the trip to Coos Bay

We have been making the drive down to Coos Bay to see an old family friend of my (ex) wife’s since 1985. The family friend is a friend of K*’s grandmother (long gone), and was instrumental in arranging a Home Stay for K* in Coos Bay when she was in her teens.

(Yes, K* first came to Oregon years before I did)

She has come to see me in the summers since spring of 1996, when I left Japan, 9 months after our divorce, and we have driven down to Coos Bay every summer. This year, I don’t yet know whether she’ll come this summer, but she did come for my 50th birthday in March, and we drove to Coos Bay. The weather was bad the whole way, and we took a different route this time; in the past, we have driven out to the coast from Portland and down US 101 to Coos Bay. Of course, there are several ways to get there; we have often gone down I-5 to OR 38 and out to the Reedsport on the coast and US 101, turning south to Coos Bay. Either way, it’s nearly 5 hours of driving each way.

(The weather was not good, although, since she left in mid- March, the weather has generally not been as good as when she was here in late February to mid-March)

We stopped an hour or two south of Portland at the junction between I-5 and OR 22:

An abandoned gas station….

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In Coos Bay we stayed in a motel overnight (where she used the bathing suit she bought in the previous entry’s picture) and saw our family friend for lunch the next day. Our visits have gotten shorter over the years, since the lady has aged (27 years since 1985) and is in an assisted-living home now. Our visits these days, with ten hours of driving involved, tend to max out at 2 hours.

Somewhat selfish, yeah, but I get points for driving so long for such a short visit more than 2 dozen times.

We walked around the waterfront in Coos Bay before lunch:

Coos Bay was a logging port, and in another era, a coal port for ships, being one of the few good ports between San Francisco and Portland. Where the huge old sawmill stood for decades, the Coquille Indians built a casino/hotel, The Mill. To spruce up the waterfront, this boardwalk was built. (the local paper had indignant reader’s letters complaining about the city building "useless" things like the boardwalk. Obviously republicans)

We saw some interesting stuff on the boardwalk:

We met a man who told us that he had walked from Missouri – walked – and he told us of the poverty he had seen, about towns where, after dark, families were picking through dumpsters looking for food. He had looked for work the whole way – nearly 2000 miles – and had not found anything. He had a dim view of the TV news, which, he said, was full of lies and distortions; to him, the country was in far worse shape than the TV talked about.

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The day’s weather fit the subject.

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The man told us he planned to walk to Portland the next day – almost 200 miles from Coos Bay.

I wonder if he was successful in finding work?

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After that conversation, I was sort of glad to see quirky little features of the boardwalk:

Lobsters are not native to the northern Pacific….

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Tales that Elvis was seen on the Oregon coast are verified:

Leaving Coos Bay that day, we drove up 101 to Lincoln City, stopping along the way to walk out onto the beach and to walk in the sand dunes near Florence – more pictures of those places to follow.

 

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