Rowkin Rovings Blog

We are being beach dwellers today. The purpose of taking this rather tortuous route down to Phoenix was so that we could drive the west coast road which has been one of those items on our bucket list. We have always heard so many positive things about this road and to live in North America for 20 years and not have done is just a little embarrassing.

It was said that you should drive it from the north to the south which makes sense and lots of warnings that it was a very popular route. Probably doing it in November wasn’t the best month to drive it due to the weather but that is just how things fell into place and as we have mentioned several times already the weather gods have been super benevolent towards us.

And very benevolent they continued to be. Being Thanksgiving weekend has added more traffic than usual but goodness, we would not attempt to try it in the summer months.

We set off earlier this morning as we had almost 500 kilometers to cover and wanted the opportunity to stop as often as we wanted along the route.

One fact we were not aware of was that there are king tides between the 25-27 November, so how lucky was that. This meant that a lot of the blow holes were show casing themselves to the max.

There are many rivers disgorging into the Pacific along the west coast which has meant a lot of eye-catching bridges have had to be built to accommodate for ships passage up these rivers. There were many inlets with large fishing fleets harbouring there out of the very rough seas.

Of course, none of our photos are going to do justice to the scenery that we saw today.

The king tides along the northwest Pacific Coast of the US are about 12 foot or 3.6 meters. It is mesmerising to watch as they pound their way along the coast as well as a lot of the rocky outcrops along the beaches. The king tides are becoming more of an issue as the rising sea levels have caused more severe flooding along the lower coastal regions.

There are 13 light houses along the coast of Oregon. The coastline being a distance of 476 kilometres. The Heceta Head Light House was built in 1894, the 56-foot (17 m)-tall lighthouse shines a beam visible for 21 nautical miles (39 kilometres; 24 miles), making it the strongest light on the Oregon Coast. There use to be three light keepers in the days of old and the gorgeous home of the two junior light keepers is still standing and is available as an Air BnB – wish we had of known about that! It will set you back between $210-$400 USD per night – ooops, a little out of our budget but mostly because of the terrible exchange rate we are getting. The exchange the banks are giving us are CDN $1.38 buys us USD $1 – ouch, ouch, ouch!!

Asked Fras if these rock formations are called “erratic’s” which are a true geological term, but he replied that they are just knobbly bits. As we were ending our driving day the sun was starting to set over the Pacific Ocean which gave us a very ethereal atmosphere.

So, we have just crossed over into Northern California where we have discovered that the cost of fuel has shot up astronomically because of all the additional taxes they pay here.

As we turned to pull back into traffic, we caught sight of the Welcome to Oregon sign …….

……..yeap, sh&#@ts all over the Californian sign.

To sum up our visit to Oregon – DO IT!! It is a beautiful state with a lot of variation from the wild coast to the majestic mountains and soaring trees.