Coos Bay, OR

After a week of being parked next to Route 101 in Tillamook and trying to drowned out the highway noise by running two fans at night, we are finally again in a campground that is away from the highway. It is so quiet here that it was very noticeable the first night.

This area of Oregon is so beautiful. I am fascinated with the coastline and we have been driving up and down Route 101 all week. The first day out we went to a State Park in Coos Bay and actually got to see a gray whale.

I know that the whale can not be clearly seen, but trust me, it was there and it was just awesome to watch him. However, it was a little bit hard to take a picture of him. He never jumped out of the water, just came up for air ever so often. What we could hear very loudly was the sea lions, sunning themselves out on the rocks.

We are still in love with this great shore line and we did do some beach walking to explore the rocks at low tide with all the sea live that was stuck to them. We don't have to many pictures, since the sea mist (the locals say it is not fog) has been here pretty much every day and you can't take good pictures while the mist is there.


Amazingly, the sea mist is only right at the coast. If you drive inland about 1/2 mile, you are back in beautiful sunshine and blue sky. It made us wonder if we really would want a house at the coast, since a lot of time you really can't see the ocean. We actually looked at a house in Bandon, about 20 miles south of Coos Bay, but decided that it was not right for us and we are not ready yet to settle back down. We also found out that Oregon has a 23% rate of unemployment and there was maybe 10 job listings in the local paper. That certainly does not sound promising. But we will definitely keep this area in mind when we start house and job hunting again.

On Thursday we checked out the boardwalk in Coos Bay, which is totally different from the Jersey shore.


It has been a great week here, but we are ready to move on to go see the big Redwood trees in northern California.