Say Cheese!

Tonight we are at Cape Lookout State Park, on the Oregon coast.  I have cracked open the “two buck chuck” and really, what can one say about $2 wine except, for the price, it’s damn good! 

We are camped in west coast forest, but less than a couple of minutes’ walk from the ocean. Amazing! I am loving being so close to the Pacific and its sounds and smells and beach treasures (ok, broken shells!).  When I walk the beaches I walk with Remy, and it is fun to watch her experience it all.  She is alternately a little confused by the vastness I think, and fascinated by the minutiae, like shells and bubbles and jelly blobs.  Today she dug enthusiastically in the sand after…. something... for a few minutes, and failing to find it, peed on it and moved on. Is there a life lesson there? Perhaps.

It was an easy drive from Nehalem SP to this one today, and knowing that, we had a leisurely morning there - including a nice long walk with the dogs on the trails and beach of Nehalem, and lunch before we packed up.  

En route to Cape Lookout we stopped at the Tillamook Cheese Factory, where you can take a self-guided tour and see the cheese production/packaging floor in action before stopping (of course) for samples and purchases.  Suffice to say I now have enough cheese to last me ’til 2014  (especially since Jen is trying hard to stay dairy-free) but DAMN it IS good stuff! I picked up old cheddar, smoked cheddar, AND smoked peppercorn white cheddar (because if there’s one thing a mostly-vehicle-bound, mid-40’s female traveller needs, it’s um, more cheese, right?!) 

When we pulled into Cape Lookout, one of the first things we noticed is how many of the sites are reserved (95% of them?) - not for tonight, but for tomorrow night.  Friday.  Of course.  In talking with the camp host here, I learned that all the state parks down the coast will be full to capacity for the weekend, and that without reservations we are taking a chance on having a place to call home tomorrow night.  In state parks anyway,  Jen has been researching alternatives on line, and there are many.  So we are not sure where we will be resting our heads tomorrow night - all part of the adventure.  (I take comfort in the knowledge that wherever we are, we will have cheese.)  Although we had talked about boondocking our way down the coast, the temps combined with the humidity (currently it’s 6:30 and 10.1 degrees C, but it feels cold out there) mean it’s really nice to have electricity and thus easy heat.  Also, there is a storm expected here on the coast tonight and tomorrow.  But for tonight we are tucked in and warm, and the millenicom mifi that we ordered and picked up in Great Falls is working well here so we will probably hunker down and watch a movie on Netflix! It’s a funny dichotomy of “roughing it” and not. But I’ll take it.