Tuesday 17th March

Time to leave Portland, and time to head back to the coast. And we had a day of amazing coastline ahead of us. The first stop was in Depoe Bay, which had been recommended to us back in Astoria. There is a sea wall which you can drive right up to, with the Pacific behaving particularly ferociously just beyond it, and spouting horns where the sea is rushing in and is thrown up into the air through channels in the rock. Next stop was a place Captain Cook had jovially named Cape Foulweather, which was actually looking very pleasant today with great views up and down the coast. Well, to see the view back up the coast you had to walk all the way through the gift shop. But we smashed a penny in there so it was all ok. We then moved on to the Devil’s Punchbowl, a massive natural bowl eroded into the rock by the sea. We got up close and personal with some surprisingly tame chipmunks before heading down to a very wide beach at low tide and poking around in some tide pools. There was some crazy seaweed which strangely resembled the kind of thick cable that we are used to hauling around on the railway back home.
Our final destination for the day was Newport, a pleasant little coastal town. We had food at the Rogue’s brewery bar, Japanese Kobe beefburger and awesome rum cheesecake. Some great homebrews as well, the Chocolate Stout and Russian Imperial Stout. Missed out on the Mocha Porter but will hopefully be able to find it at another Rogue’s bar on the road. Stayed at the America Inn motel, another great motel experience with an excessively friendly worker, and this one with pastries and fruit for breakfast. We hit the town in the Nye Beach area with a choice of three places to go, so naturally we tried them all. First was the Sandbar and Grill, a standard bar that seemed ok and served the decent Deschultes Black Butte porter which we had already sampled. Then we went to Mundo’s Café, a hippy-ish place with live jazz music which was very pleasant. The third place was Nana’s café, an Irish bar that had been recommended to us so seemed the obvious choice for St. Patrick’s Day. Things seemed to be quietening down and they had run out of Guinness so we played some darts and headed back to the Sandbar where things seemed to be livening up. We hooked up there with a guy called Terry who we had met in Nana’s, a Brit from Weston-Super-Mare who was living and working in Astoria on the West Coast Groundfish Observer Program. He told us about places to go in San Francisco, and then we just seemed to meet a constant stream of people who all had advice of places to go on the way south through Oregon and into California, which was frantically being scribbled down in my notebook through a haze of porter. It was another great night in smalltown America.