Crescent City, CA

Today we continued driving south through Oregon. When we woke up, we saw that it was raining. But we're kind of used to precipitation by now. I did my morning swim to loosen up the muscles, and then away we went. We stopped first at the Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden in Portland, which was incredible. In fact, I think it was even a little better in the rain. There were ducks taking baths and everything was fresh. The rhododendrons and azaleas were beyond peak, but still beautiful.


We then drove south to Eugene, where we had lunch at a food court, at a Middle Eastern place. Jim got some sort of meat pocket sandwich. He asked for it to be spicy, and then topped it with some of the hot sauce that came with my food. I took a little taste of the sauce and noticed jalapeno seeds in it. Well it nearly knocked my socks off. Jim was almost crying by the time he finished his sandwich. He ate half of the yogurt that came with my dish, and then got ice cream too. :) He claims it was the hottest dish he's ever had in the U.S.

As we continued driving, I saw thousands of purple lupines along the road, just growing in the ditches.

No kidding. There were a few yellow ones too. I tried growing a lupine once. It died very quickly. But here they grow like weeds.

After Eugene, we drove to the coast. Except we couldn't really see the coast for a while. There were these huge, beautiful dunes, but all the beaches charged a fee to enter, and all we wanted to do was stop for 5 minutes and look at them. So we drove and drove, and finally we started driving along the ocean. This is mostly what we saw:

But we finally stopped and walked out on the beach:


We met this couple, Dan and El, who were from California but had moved to Oregon. They had two dogs. The one in the photo (above) is 17 years old and still likes to go swimming in the ocean. They had a younger dog, a black lab, who didn't like the water! It was funny watching him fetch a tennis ball, but he would stop if it went into the water. It was El's 50th birthday and they were having a drink of wine on the beach. Dan took our photo.

We kept driving along the coast, and saw these rock formations in the water. They were beautiful. Then we crossed into California and stopped in Crescent City, which is where we're staying tonight.

Tomorrow it's the redwoods!