The weather this year in Bend has been quite moderate with a late spring and reasonable temperatures, reasonable until this past week when the forecast was for brutally hot weather. On seeing this, we decided to go to the coast for a couple of days just to get a change of pace.
When we lived in McMinnville, we went to the coast frequently and had explored all of the northern half from Astoria on the Columbia River down to Seal Rock in Lincoln County. Now living in Bend, our direct route to the coast goes to Florence, in a new section of the central coast for us. Ann found us a room in Yachats, just north of Florence, for Wednesday and Thursday.
With the haze from wildfire smoke from the big fire at Yosemite rolling into Bend late Tuesday night, we felt like we got out just in the nick of time. Below, you can see the weather situation and the haze rolling in from the fires.
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| Bend Forecast: Highs in the 100s |
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| Ditto for Yachats: Highs in the 60s |
After
Carter and Emma left on Wednesday morning, we set out for our beloved Oregon Coast. I decided to take the newly opened McKenzie Highway (the portion of OR 242 between Sisters and the intersection of OR 126 coming in from Santiam Pass, the portion which is only snow-free just a few short weeks a year) through the McKenzie Pass to Eugene and continue on through the Coast Range on 126.
Arriving on the coast in Florence, we would head north to Yachats where we would spend a couple of very delightful days seeing most of the sights in the Yachats area, most notably Cape Perpetua Scenic Area in the Siuslaw National Forest run by the National Forest Service. During the trip, I shot about 600 images, some of the best of which are in the posts indexed below.
We now take cell service largely for granted, if not for telephone service, for navigation. We expected no signal in crossing the Cascades, but not on the coast. It turned out that we had bupkis for signal north of Florence and had to find our inn by old school means. Fortunately, I remembered the street name that we needed to find and approximately where it intersected Highway 101. My habit of looking at a map beforehand paid off. Still, we did have a bit of trouble finding the exact building we were seeking.
Our trip back would see us retrace our path to Eugene and we would go back to Central Oregon over the Willamette Pass on OR 58. As soon as we got over the coast range back into the Willamette Valley, the temperatures would spike, but not nearly as high as later in the afternoon when we crossed the Cascades into Central Oregon, our respite from the heat coming truly and miserably to an end.
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| The Misery to Which We Returned |
Index of Posts
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