We love Oregon Coast. After Icefields Parkway this is again a piece of our journey that is leaving us with mouth wide open after every corner.
Oregon Coast is about 600 kilometers long and offers great Pacific views, sandy dunes, plentiful hiker/biker campgrounds, dog friendly beaches and some pretty tough climbs :). No it’s no flat beach all the time!
Once we discovered it won’t be possible to achieve 80-90 kilometers as usual due to amount of time we spend whale watching, picture taking and admiring the nature, we took it slowly averaging 50 kilometers per day and this is what we saw.
Astoria to Seaside
This section brought one great surprise – tailwind finally! And a beautiful fog over the ocean playing games with our camera.
Seaside to Nehalem Bay State Park
We saw partial solar eclipse here, met Neil – our warmshowers host, great 70 year old guy who kept us entertained with stories from his travels. We met Molly and Sara, James and Scott – fellow cycle tourists doing various sections of the Pacific Coast and the guys performed Taylor Swift hits at the campsite. There’s no audio/video from this but you missed a lot guys :-D. This section of Oregon Coast provides some great views and beaches and we saw the whales for the first time as well. Ecola State Park tested our nerves and legs with some of the steepest hills ever encountered. But it was so much worth it!
Nehalem to Cape Lookout
Just to keep us entertained, Tom forgot his phone at the campground and had to take the bus to get while we were already 20 km into our day. We parted ways with Hwy 101 for a while and headed to our next campground, Cape Lookout.
Cape Lookout to Lincoln City
We started our day with a climb, quite a terrible climb. But we made it. At the end of the day we were “rewarded” with another one but thankfully off the highway and the dogs could run with us. Lincoln City campground is another story, story of big disappointment, but we get to that in a review post about Oregon Coast campgrounds.
Lincoln City to a secret location full of whales 🙂
This was our shortest day but we decided to have it short on purpose. Already in Boiler Bay we saw some gray whales, one of them came very close to the shore. It was definitely a wildlife day. Friendly raven who didn’t fly away even when photographed with wide angle lens (you need to be really close for that ). Huge bald eagle flying above the water with the fish he just caught. And then a place where the whales had their playground. We saw it, we saw them and we knew we wanted to spend the night there. Obviously you need to wait until it’s dark enough as it was a place where people would come quite a lot but after dark, it was our kingdom! One of the whales even said goodbye with her tail up in the air and then slowly swam away.
We hope you enjoyed this and also that we were able to transfer a little bit of Oregon Coast awesomeness over to you! Keep tuned for Part II., there’s more to come!
