Still not Portland

In yet another change of plans, we decided to stay in the Long Beach area, and picked as our campground the State Park at Cape Disappointment. Pitched tent then set off to ride to the whale skeleton, via the park's hiking trail then the multi-use dune trail. Made it about 20m off the sealed road before the walking started - even Nene couldn't get her bike up that hill with that mud. Clouds and silver linings, though, as we spied a small black-and-brown frog and a slow-moving brown lizard that we'd not have seen had we been travelling at bike pace.

35 minutes later, we could see our van. We were about 150m from our campsite, as the crow flies*. Not being crows, it was another 15 minutes before we reached the lighthouse (which was pretty cool, although exposed to some ferocious winds) and headed back via the road. Back at camp, we decided a short beach walk before dinner was in order, and duly made our way through the dunes to the driftwood-piled black-sand beach. When we looked north, we could see the lighthouse, no more than 200m away, and atop a cliff face that we probably could have scrambled up without too much trouble were it not the focus of a native revegetation project, and were we not cold and wet and tired already. Unfortunately for Janine, the shower in the Women`s washroom failed to produce hot water. Especially galling when I stayed extra-long in my toasty warm shower and she was left to finish camp setup and cook food, shivering all the way.

Woke in the morning to find ourselves soaking wet, just like the Bruce Springsteen song, except with no freight trains. Turns out that the tent leaks when it rains hard**. Also turns out we both slept really well. Kind of scary waking up in a wet bed, though - the bit before the truth is deduced is kind of uncomfortable, as each of you wonders which of you was the culprit, although both of you are quietly certain it must have been the other one.

Still cold and rainy, but we saw our first woodpecker pecking wood as we drank our morning coffee, and the wind had abated, so we were in good spirits as we headed north up the peninsula towards Leadbetter Point and the Wildlife Reserve. As it turns out, it might have been better to have kept the high winds, as the still air meant the mosquitoes were out in force. The woman in the Long Beach Info Centre (who was lovely, and had ungnarled hands) had told us they were big and hungry***, and that some of the trails up there might not be passable this early in the season, but she`d not managed to convey the full horror of being trapped in the middle of a saltmarsh, unable to move either forward or back, wearing too many layers in a futile attempt to stop the world`s biggest, most evil, blood-sucking filth-monsters from getting a feeding tube into your skin. Eventually we managed to escape, and made it back to the van, sweaty and covered in blood and mashed insect corpses but having seen a porcupine at the beach, which was almost odd enough to make me forget about the odious prelude. Almost.

A quick stop at Long Beach Coffee Roasters for caffeine, newspapers, and interwebby ride option research, and we set off for our new, revised target location: Mt St Helens. Via the whale skeleton and Oregon, because we could.




* = Crows, here, seem to fill the avian scavenger niche occupied by seagulls in NZ, to the point where even on the beaches it's the crows that prevail. The gulls seem strangely subdued - almost like autistic versions of their NZ counterparts

** = No complaints, though, as we kind of stole it from the Canadian Campling-Pharos, who said they paid not much for it about 15 years ago

*** = Unlike the bears, which she said were small, and not hungry: `Not for people, anyways!