July 13…. It’s cold, it’s hot, it’s cold

Week before last, back in Reedsport OR where I flipped the dune buggy, it was quite chilly most of the week. 40’s at night, up to 60 in the day. Then we moved about 50 miles inland to Lebanon OR for a week and the temps were in the 90’s. Not so horribly hot as that would have been back home, the humidity out here is tolerable so 90 wasn’t so bad. And now we’re back on the coast wearing jeans and sweats again. Just crazy the way the temperatures can vary within a few dozen miles. Get away from the ocean and watch the thermometer shoot up.

We went to visit Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area, just north of Newport OR. There’s an old rock quarry there, hacked out of the cliffs right on the ocean. After hearing about the earthquakes in California, and all of the tsunami preparedness warnings, it seemed like standing on that spot could have been a really bad idea if something like that happened up here.

Also there was an old light house, dating back to about 1850 or so. It used to be manned, round the clock, by three lighthouse keepers, hauling oil up the stairs to keep the fire burning in the lamp. Somewhere in the past it was converted to electricity, and later it was automated, including a standby lightbulb and sensors to let the Coast Guard know if the light ever failed to come on at night. No more lighthouse keepers. There goes another one of my dream jobs, eliminated by “progress”. 😢

The fog is so thick around here sometimes I’m not so sure a lighthouse even matters. Visibility in that soup might have been a couple hundred yards at most.

There’s a spot just below the lighthouse called Cobble Beach. The rocks from the cliffs break off and fall to the beach, about baseball to softball sized, then get washed back and forth over and over by the waves, until they are perfectly round little spheres. And we heard the music again!!

We first heard it at the beach back on June 15. As the waves wash up and then withdraw, they make the most wonderful sounds, clattering all of the rocks against each other.