It is mid-February, and here in the high desert it has been quite mild but spring has not shown up yet. At the suggestion/invitation from neighbor friends, we headed off to the Oregon Coast to do some yurt camping at Sunset Bay State Park .... to find a little bit of spring on the President's Holiday long weekend. So what the heck is a yurt? Well, it is a little round structure with heat, lights, a table, two chairs, a bunk bed, and a futon. Oh, and Nancy is guarding the porch.

Amy and her friend Alanna, whose family was staying in the adjacent yurt, are in the picture below taken inside our yurt.
One of the first things that we did was visit Game Park Safari near Bandon. Amy had fun

holding and petting some of the critters, such as the opossum in the picture above. She did not cuddle with the lions, leopards, or the guy in the photo below.

One of the baboons was particularly entertaining in his ability to demand treats and then to find kernels of corn thrown his way.

After a brief sojourn on the beach, where it happened to be quite windy, we got together with
our neighbors, the Vanderhoevens, for a pot luck camping dinner followed by smores around the campfire. The video below is bad, but the pictures we took were even worse. Anyway, we had a good time telling scary stories. It rained rather hard at night and the campsite was in a perfect

location for a tsunami to do something bad, but when morning dawned it was a beautiful day. (It is probably more than 100 years since a tsunami hit the Oregon coast, but somebody has to worry about it!)

Nancy and I did some exploring of an adjacent state park called Shore Acres and found some wonderful places to enjoy the ocean. We asked someone to take our picture, shown below. I took

a video shot of the wild ocean near this spot and posted it on Facebook so I won't duplicate it here. The photo below shows typical wave action we were seeing.



A little further down the road there was another scenic spot with a lighthouse in the background.

That afternoon, we came back to the Park along with Amy and the Vanderhoevens. Here is a photo of Rosie V at the top of one of the cliffs overlooking the ocean.

A little further down the path there was a spot to get closer to where big waves were smashing against the rocks. I couldn't resist getting a little closer; the spot I am standing on is perhaps 50 feet above the beach, but some of the waves "exploded" up to that height. Amy and I were

tempted to get closer but thought better of it. The video below captures the action a little

better than a photo. The fenced in area above Nancy's head has a view point. By estimating that one of the people standing there was 6 feet tall, I calculated that the viewpoint was 75 feet above the ocean. Some of the waves splashed considerably higher than the viewpoint so my best guess




is that some waves were at least 100 feet tall. In a less rambunctious place, Amy and Alanna along with Alanna's brother Isaac found a good place to give me the creeps by standing on an overhang. Fortunately, they did not fall in.



In the beginning of this post I mentioned spring. Shore Acres State Park, where all these pictures are from, had an estate built near the edge of these cliffs maybe a hundred years ago. While the original house on the site burned down, the gardens remain. The daffodils were blooming!


While there was lots of green grass, most of the other flowers were not yet blooming. However, Nancy and Rosie found a magnolia that was beginning to get some flowers.


It turns out that there are lots of rhododendrons growing wild along the coast, but we only saw one in bloom as we began to drive home the next day. I suspect that in a few weeks there

will be lots of flowers blooming on the coast. The reputation of the coast is that it rains all the time, but maybe we were fortunate in that we had no rain during the days we were there other than the one night. Also, the temperatures each day were around 60 degrees so it was a nice departure from winter.

Mastering Marshmallow

As noted in the post below, Nancy had a really good time and showed rapid progress after one ski lesson at Mt Bachelor. It turns out that the first lesson was on a nice day and, of course, we forgot the camera so no pictures.

On Monday the forecast was for a nice day, a little break from all the cloudy stuff blowing up from California. With a good forecast, we headed off for Round 2 of skiing. But there was one little disquieting thing as we headed off that morning - we couldn't see the mountains. Twenty miles later, when we pulled into the parking lot at Mt Bachelor it was snowing.

Our original plan was to ski together on the bunny hill before Nancy's lesson, but the bunny hill lift was not running. Nancy encouraged me to get in some runs myself so I took off. By the time I returned, which was after her lesson, I learned that Miz Nancy had blown past the bunny hill and had now mastered "Marshmallow" after her second lesson.

Camera in hand, we decided to take a few runs together. I took this shot of Nancy at the top of Marshmallow, which starts off just below the lift to the summit. It is a little hard to read the sign on the summit lift, but it lists an elevation of a little over 7000 feet.


A little further down the slope, I shot a video of her zooming down Marshmallow. A disclaimer: I was holding my poles and gloves in one hand and the camera in my other hand so as usual my photography was pretty "shaky".


In spite of the snow, we had a really good time and are looking forward to Round 3, probably on Friday (weather permitting).