (with unlimited internet), which became Verizon by the time we got it and installed it. That created some major problems but Jim finally got them straightened out and it is working well. He posted on some internet groups to see if anyone would like to take over our old Verizon account, with 13 months remaining on the contract. We hated to pay them $120 to get out of the contract and after calling Verizon found out how easy it is for another person to take it over. Someone on the Lazy Days group was interested, so she gets a free data card, no activation fees, and a 13 month (instead of 2 year) contract. All we had to do was make a phone call to Verizon and give them her name before she called to get the account transferred. We boxed the old data card and accessories and overnighted it to her yesterday. Glad to have that resolved.

I spent a lot of time trying to find us a place to camp for the weekend. We wanted to go a bit farther north but everyplace was booked for the weekend. Even contacted several private RV parks with cable hookups, hoping we could watch the end of the Tour de France this weekend, but no vacancy anywhere. We can understand why everyone heads for the coast this time of year, as hot as it is in the rest of Oregon. Finally decided to check and see if we could just stay here a couple more nights, since there is so much to see in the area. There were 2 sites available for Friday and Saturday, only one of which we could fit in, so tomorrow morning we will be moving to another loop. It’ s even a better site than where we are now, and it will be a short trip.

We went a few miles down 101 to the Waxmyrtle trail, near the campground we were originally going to stay at. The first part of the trail goes through the forest along the Siltcoos River Estuary, then comes out at the coast.

This is a sign we have never seen before. Unfortunately we didn’t see any seals or sea lions, so we weren’t tempted to disturb them!

We got to walk along the Pacific beach for the first time ever. It was cold and windy and foggy and the sand is brown. We are spoiled from living in Pensacola for so many years with the beautiful white sand. It appeared to be low tide, and it was amazing how far out the water was from the water line. Also, the surf was much more impressive than the Gulf.

We spotted this huge jellyfish far out of the water, and it still appeared to be moving. I found a piece of driftwood and Jim picked it up to put it back in the ocean.

I didn’t have the camera out when he dropped it before he got to the water. It probably didn’t survive the fall, but we tried!