Miller Creek (Crescent City)(Leaving)
As it turned out, the weather influenced my decision quite a bit. As I drove towards Brookings listening to a local radio personality describe his recent trip to Kansas with his family in an RV, the clouds got darker and the wind and rain heavier. I pulled in to the Mount Humbug Day use area to catch up on my journal entries for a while. I typed them up in my car until around 10 am when I went to see if the campground would be suitable for a stay over that night. I decided that it was a little too soggy to set up camp so early and headed north.
A few miles later I stopped at a waysided south of Port Orford and continued typing my journal entries in the car while watching the storm pound the beach. The lady iun the visitors center said she expected the rain to last at least two more days. When I asked what she thought it would be like inland, she said she forgot to ask her daughter what it was like in Bend when she called her to wish her a happy birtday that morning.
I like the Port Orford area and decided to drive around a while. In elementary school I remember the frist grade teacher at the time (Mrs B, not mom) had a son my age. They invited me to stay with them for the weekend in Port Orford once. I remember we spent a lot of time at a place called Agate Beach searching for agates, of course. I know he had a rock polisher he wanted to use and we played a game called Mousetrap that at the time was too complicatged for me to understand well. I also remember this was one of the few times that I was able to stay overnight away from home without my parents being called because I was so distraught from being homesick. Even at that age I was anti-social.
I drove around Port Orford and stumbled on a road called Agate Beach Road. I followed it around but all the access was pricately owned. I drove through an RV park that had a sign on a dilapidated chain link gate saying public access would cost 50 cents per person. I'll bet they are making a fortune off that. Later I believe I found the house we stayed in that weekend. It was close enough to the beach that we could have walked there and it looked very familiar.
I headed north still undecided as to where I would end up. I wanted to stay one more night on the coast then head for Bend. I did not want a little storm to chase me away. At Cape Blanco the storm was not so little. I checked the campground there, but was dissatisfied because all the sites were full hookups and would cost an extra $4. I headed out to the light house and got some good video of the wind rocking my Satrun pretty good.
Further north I stopped at the public library in a very small town called Langolis. The library was a brand new building right off of Highway 101. The redheaded ponytailed gentleman that helped me informed me I could use thefloppy on the computer in addition to accessing the internet. I checked my email, then remembered I did not have the needed web pages on a floppy. I ran to the car to get my laptop, but when I returned a local gentleman was using the computer while his two daughters were excitedly discovering new books they had not read and his young son and I watched the deer grazing outside, he holding a bag of new jackets from Walmart. The local gentleman relinquished the computer around 2:45pm about 15 minutes before the library closed (although the librarian said he would stick around if needed. As it turned out, AOL had me locked out of my FTP site so I was unable to upload my latest entries. I thanked the gentleman for his time and help and left.
Around 5pm I passed through Coos Bay. It seemed like a bustling town. Its library was the biggest I had seen so far on my trip and had a lot of clients excitedly using it services at that time of night. I tried to send out entries 6 and 7 via email because I knew everyone was waiting to hear the end of the camera story. When I later checked this email via AOL, I was dissatisfied with the results and unsure if I would try it again.
At 6:45 pm in a constant and heavy drizzle of cold rain, I pulled into the Umpqua Lighthouse Campground and chose a site. Everything was wet, but this is camping in Oregon and my chance to see how I would handle it. I set up the tent then looked for something to explore.