May 14, 2022
8:15 am Set sail for coffee
As mentioned yesterday, we had no Wi-Fi and terrible signal at the Jesse Honeyman State Park, so we ended up at a Starbucks having coffee and sweet, sweet internet. What we did not mention was that, while Starbucks appear every ten feet where we live (Seattle area) they are as rare as hen’s teeth in this part of Oregon! It’s forty freaking miles between Starbucks!! And there’s no other espresso stands (we looked while we were driving an hour to the closest Starbucks. Someone should tell HQ that their plan to take over the world has a ways to go…
11:36 am Brandon, Oregon
There’s a lot of plastic that ends up in the ocean and from there a bunch of it makes it way to ocean beaches. This made artist Angela Haseltine Pozzi angry, so she did what artists do when they get angry: she made art! Specifically, she started making art out of the crap she found on the beaches: milk jugs, soda bottles, shotgun shells, lighters, etc.
And, boy howdy, did she make art: great swooping sea turtles, jelly fish, clownfish—all creatures that are endangered by the plastic in the water. Sea Turtles, for example, think that plastic bags look like jellyfish and chow down on them with expected results.
All this art gets displayed at their headquarters in Brandon, and around town, and various places around the country. There are teams of volunteers that head out to beaches and gather trash and bring it back and Angela directs teams of artists to assemble them.
Rather than wave our hands around about it, it’s probably way easier to show some of the pictures we took of this art work:
You can find more information at: https://www.washedashore.org/
We bought some cool stuff (flip flop earrings made from old flip flops!) and tossed money in the donation bucket. If you are so inclined, these are cool people who will use your money to make the world a better place.
Then we stopped by the Farmer’s Market where we bought some jalapeño brittle (!) for Robert and some drinking chocolate for Gini (this is like hot chocolate, only very intense).
1:20 pm
Traveling down the road (again) it is only intermittently raining—which is a huge change from yesterday and we are delighted to sometimes be able to look at things without a wall of water in the way. In this part of the Oregon coast, Highway 101 runs right along the coast and the landscape cooperates by displaying stunning vistas of the land cascading straight into the sea, which is crashing against the rocks with the beach struggling to keep the two of them separate.
It’s pretty cool, and makes up for the many (many) different speed limits that exist for Highway 101. We’re pretty sure that somebody in the State government has a brother-in-law in the Highway Sign business, because every mile or so there’s a different speed limit. Go 55. Now 50. Wait, back to 55. Now go 45 for a while. Now 40. 55! 35! Somebody is making money off this…
3:00 pm Brookings, Oregon
Remember that shelling by the Japanese that supposedly happened in Warrenton? (Although we have no proof!) Well, that same submarine was up to more mischief further down the coast. This submarine carried an airplane (apparently in a water proof hanger?) and an erstwhile Japanese pilot (Nobuo Fujita) took flight and dropped four incendiary bombs! On the woods near Brookings Oregon!
We’ll pause for a moment for the laughter to die down. This is a lot like trying to dilute the ocean with a bucket. As we can well attest, it is very, very wet here in Oregon. Very wet. Tossing a match, or a torch, or a napalm bomb on Oregon will lead to a very predictable result: it fizzles out. Three of the bombs didn’t even explode and the one that did met head on with damp Oregon forest.
Still, there were a lot of very excited fire rangers (the bombs landed in the woods), especially once they found the bomb shards and realized they had been bombed. This led to lots of Americans freaking out thinking that the Japanese were about to stroll ashore and take over everything. So a lot of barbed wire got strung, some blimps got deployed (in Oregon, of course, apparently a hot bed of invasion), and civilian volunteer patrols were keeping a close eye on the coast.
Anyway, Nobuo (the pilot) felt pretty bad about the entire episode, so the town of Brookings had a fund-raiser and invited him (and his family) to the 1962 annual Azalea festival and he brought his family’s 400 year-old samurai sword with him and gave it to the town as evidence of his sincere remorse.
The town said “Ah shucks, don’t think twice about it,” and forgave him and everybody had some sodas and danced and let bygones be bygones.
How do we know this? Because Brookings put the samurai sword in a display case in the library, along with books of newspaper clippings! They’re not trying to cover things up like Warrenton did. They proudly own their history!
So there you go.
The samurai sword donated by Nobuo Fujita to apologize for bombing Brookings
Model of submarine (plane location may not be accurate)
3:14 pm Entering California
Almost as soon as we enter California, the roads straighten out and the sun shines .We quite like California.
At least until Siri sends us on another trip round Robin Hood’s barn—this time, as soon as Siri announces the detour, Robert asks Siri if he is sure (Robert’s Siri is an English butler).
Siri replied, “Sure I’m sure!”
And off we went round the barn! We tried to get Siri to explain why he had made this choice, but he pretended not to hear us…
5:00 pm Dinner in Klamath
We’re staying at the Chinook RV park—that’s right, we’re a Chinook RV at the Chinook RV park! We can see the edges of the space-time continuum fraying just a little bit as we pull in…
Time for Harvey to relax!
All this Chinook-ness is happening in Klamath, California, which is a very different place than Klamath Falls, Oregon. For starters, there are five restaurants in Klamath, CA. One of them is closed. The nice one is open, except for this week. Two others are open but temporarily closed.
A typical restaurant sign in Klamath
By stopping a random guy in a parking lot, Gini got a lead on a restaurant (we felt like we were looking for a speakeasy). This restaurant turned out to be on the grounds of another RV park, in an old unfinished barn (plywood floor and walls). They served hamburgers and pizza.
Robert got all excited at the prospect of pizza, but then the cook/wait-staff/cashier said, “I only got large pizzas and if you order one I gotta turn on the oven and that’s gonna take 45 minutes so you really want pizza?” Robert decided he didn’t want it that badly.
But the spicy bacon burger he got was quite delicious. Gini’s slabs of meat between hot dog buns was less so. We’d advise you to avoid it when in Klamath, but you’ll probably never find it…