On a short stretch of Highway 101, along the Oregon coast between Yachats and Waldport, there are several streets named after states, with Kansas and Nebraska among the honorees.
That’s certainly a striking contrast: the image of flat fields of wheat and corn vs. the Pacific Ocean’s expanse and the shoreline’s diversity in terrain.
Just ask two experts.
“We love the trees, the hills and the water [along Highway 101] — we don’t get much of either back home,” says state of Nebraska resident Brandi Beins, formerly of Kansas, the state.
Beins was with her husband, James, at the Cape Perpetua viewpoint just south of Yachats, enjoying their third day of honeymooning, a trip that started June 11 in Seattle. James is a student at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and he says the choice to visit Oregon was made because the couple wanted to go somewhere they had never been. And to get away from the cows and corn for a bit, he adds.
Hordes of people from Eugene will likely follow the Beins’ lead and make at least one coast excursion this summer. Most veteran beachcombers already have their favorite hideaway or know the best spot to just plop down for a day in the sun.
If you don’t, the following mini-guide — it encompasses just the span of Highway 101 from Florence to Newport — might help establish a getaway plan for a day trip to the beach.
Don’t forget your sunscreen, though, and binoculars are always great to have for bird watching or spotting marine life.
Sea lions, kitsch and sand dunes, oh my
Once Highway 126, heading west from Eugene, spits you out onto 101, take a left for an aside to the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area.
Unfortunately, sand walkers have to sometimes compete for space and tranquility with the presence and constant sounds of all-terrain vehicles or motocross bikes. But the views from the dune tops are enchanting, with sandscapes visible for miles.
This portion of the dunes area is the northernmost tip, but offers a nice spot to play. The Jessie M. Honeyman Park, approximately 3.5 miles south from downtown Florence, is a good site to munch food, catch fish or lose yourself in the endless sand.
The town of Florence is an interesting stop with quite a bit of history, as Dick Kirby, a 32-year resident and volunteer at the town’s Visitor Information Center, can tell you. Today, however, he says that Florence is populated mostly with retirees, the majority of which have escaped from the southern wreck known as California.
Kirby says Florence has everything he needs to get by and rarely does he “have to go to the big city,” Eugene.
Whatever Kirby can’t find in his small burg, at least in the realm of kitschy coast souvenirs, he and other visitors can certainly score at the Sea Lion Caves gift shop, 11 miles north of Florence. You haven’t seen bad art until you’ve been inside this place.
Customers can sift through the shelves for such gems as “Oregon Coast in a Bottle” for $6 or a 6-inch blue, ceramic whale tail — just the tail — glued to a piece of wood. Other beauts include little skiing snowmen made of small seashells (a mere 75 cents) and a cougar head carved inside a set of moose antlers. Get out the credit card for that one, however; the cost is $195.
Skip the Sea Lion Caves because the gift shop is a hoot, and it’s free to wander and laugh. The “attraction” does sit on a small space with a nice overlook, however, one that is perfect for taking in the Pacific’s immensity.
“I love the ocean because in Japan you can’t see it,” Mayo Hotta says, as she and her two friends, Sayaka Mimura and Mikako Kiue, sit outside the gift shop. “I love to see the green of the trees and smell the ocean.”
The Central Oregon Community College students were spending a few days of their school break on the coast, away from the Bend campus, and very far away from their homeland, Japan.
“The coast here is more calm [than in Japan],” Kiue says. “And we have no sea lions over there.”
The country probably has nothing similar to the Sea Lion Caves gift shop, either.
Presto chango, the road reappears
In February, when heavy rains caused some of the oceanside terrain to give way, taking big chunks of Highway 101 with it, the gloom-and-doom forecast for coastal businesses matched the crappy weather that brought about the slides in the first place.
With the damaged stretch of road now reopened, shopkeepers along the affected area, especially in the town of Yachats, are gearing up for a less suspenseful summer season.
Jeune Arnold, who owns a small gift shop called “Comfort,” scrunched in between a diner and the town’s Visitor Information Center, says most everyone in the area made it through the ecological calamity. Despite the financial setback she incurred, the former Eugene resident can’t imagine moving elsewhere.
“This isn’t a place to come to make a living,” says Arnold, who has lived in Yachats three years and has had her shop location for half that time. “It’s a matter of survival just to have the privilege of living here.”
Arnold remembers coming to the Yachats area since she was a small child, and she’s used the coast as a place in her adult years to “relax and find a serene place to be.”
“It just kind of calls you,” she says.
Michael Deutsch knows all about the call of the coast. In fact, he recently fled Arizona and landed — temporarily, at least — at Beachside State Park, halfway between Yachats and Waldport.
“I came for the rhodies, the moss and the ferns — everything they don’t have in Arizona,” Deutsch says, while sitting in his van, which is a veritable house on wheels. “It has all the necessities and some of the niceties. Sometimes I live in it.”
Deutsch and Betty Hoffmester, who has lived for 24 years in a small neighborhood directly across from the park’s entrance, are shooting the breeze as the wind gently swirls off the beach. Hoffmester says she is happy she moved from Long Island, N.Y., to California to what she calls “God’s country.”
Deutsch is more of a drifter, he admits, and his eyes sparkle when he talks about traveling the Pacific coastline from Alaska to Chile on one particularly long trek. He first passed through this span of coast in 1955, as a runaway headed from Seattle to San Diego.
He laughs when asked what he does for a living.
“‘Is’ness is my business,” Deutsch says, smiling with a look a contentment as his dog Murphy rolls around on the parking lot pavement with Hoffmester’s pooch, Prince Andy. “I’d be happy if this is the apex of the whole deal.”
Look! Up in the air! It’s a … shark?
The Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport created quite a splash on May 27 when it opened its newest exhibit, the Passages of the Deep. Replacing the aquarium’s most famous resident, Keiko the killer whale, was no easy nor inexpensive undertaking.
The $6.9 million used to refurbish Keiko’s former home bought a lot of water — 1.32 million gallons are used for the exhibit — in addition to a plethora of sea life.
You want quillback rockfish? Check. Red Irish Lord? Covered. Cabezon? Oh yeah, there’s cabezon. Shortspine thornyhead? Come on, what aquarium is complete without a few shortspine thornyheads?
There’s also literally tons of sharks swimming under, over and around the 200-foot underwater tunnel, which is actually separated into three parts: Orford Reef, Halibut Flats and the Open Sea, which contains most of the “Jaws” imitators.
Not everyone at the aquarium was impressed, however.
“It’s smaller than I thought,” says a middle-aged visitor who would only give Julius Caesar as his name. “They need more lighting so you can see the color of the fish.
“When you see something on TV, you get all the color.”
“Caesar” was visiting from Hillsboro, Ore., and was glad he came out to the coast to see the Deep set-up.
“Now I don’t have to c
ome back and see it again,” he says.
In contrast to that curmudgeonly outlook, 8-year-old Sarah Leuck from Dublin, Texas, wasn’t all that sure how to respond to questions about the aquarium, but she knew what she enjoyed the most.
“The sharks. Because they look cool when you walk over the glass,” she says, with her grandmother Judy Jacques standing nearby.
“I was impressed,” Jacques says. “Although I thought it was one consecutive tube, it’s nice that it’s broken up into different habitats.
“We saw two rock fish peeking out in the Halibut Flats section, and they were really tough-looking characters.”
Hmm, perhaps they were related to Mr. Grumpy.
Home away from home
While the distorted rectangle of a trip — west from Eugene to Florence, then north to Newport, then east to I-5 at Corvallis, and finally south to Eugene — can be made in a day, albeit a long day, some may want to stay the night on the coast.
Everything from small motels to glitzy resorts can be found along Highway 101, but for a real treat, one should consider renting a beach house.
Judith Ross is the owner of Horizon Property Management in Waldport, and she says that although most of the rentals have been snapped up through late August, a few vacancies are available. This time of year, she says, is prime-time for her business.
“We’re not like Sun River, where they have a winter and a summer season,” Ross says. “We have only a summer season.”
The houses that Ross manages range in price from $40 a night up to about $120 a night, but she says a few other coastal companies have deluxe homes at upwards of $200 a night. Reserve now, however, unless a night at one of the cookie-cutter “Daze Inns” sounds more enticing.
“The busiest weeks of the season are the last weeks of July and early August,” Ross says. “It gets very crowded, very fast.”
Of course, not all hotels have that “seen one, seen ’em all” feel. The Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport is unique and a bibliophile’s dream come true.
Owners Sally Ford and Goody Cable, who live in Portland, named the hotel after the owner of Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore in Paris, which was a hopping place in the 1920s and 1930s. Beach was a patron of literature and each of the 20 guest rooms in the building, which was built around 1910, have been furnished and named after different authors.
The notables are impressive as you scan the list: Agatha Christie, Mark Twain, Alice Walker, Jane Austen Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, and even Dr. Seuss made the cut, among others. The rates range from $75 to $162 per double occupancy from now through late October, and the charge includes breakfast in the Tables of Content restaurant.
“As a storm watching building it can’t be beat because it’s like an old novel in itself — it has its own mantra,” says Marcia Schwartz, who was working the front desk at the oceanfront site.
Cable and Ford have been friends since age 3, says the hotel’s manager, Ken Payton, and the two looked at an old mansion in Portland and an old hotel in Eastern Oregon, before settling on this place.
“Both women are voracious readers and one of them thought to create a literary theme where people could interact with each other,” Payton says. “The other thing that’s fun is that the guests are coming here as a destination, as an event. They didn’t just see a vacancy sign of the corner.”
Payton has a tip for any poor, struggling college student who just needs a day or two to chill. Hostel rooms, not mentioned in the hotel’s brochure, run just $22 a night and Payton says he sees his share of students bunking up with a good book or a load of studying.
“We get the world’s nicest people who stay here,” she says, “because it’s such an easygoing and laid-back atmosphere.”
Sounds like the drive along the coast.
