Friday, August 20, 2010

Last Coastal Stop in Brookings

After spending two nights in Bandon where we got a little sun each afternoon, we headed down the coast to Brookings to stay at the Driftwood RV Park. After we got settled in, Allan took the dogs over to the beach where they examined every piece of seaweed and exoskeleton to determine if it was edible. They seemed to think that the beach was their personal snack bar. Notice that Allan is wearing his levis and a sweatshirt, that is because the temperature is in the 50's. Every morning here in Brookings is socked in with wet fog and the sun does not try to make an appearance until almost dinner time.


One of the first items on our Brookings agenda was to head down to Crescent City and get prescriptions refilled at Walgreens. While we were there we stopped at the visitor center to inquire about good access to the beach and were given directions to Kellogg Beach a little north of town. It was a beautiful beach with a line of stones along the wave bench and there were several people walking along looking for agates. One man had a garden rake which he used to uncover stones under the sand and he showed us several agates which he had found. We did not find any agates but did take home a small bag of stones for our garden and we also got numerous photos of the beach, the beach grass, and the sand dunes.

Yesterday was a trip to the past. We headed up the Smith River, a wild and scenic river flowing from Oregon down into California and out into the Pacific. When we lived in Southern Oregon many years ago, we used to bring our kids and dogs to the Smith to raft. We also used to drive all the way to Crescent City to gather old seaweed from the beach to dig into our garden for compost. It must have worked, we had more veggies than we could can on our woodstove. This was a perfect day for memories as the sunshine was warm and the forest smelled sweet as we stopped for lunch at the Patrick's Creek Lodge, an old historic stopping place for travelers long ago. We used to drive down from Oregon to have dinner there 30 years ago and we were pleased to see that it looked just the same. We had lunch in the dining room but looked into the bar where we had always had a drink before eating, back in the old days. After lunch we walked down under the highway bridge along the river to the NFS campground. We got excited for a few moments when we saw they were looking for summer campground hosts but then we realized that although we could deal with the no electricity hurdle we would not be able to get through the summer without cell phone or broadband coverage for our internet. Oh well, it was nice to fantasize about being back in Patrick's Creek again and we were pleased that we had a whole day in the sunshine.

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