Hotel Room Sunset

I managed to take a few pictures of the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean from the hotel room Tuesday night. It was not a super colorful sunset, and there were clouds obstructing the sun as it disappeared behind the ocean, but it was a sunset. This picture was my pick of the litter.

Bridge over Yaquina Bay

This bridge carries route 101 south over Yaquina Bay. Newport is to the left. This picture was taken from Yaquina Bay State Park

Views from Agate Beach

Agate Beach is located a few miles north of Newport. It is very wide, with enough sand to form some small dunes, and wonderful views of nearby mountains. One of the travel books that we bought suggested that you might actually find agate on this beach, but we had no such luck.

Cobble Beach

Below Yaquina Head Lighthouse there is a cobble beach that you can explore. A cobble beach is simply a beach made of small round stones, about the size of golf balls. The wave action erodes the "corners" of stones to make them round. The sound of the waves on a cobble beach is weird because the stones actually get moved around. And finally, these stones are really difficult to walk on.

Yaquina Head Lighthouse

As I mentioned yesterday, the visit to Yaquina Head Lighthouse was filled with wind and fog. You are allowed to climb up the lighthouse, but they were limiting the number of people to a few at a time (because of space limitations). Because everyone wanted to get out of the cold wind, there was a line to climb up into the lighthouse. We were impatient and skipped that.

Despite the gloomy weather, there were a few photos that are worth posting. The first two are of the lighthouse itself, with appropriate amounts of fog. The third photo is an attempt to show the wind blowing, using Tammy as an action figure model.

Not Enough Time

I am too busy taking pictures to be able to post blog entries for the ones I think are interesting. Today was a busy picture taking day. I still have pictures from Yaquina Head Lighthouse (despite the fog and wind), Agate Beach, Yaquina Bay State Park and sunset from the hotel window. There are probably another six or seven blog posts from those, but it is getting late. I will have to post them tomorrow at some point.

Speaking of tomorrow...Tammy and I leave Newport tomorrow morning and head east across the state. Actually, we will head south towards big sand dunes, and then east towards Eugene where we will spend the night. This will be the first half of our move across the state to Bend, where we will spend a couple nights.

Goodnight for now. More pictures from today will be coming tomorrow. At this rate, I will be posting pictures from this trip after I get back home. But all the thumbnail versions of pictures I have taken are online at the moment (the full sized images are not...still 486 of those to upload). You can find the thumbnails for the Orgeon trip here.

Views from the Punchbowl

Here are a couple of pictures I took at the Devil's Punchbowl State Natural Area. They are pretty nice views especially with the fog and clouds.

Plump

At the Devil's Punchbowl State Natural Area there was a very fat squirrel that was living in the park. He kept coming out of the bushes onto the paved path, obviously wanting to be photographed. Very fat.

Devil's Punchbowl

North of Newport is a little park that exists primarily because of the remains of a sea cave that collapsed. Now there is a big hole in the ground that is walled in on all sides except for one little piece that the ocean comes in and out of with the tides.

That was not a good description. Look at the first picture. The second picture shows what used to be part of the same sidewalk I was standing on. Hmmmm....

Foreshadowing

While Tammy was driving, I took this photo from the car. It turns out that the cool clouds in this picture was actually the wind driven fog that enveloped Yaquina Head Lighthouse. That was where we were going, but we were clueless when I took this picture. We had no idea we would be cold and not be able to see the ocean from the lighthouse.

Newport Afternoon

Newport is a beach town. But on the back side of the town there is this little section on a bay, with its own row of shops and restaurants. All through this section, the sides of buildings have murals painted on them. And, today at least, there were lots of sleepy dogs hanging out on the sidewalk.

Newport Harbor

This is a picture of the little harbor that the seal was swimming around in. The area to the left of the boats is where the fish flinging fun occurred. It was very quaint, and a tad foggy.

Seal

In the little bay/harbor next to Newport there is a colony of seals. I think that they are Harbor Seals, not because I saw them in a harbor, but because I cannot think of another kind of seal :-/

This particular seal was swimming around catching fish this morning. He would bring a fish up, fling it up in the air and then catch it before the chomp and swallow routine.

The first picture is when I caught him taking a breather between dives (and it looks pretty grainy...hopefully only until the full sized image gets uploaded). The second shows him between the fling phase and the chomp and swallow phase of the routine.