blog of kaiyen

Our fourth day on the Oregon Coast had us driving from Bandon to Yachats.  Overall, Yachats is a pretty good place to stop.  It’s past Florence and the dunes, and the coast makes a definite transition to a less rocky landscape, with softer beaches and finer sand.  It’s also a good distance from Bandon yet still leaves a lot of distance until a next major stop, such as Depoe Bay or even farther north.

The truth is that after getting beat up by the wind at Bandon, we took it easy on this drive.  First, if it’s possible, we spent too much time photographing around Bandon, trying to catch every beautiful moment from sunrise to sunset.  Second, I wanted to devote a good amount of time to Shore Acres State Park, which many tell me is the one place they’d go for even an entire week.

Everyone says that one needs to be ready for just about anything in terms of weather in Oregon.  We were ready for rain, we were ready for gloom.  We weren’t quite ready for tremendous wind, but weren’t complaining since it came along with clear skies and the sun.  Something else we weren’t expecting was such calm seas.  Now, we had waves, and in Depoe Bay we had some good blasts of water now and then.  But we never got the massive waves crashing into the sheer cliffs kind of experience that everyone told us about.  So Shore Acres, known for its big cliffs…was a bit of a let down.   I will say that the park there really is quite impressive, though, and it was one of the times we really had a chance to break out the macro lenses.

To top it off, the sun actually wore us down a bit.  So we didn’t get big waves and got worn down by the wind and the sun.  So we hit the road and went straight past Coos Bay (including past the Coos Bay Bridge, which I wanted to photograph but reached at the worst time of day, in terms of light).  We stopped off here and there, but overall just kept looking for nice vista points and a good place for a sunset photo.

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