Only in a few places you can go camping to the beach in the middle of the winter and still enjoy it. This trip was to a place called Cape Lookout. It is a park located in the Oregon coast at about one hour from Portland. Being low season, there was almost nobody camping in tents. Campers were staying in RVs or park’s huts. Since we were car camping, we made the trip in stages. Marci and Chris were the first ones to get there to set up the Condo (that’s the name of the tent we took), Jeff and Lisa with her dogs followed and later me with Amanda and Shia. Later on Tom and Chris joined us although they camped in their own tents. The trip there and arriving was under heavy rain, so there aren’t many pictures to share from the experience but the tent was already set up and decorated with all sorts of accommodations like music, decorative lights, food and a mirror ball! The only problem was that it rained the whole night. So much was the water that I ended up getting in the tent and inundating parts of it. Luckily we had enough padding to stay mostly dry. I was sleeping on an inflatable bed completely dry and ended up sharing it with Shia when her bed got wet. Saturday morning was a bit chilly but ran had finally stopped. We did set up a table for breakfast in a small, close by building with the bathrooms and a small hall. Midway thru our breakfast we received a visit from a park ranger to check if we had paid for our camping spot and cars and also to tell us that dogs needed to be on a leash. Upon seeing that our tent was all wet, he offered the hall. This hall is usually rented out for 25$ a day and can only be used until 10 PM, but being low season, the ranger gave it to us for the whole weekend without extra charges. The hall, apart from being considerably big and having chairs and tables, had a kitchen, sink and a heater! As you can imagine, everything we had in the tent was moved in minutes to the hall. Then we hanged everything to dry with the heater. After getting stuff ready, we went out for a short walk. We took a route going towards the coast. Weather was cloudy but not very cold. After that first, short walk, we head back to the hall to have a little lunch, pick up some stuff and head out again with the intention of getting to the view point. The trail was incredible bordering the coast line and going up the hills with drops and cliffs all the way down to the sea. The views of the coast with all the clouds moving in from the sea were amazing. Tom and Chris surprised us at the view point with a bottle of wine that we drank. That was not enough to keep us warm, maybe another type of liquor would have done it. We then headed back arriving back at camp when it was already dark. During dinner we enjoyed a delicious chicken with apples made by Amanda and very soothing massages given by Marci. Sleeping in the hall was clearly and improvement from sleeping in the wet tent. On Sunday we woke up, had breakfast and head out, this time towards the beach. The first part of the trail was the same we took on Saturday, but after it veers of, goes up the mountain and then back down to the beach. Once we made it to the beach we encountered some surprises. First off, it was completely desolated. All the extension of the beach was only for us. Besides that, weather was much better than the previous days with 61 degrees. Obviously the first thing to go was the shoes. From there Marci and I took a long walk on the beach taking pictures. You’ll see there was a lot to be entertained. At some point we found algae that resembled a whip. Marci started playing with it and obviously ended up hitting herself, still, there are some really cool pictures there. After that, Jeff and Marci entertained us with a pole fencing duel. We then had a small lunch before heading back to pack and head back home. On the way we made a stop at a Mexican restaurant were we enjoyed a nice meal and Marci took the final funny pictures of the day.
View pictures of the trip | View Marci's pictures |
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