This is Part 1 of a two-part story on traveling the Oregon and Washington coasts. Start by taking the faster route down I-5 to Grants Pass, Ore., then take U.S. 199 to Crescent City, Calif., and head north on U.S. 101 to Brookings, Ore. Next week we begin in Seaview, Wash., and end up in, believe it or not, Blaine, at the Canadian border. Tune in next week to find out why.
By Christopher Reynolds
Los Angeles Times
The Heceta Head Lighthouse near Yachats, Ore., stands on a seaside slope as spectacular as anything in California’s Big Sur, and there’s a bed-and-breakfast in the lightkeeper’s home next door. Be nice and the innkeepers might let you stand beneath the lighthouse tower after dark.
From here you can follow the beam as it scans the western horizon, cutting through the misty air for miles. Coming ashore, the beam crawls across the cliff face on the other side of the inlet, then flashes through the nearby evergreens like a spotlight on the heels of a fleeing thief. Then to sea again.
Heceta Head was one of several don’t-miss destinations as I drove 1,149 miles in seven days, driving the coasts of Oregon and Washington.
I slept in a new bed each night and made sure each lodging was at the water’s edge. I met a fisherman with a divinity degree and a vampire fangirl comedy duo. I didn’t see one raindrop. I downed a seven-course breakfast, then chased it with a 10-course dinner.
In Washington, I confronted Disappointment, Flattery and Deception on consecutive days. And, no, that didn’t make me homesick.
I started at the big, green “Welcome to Oregon” sign south of Brookings. I would spend about $135 per night on lodging (before taxes) and just $134.82 on gas thanks to a Kia Spectra. I followed U.S. 101 and Highway 1 because, especially in Washington, you often have to leave 101 to see the sea.
“It’s very easy to drive and drive and drive the coast and never see anything,” Ed Kirkby warned me on the first night. “So you just have to park it, camp and hang out.”
We were standing at water’s edge in Harris Beach State Park, north of Brookings, while the sun dipped behind a set of ragged black sea stacks. Kirkby, on a two-month road trip of his own from Tucson, Ariz., had just finished crabbing and was headed to his tent.
I got back in my car and pushed up to my Gold Beach hotel.
For mile upon mile, the beaches of Oregon give you dramatic sea stacks and tide pools, and even in summer the beachfront hotels, motels and inns are cheaper than California’s in winter.
I measured my progress in lighthouses and bridges, many of which date to the ’30s, when workers were still building the Roosevelt Military Highway that we now call U.S. 101.
By the time I reached Heceta Head on the second night, I had covered 329 miles, lunched on tremendous fish at the Crazy Norwegian’s restaurant in Port Orford and risked burial alive on the wind-lashed sand dunes near Florence.
I struggled to remain standing while the gusts ripped at the sea grass and peeled feathery spray from the waves. Yet in the middle of this, a single sea gull glided, scarcely moving a feather, as if governed by the physics of some other planet.
On the third day, after a seven-course breakfast at the Heceta Head Lighthouse B&B, I paused for pasta at Yachats (pronounced YAH-hots), a gem of a town tucked between green hills, and I crossed the Yaquina Bay Bridge into Newport.
I missed the big aquarium here but caught fisherman Joshua Barrett, 29, selling tuna, halibut and crab from the docked Chelsea Rose.
He told me how crabs’ eyes allow them 360-degree vision, how he drains blood from tuna and how, in the battle to keep fish grime at bay, he trashes about 10 T-shirts every month. (That day’s T-shirt read: “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.”)
Barrett told me he had served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, worked as a graphic artist and earned a master’s degree in divinity. He seemed to have a pretty good handle on particle physics as well.
“We caught a wolf eel the other day,” Barrett said. “About 7 1/2 feet long …”
It was clear that Barrett had enough tales to last well into next year, but I was due to hear a few others across town.
The Sylvia Beach Hotel, a retro- bohemian, semi-Luddite, slightly shabby retreat in Newport’s artsy Nye Beach area, names its rooms after famous authors, outfits them accordingly, and urges guests to stay for dinner and play “two truths and a lie” with one another. It’s a 10-course dinner, which, counting lunch, put me at 18 courses for the day.
I enjoyed good salmon and even better falsehoods. Amanda, a young Oregonian, flummoxed us by lying about everything, from brothers and husband to Japanese and Korean language skills. Conversely, Martha of Georgia accidentally told the truth and was disqualified.
Not one soul bought my account of bungee-jumping in Zimbabwe, despite lavish details about Victoria Falls and fruit-hurling monkeys. I retired to my room, the Edgar Allan Poe, to nod off beneath the dull blade of a big metal knife, suspended from the ceiling over my pillow.
Cheesy? Perhaps. But things were about to get cheesier.
The next day I hit Tillamook, where about a million travelers a year stop for the cheese factory tour.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea. But it was free. And it was a self-guided tour, allowing easy escape. And then there was the restaurant-retail area — an ungodly amount of dairy products, including 38 flavors of ice cream. Resistance was futile.
Now I had many miles to cover quickly, which meant dissing three substantial cities. I prowled Cannon Beach for a few hours. I slowly cruised through Seaside (a Coney Island of the Northwest). Then I blasted past Astoria.
Ah, but the Astoria-Megler Bridge. It’s a green monster, a truss structure almost four miles long, built in 1966. It begins by soaring high over the south side of the Columbia River, then it drops until you can almost feel the Columbia lapping at your ankles.
You can’t walk on it, but with that descent it’s twice as much fun to drive on as the Golden Gate Bridge.
A man feels proud crossing such a bridge and pleased to reach the midpoint of his journey.
Continued in Washington next week.
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