February 2023 update: this post is being updated from 2 photos, which in itself was rare back in 2006, with a few more of the images that defined the day for Caroline and me. Gleaned from cold storage and not in the original text, we left our most excellent yurt at Beverly Beach State Park in the dark, stopping at Dutch Bros. also in Newport, Oregon, for coffee and driving south to North Bend before dipping into the Pancake Mill for breakfast two hours later.

A bit of a boring photo for sure, but sometimes, the boring must accompany the stellar in order for contrast to be well understood. There was likely something else at work that we succumbed to while out here in Oregon, the need to linger for another moment in the gray. Nothing quite like hanging out in a diner, cafe, or restaurant to linger in the vibe we reluctantly must leave.

Today will be all about the southerly direction we must go, and it is with that reality that we find ourselves adjacent to the Coquille River Lighthouse at Bullards Beach State Park in Bandon. Our original plan was to cut from the coast to U.S. Highway 5 for a faster drive home, but poor weather in the mountains and bridge repairs in Northern California have us taking the long, slow, scenic way home along the coast.

And, of course, we must stop for these moments of blue sky as it may be all we’ll witness on this day.

If only Face Rock, also in Bandon, could talk, I’d ask it how many days it has been witness to blue skies, though I might also enquire if it has seen a stray UFO here or there.

Of course, I wanted to enter this abandoned house, but things we relatively kept up, meaning for all I knew, the place only looked as though no one was living there.

No time to go down to the docks here at Port Orford. Heck, what am I even doing with all this driving still ahead of me?

I know we are trying to keep a solid pace, but how can I just drive by this scene at Gold Beach, ignoring its aesthetic brilliance?

This may well turn out to be the most dramatic shot I’ll ever shoot of the shark fin rock here at Meyers Creek Beach, but that doesn’t imply I won’t try again and again over the approaching years of doing better.

For a minute, we felt sympathy for this guy; we even refused his offer of money. He wasn’t with us long before he needed to get out of our car. The lesson was learned: guys too well dressed for small-town America hitchhiking are probably sociopaths, and as soon as you tune into the crazy talk, it might even be better to boot them from the car with the first verbal transgression. Lucky for him, we took him as far as Eureka before insisting that there was no way he was going any further with us.

After filling up on Dutch Bros. again, this time in Eureka after ditching creeper dude, we stopped in at the Humboldt Redwoods State Park to commune with nature and wash our mistake off of us, only to record here on the blog for posterity.

Sunlight has started to fade, and yet we still have 300 more miles of driving before reaching Santa Cruz, California, south of San Francisco. Should we make it to our hoped-for destination, we’ll have covered more than 700 miles today.

Speaking of San Francisco, why not pull into the city for a dinner break? Oh, this looks interesting: Hakka cuisine in the style of Szechuan flavors, and we were the only non-Chinese customers; as a matter of fact, I think that even the menu presented us with some challenges. We ended up with a whole fish that we split before returning to the road for the final leg of today’s journey.