It was a very foggy day. That is not uncommon for the Oregon coast. Where the fog is light it makes a great scenary when it becomes thick then it’s like November at home. Humid, cold and unpleasant.
I did lot of little detours today. First to the Yaquima head lighthouse. It stands out on a little cape which still was deep in the clouds while back on the highway I had already been riding in the morning sun. Lots of birds nest in the rocks around there. You may climb down to the tide pools at the bottom of the lighthouse. It was low tide, you may find starfish there and lots of mussles… but you will be observed by watchful seals out in the water. It is not so sure who watches whom more closely.
I later went to the Hatfield marine science center in Newport run by the Oregon state university. It is a bit chaotic, but they have lots of cool stuff there. Some aquariums with octopuses, fish and all sort of other marine creatures. A kind of open pool where you can touch all sort of funny things like sea cucumbers, starfish, sea urchins, mussles and observe how they react towards it, from which you can deduce how they feed. The staff explains everything to you to even your most naive questions. They have teeth and balenes from different types of whales, skulls of sea mammals (ever seen a walrus skull?), little experiments where you can build some lego houses and then have them swiped away by a tsunami wave. There is material on tidal energy, “migration” of species on ships and the ecological problems this might cause, geology (the tsunamis again…). All for free. So there is much cooler things than the road works you Oregon folks tax money pays for.
The landscape was rolling I left and entered tsunami hazard zone as I climbed up hills and rolled down again, left and entered…
I had a nice backwind all along and let mr push up the last meters of Cape Perpetua, only the hwy top, of course. The road going all the way up winds and twists and is far too steep to be pushed up. There is a rock on the cape shelter from where you can see 70 miles south on clear days. Not today though.
In the afternoon I spent quite some time watching spouting hole, a funny kind of coastal geysir, which with the tides coming in became mor and more spectacular. It is a hole in the cliffs, where the water flows in and is hurled
out from time to time by the tidal waves such that it jumps up in the air.
Tales of the Queen 