September 3, 2009 – Lincoln City, OR

Big day, lots of action, pretty much all good. Started great, ‘cause I got my cookies for the phony paper retrieval, then got another two when a real paper showed up, courtesy of the RV Park. OK! Geri and Don had come to the conclusion that I hadn’t been getting enough exercise recently, so Don volunteered to take me down to the beach, where he knows I’ll do a lot of running. Well, we both got more than we bargained for. The beach wasn’t that far away horizontally, but vertically was another matter. We found a stairway that went down, and down, and down to the beach, and finally we were walking on sand. Soon, I was parading through the surf line, getting my toes wet, and doing some crazy dog runs. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why Buddy, my mentor, always went absolutely wild whenever we were at the beach. Yeah, the wave action is exciting, and the sounds are different and stimulating, but it’s really not enough to make me want to dive into the surf to retrieve some stupid dummy that Don’s thrown out there. Besides, I don’t like retrieving that much anyway. So call me a renegade retriever; I don’t care. But the beach is fun, and I do like to run on the sand, and it is great exercise for me.

So we walked down the beach, meeting a lot of people who immediately liked me and wanted to pet me, which made my day. Don was looking for a stairway to get us back up to the road home, and finally found one when we were about a half mile down the beach. The stairway he found led to another, higher, stairway, which led to another stairway, which led to a road that was very steep. I’m saying that by the time we got up to a street we could get back to the RV Park on, we had done a lot of climbing. I was panting, and Don was complaining of leg cramps. Once we got back to the rig, we both collapsed for awhile. After a bit, we all got in the truck and did some touring of Lincoln City. We found a little elevated walk over a swampy area that led us to an RV Park on Devil’s Lake; that was kind of fun. We drove down to the north end of town, and then turned back to drive along the beach front. There’s a lot of motels, bed-and-breakfasts, and guest cottages in this place; Don says it’s one of the closest places to Portland for people to visit the beach for a weekend or a vacation. We headed on south down the 101, stopping at some of the overlooks that we couldn’t stop at yesterday because we were in the coach. I’m not the biggest scenery nut in the world, but I had to admit that most of the views were really impressive. We wound up in a little burg called Depoe Bay, where they parked in back of a restaurant and went in to have lunch. Geri finally came out and got me out of the truck, and took me around to the front of the restaurant, where I was surprised to meet some old friends; Robyn and Bob, from Paradise Valley, Arizona, Gwendy and Archie’s folks! Turns out they’re staying down in Newport, and Geri and Don found this out from a comment on this blog! I was pleased to provide the vehicle that got them together! They were both very appreciative of me, but I was sorry that they didn’t have their dogs with them; they’re both great dogs, though Archie is a little excitable at times. We walked around Depoe Bay for awhile, then we got back in the truck and went a little further south down the 101 to visit a few more viewpoints. One of them was on a bluff 500 feet above the ocean, Don told me. Cool. Lots of people, lots of petting.

We finally headed back to the rig, I had my dinner, and Geri went shopping at the local Tanger outlet stores. Don worked on organizing photos, which I hope he’ll start posting on my blog; it looks kind of silly with me talking about Oregon with photos of Hoover Dam alongside. We’re heading out tomorrow, a short trip to McMinnville, where we’ve never been. Don says the RV Park there is supposed to be really nice. I’ll give you a full report tomorrow!