Wednesday 18th March

Free pastries, doughnuts and fruit, great start to the day! First off we went to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, billed as being one of the best in the country. And it was pretty amazing, many varieties of fish, jellyfish, crustaceans, an outdoor area with sea lions and sea otters, an octopus that was in hiding, and a deep sea walk through section. This was fantastic, a tunnel you went through with glass all around and sharks, rays and other deeper sea creatures swimming alongside and above you. And even below you….there were sections of glass on the floor, I was reluctant to walk on them even though there were kids sprawling all over them.
Time to hit the road again, south on the 101 a short distance to Yachats for lunch at the Drift Inn, which had open umbrellas hanging right-way-up from the ceiling! I had seafood lasagne and Greg had crab quesadillas, tasty stuff. Just south of Yachats were Cape Perpetua (another Captain Cook naming) and Devil’s Churn. The Cape is a bluff 803 feet above sea level, described as the best view on Oregon’s coast. It would be hard to argue, pretty incredible up that high, being able to see about 70 miles of craggy coastline. Devil’s Churn just beneath the Cape was an instant favourite of ours, a deep inlet where the Pacific causes its merry havoc. Great views from above and you can get right down to it perfectly safely, but it still feels pretty intimidating having the raw power of the ocean doing its stuff that close to you!
Then the alarmingly sudden change from cliffscapes to dunescapes. You actually can’t see that much of the Oregon dunes from the 101, and unfortunately we missed our turning for the place where you get a grand overview of a large section of the dunes. But we found a beach road in a little place called Winchester Bay, and we were well rewarded. The road took us through some massive dunes, and we saw people riding ATV’s and motorbikes through them, looked like a helluva lotta fun. We stopped in a car park at the end of the road a few miles in, with huge dunes behind us and a sandy ridge just in front. We had lost our bearings a little, and were not prepared for the wonders that lay just over this little ridge. It was a wide beach stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions virtually in a straight line, with the vast Pacific waves rolling in. There was no-one else at all on the beach, and minimal signs of human intrusion, it was quite an incredible place to be in those circumstances.
It was quite late in the day by now, so we picked the town of Roseburg to be our stopover place. It was east on the 42, we wanted to start moving in towards Crater Lake. We found a cheap motel very quickly, which never seems to be too difficult. Very large and comfortable room and beds, again with free breakfast, yet again very impressed with the motel standard! It was getting late and we were not excessively hungry so we chose tonight to be our first experience of Taco Bell, the Mexican Mcdonalds. It was actually surprisingly and rather worringly tasty. Having read up on the journey to Crater Lake we found that we would be passing hot springs and waterfalls on the way, so we set the alarm for 7am and got an early night.