My God, they pump the gas for you here!
Trip Start
Sep 03, 2008
1
17
28
Trip End
Oct 01, 2008
Where I stayed
LaQuinta inns & suites White City
White City, Oregon
Saturday, September 20, 2008
We left Newport very grateful this morning. The weather report last night predicted fog all morning, and all we actually got was a little haze. We followed the beautiful seacoast for 3 hours, and the terrain was again ever-changing. High cliffs with basalt "Islands", low areas with beautiful sand beaches, and then we came to "the dunes". It was 20 or 30 miles of huge sand dunes! I had no idea they would be there. I have seen the dunes around the end of lake Michigan, but these go on for miles, and reach about a mile or two inland. There are places to rent 4-wheelers, and places offering dune buggy rides all over the place.
After the dunes, we came to the mouth of the Umpqua River, and headed inland. The Umpqua river is wide and slow at the mouth, but as you go farther inland, it narrows and becomes rockier, faster, and is really beautiful. Umpqua, by the way, is an Indian word meaning "funny little Orange people". No, never mind, that's Oompa-Loompa. A few miles upstream, we saw a sign "Elk grazing area" near a large meadow. You know how much wildlife we have seen on this trip.....zippo. One moose, the back end of 2 mountain goats, and a few buffalo. Well guess what, we saw a whole herd of Elk! They were laying down! That must be our problem, we were looking for them standing up! We got a bunch of pictures from a couple of hundred yards away, but the close-up I put in for you is much better.
When we got to I-5, Victoria (the navigator, you remember), said we were on track to get to the Hotel at 1:30 in the afternoon, way too early. We plugged in Crater Lake, which was about a 125 mile side trip, and off into the mountains we went (again along the Oompa-Loompa river). There were signs saying that the road was closed at mm 59 because of a wild fire. We thought we could get close and then take a detour around the fire, or, maybe, they were letting people through. Dumb move. At mm 50 we started seeing smoke in the air, and at mm59 the road was blocked. We asked the man with the flag how to detour around the fire to get to Crater Lake and he said "go back to I-5 and take it to White City and go in from the South". We backtracked the 59 miles and got to our Hotel in White City too late to go the 75 miles to get to the lake. We will catch it next year.
The dead-end detour was really worth the time, anyway. The river got more beautiful as we went up it. Near the mouth it was filled with commercial fishing boats. Then, farther up, it was personal fishing boats. As the river turned to rapids, it was filled with fly fishermen in waders. I have never seen so many fly fishermen in my life. I'll bet we saw 50 of them. It was another day of beautiful scenery.
Tomorrow it is off to the California coast via Redwood National Forest. We visit Duncan MacLaren, my old College buddy and best man in our wedding, and his wife Betty.
