Chapter Four - Monday

In which our heroes see some very large trees.

Our alarm went off at 8:30am, and we awoke to the sound of waves crashing on the beach right outside. Our room was decorated in an Orca/Mermaid theme. Neither had acheived dominance, so it looked like the decorators just couldn’t make up their mind which theme to follow. Or perhaps after doing the other rooms, they just had a lot of Orca and Mermaid stuff left over, and crammed two rooms’ worth of stuff into the one. It was small, but cute, and it did open right onto the shared balcony overlooking the beach. While Annie was getting ready, I took some photos of the room and of the jukebox room. Apparently, one of the owner’s hobbies is to refurbish old jukeboxes, and he had a whole room devoted to them, with a big couch in the middle. One light switch turned them all on - I didn’t count, but there were more than ten of them. Three were full of playable records. In addition to the jukeboxes, the room was full of other similar stuff, such as lighted wall clocks and little 50s diner table jukeboxes. But the highlight of the room was clearly the life-sized statues of the Blues Brothers dancing in the corner of the room. The owners had won them in a contest, and affectionately referred to them as “Jake and Elmo”. (Annie and I later decided that they had misread the tattoo on one of Elwood’s knuckles, which says “ELWO” - with “OD” on the other hand).

Over breakfast with the owners and another couple, we got to hear lots of stories, including how they accuired the Blues Brothers, how a cop investigating a burglar alarm nearly shot the statues one night, and all about how their daughter had run away with some horrible people - “Thugs, you know? Big black fellas, with DREADLOCKS!” - This last part was emphasized, as though the very mention of dreadlocks would surely illustrate to us the depths of depravity these people were capable of descending to. (I refrained from mentioning that Annie had dreadlocks at one point.) Aside from the vaguely racist horror stories, the owners and the other couple staying there were actually quite nice, and gave us a great deal of advice about our future children.

After breakfast and a nice walk on the beach, we headed into Brookings to get Annie some coffee at an Internet Cafe and Espresso shop, where I wasted an hour trying to download the software to let me retreive the photos from Dad’s borrowed camera onto my laptop. Luckily, the lady running the place was really nice and didn’t charge me to use their net connection.

Returning to 101 and heading south, we got to drive back along the same roads we had driven in on the night before, but we got to see a lot more this time around. The owners of the bed and breakfast had assured us that the northern state park was the nicer of the two within driving range, so we headed into Jededia Smith State Forest, where we got free parking from a nice booth operator, and some trail suggestions from the visitor center operator.

For the next several hours we wandered around some trails, ate a picnic lunch by the river, took lots of photos in front of successively more impressive redwoods, and met a lot of nice people wandering around. Actually, we went to two areas, and we only really saw people in the second area. The first one (Nature Trail) was nice and deserted, if slightly less impressive. The second one (Stout Grove) had more people, but much bigger trees and better photo settings. We were also very impressed to see a couple of woodpeckers banging away on a tree at one point, and managed to get some photos and movies of them… we’re such city kids.

Around 3pm, we got back in the car and headed back north into Oregon on 101. Along the way, we were dive-bombed by some kind of bird, which nearly hit our windshield. At this point, Annie remarked that we had the wrong kind of animal magnetism. Still, we somehow managed to avoid killing any wildlife, and after some spectacular scenery, we drove into Bandon, and found our room at the bed and breakfast we were staying at, which was even nicer than the one from the night before. Our room had tasteful (if dated) decorations, and most importantly, a jacuzzi in the room. We hit dinner a little earlier than the night before at a really nice place called the Bandon BoatWorks, where Annie got a sampler platter of seafood, and I got a Filet Oscar, which was steak with asparagus and crab. After dinner, we headed back to the room where Annie drank most of a bottle of champagne and we enjoyed the jacuzzi tub.