A Little Bit of New Orleans in Seaside

When you start exploring a town, you never know what place or jive hot spot you might encounter..Actually, I found a little newspaper in the laundry room that had a list of community activities going on in Seaside and the surrounding area. The magic words for me are "swing", "jazz", "blues", or "70's rock". The paper said there was music down at a restaurant called L'il Bayou in downtown Seaside. It's a "taste of Louisiana" in the town of Seaside. Cozy, intimate atmosphere...neat decor...beads, cool art/music prints on the walls, low lights. We sat in the Magnolia Lounge and listened to the group for a couple of hours. Very cool!

The New Orleans atmosphere was enhanced with the "Swing Cats" playing swing and jazz music at the restaurant. They were a GREAT band--there were two guitar players, a bass player, a drummer, a guy on the clarinet, a sax player, AND a terrific violinist. They played GREAT dinner music while we sat and kibbitzed with the lady behind the bar. She told us that the violinist, a stellar player who really shined in the performance tonight, was grateful for the Portland, Oregon school system, as he learned to play violin in the local schools on rented equipment. Hear, hear! for the school art and music programs that are barely hanging on these days due to budget cuts. I am so grateful for my mom and dad who pushed me to play both piano and flute for quite a few years. Even though I didn't seem to enjoy it at the time, I learned so much about classical music and concert band music through my school training and home lessons. I really developed an appreciation for all kinds of music through that exposure.

Boy, have instruments changed since my school days...check out the bass in this group. Skinny! Both of them! Loved the newsboy caps and hats these guys had, too.

There was a little girl there who really got into the music as most small children do. I love their exuberance and natural rhythm. She bounced and bounced to the music and was enthralled at what she heard. I don't think she was much over two. I hope she keeps that love for music with her all her life.

L'il Bayou is having live music on Thursday nights and Sunday nights for quite awhile. Looks like we will be back on Thursday night for "blues" night. This time we'll try out the food and support the restaurant for providing FREE entertainment--no cover charge! L'il Bayou serves New Orleans and cajun style food along with more traditional dishes as well. I'll have to leave a nice review on Yelp for them, we really liked their place.

We like to explore local restaurants when we travel. Chains are everywhere, but unique restaurants like this are gems waiting to be discovered. We're glad we found this one.....Thanks to Matt and Karen Goodrich for providing such a cool place, L'il Bayou in the small town of Seaside!

Kite Town

We've moved up the coast a little bit....We decided to park ourselves in Lincoln City, Oregon, on highway 101 to be a little more halfway between some lighthouses and state parks. Lincoln City is known for its kite festivals that it holds twice a year, in summer and fall. There are several kite stores in town, and it's fun to see all the different types of spinners, kites, and various flags.

From October thru May, Lincoln City has "Finders Keepers"--That's where glass floats are placed on the beach for anyone to find and keep.  The common glass floats are round glass balls about the size of big glass Christmas ornaments and they originally were used to keep fishing nets afloat in Japan and other countries. In Japan, they were made from recycled sake bottles and that gives them their pretty aquamarine color which seems to be the most common color. They are prized for their rarity when they wash up on the beach. You can find them in antique stores (mostly reproductions today) and Ebay selling anywhere from 15.00 to 65.00 to hundreds of dollars or more depending on size and color and whether there are certain markings on them like Japanese characters, or fishing net lines etched into the glass. There are many glass floats still bobbing around the Pacific Ocean currents, and the ones that do manage to break away from the circular current patterns wash themselves up onto the Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California coasts. The most rare prized color is a cranberry red. They are beautiful and we've seen them in antique places everywhere but telling a reproduction from a real one would be difficult, I would think!
What's really cool is there are several glass art studios around where you can blow your own glass float or other decorative object. The Jennifer Sears Glass Art Studio is one such place. I really wanted to have the experience of making my own glass float ball, but they are only open Wednesdays through Sundays till after July 4th. Then they will be open 7 days a week. Prices start at 65.00 and go on up for making your own glass art object. Expensive, but what a cool experience! We will have to miss that experience this time around and save it for next visit as we came at the wrong time for that.

Lincoln City is home to the "world's shortest river" as the town claims...440 feet..Not much of a river, but this is low tide...

We're going to visit Tillamook Cheese factory while we're here..it's about 48 miles from Lincoln City. There is another lighthouse and a scenic drive, a couple of state parks, lots of antique stores and a couple of noteworthy restaurants so we should have plenty to keep us busy for the next three days.

Oh! Forgot to say where we are--Devil's Lake RV park. VERY nice park,  but sites are very close together. Luckily, there are not very many people here. It appears to be a relatively new park..50 amp service, full hookup, Good Sam's Park, about 29.00 a night. Nice view of Devil's Lake (three mile lake for fishing and kayaking) across the street. The ocean is a mile or two west at the most. There are many RV parks along the coast, but many of them are rather run down and are of the parking lot nature, so you have to be careful and read reviews (RV Park Reviews) to get something decent. If this park was full, we would not be staying here, the sites are way too close together. After exploring the Lincoln City area, our next destination is Seaside, OR.  Maybe we'll see you at the lake!

Photos of Newport, OR

Newport is a working, fishing town....you can watch the fishing boats unload their catch for the day right down at the docks. We saw this Pacific shrimp truck getting it's load of shrimp (?) while we explored the town yesterday....I think the bird was looking for something in the load, he wasn't eating what was getting loaded. Yuck!

Newport has a cool bridge--the Yaquina Bay bridge...

There are beautiful murals painted all over the town on the sides of buildings. Here are just four within a block of each other by the wharf.

You can tell this is a working fishing town....traps piled up everywhere....There are lots of choices of seafood restaurants, great restaurants and shops to tempt you, too! (Uh-oh! for two reasons--good food and--Are there any knitting shops? E. wants to know.) Haven't seen any, dear! And it's a good thing I'm not quilting right now, as there are a couple of quilt shops in town...

I love these colorful traps!

We're lucky we can see the Yaquina Head Lighthouse from our RV park.....We love lighthouses and the history behind them! We hope to get up closer, maybe take a tour and explore the tidepools in the next day or so. A dreary, cloudy, misty day today, but the Yaquina Head Lighthouse is still beautiful....

We are staying at the Pacific Shores RV park--a motorcoach only park in Newport. It's nice, and a bit above budget--50.00 a night, BUT--you can ride your bike easily around the park and get a mile or two in, there's a chip and putt 6 hole golf "course", you get cable, 50 amp full hookup, concrete slab, picnic table,  nice, spacious sites and the use of a beautiful indoor pool. If we look down the street a bit, you can see the ocean. There are ocean view sites that are 90.00 a night--ouch! Too pricey for being on the top of a bluff looking down to the ocean. I won't have any excuse not to use the pool. Wait a minute--but we've got to see historic Nye Beach, tour the Yaquina Head lighthouse, visit the tidepools, visit the state parks-- I might not have time to swim. (You can always go in the evening! suggests E.) Yeah, I guess I could...need to do something...all this eating our way across America is piling on the pounds since I left Zumba classes and daily bike riding everywhere at Casa Grande, AZ.  Busted!    Sigh! 

Highlights of Florence

Time to say goodbye to Florence, Oregon. Here are a few photo highlights from our visit and what we will remember...The unique Art Deco stone drawbridge/bridge that crosses the Siuslaw(Si-oo-slaw) River in Florence...it opened in 1936 The arches and stone are beautiful. This  bridge is by architect Conde McCullough

A unique restaurant in Florence called Hot Rod Grill and you can see why...We never tried it, but next time it's on the menu, (ha ha)....We did try Mo's which has very good chowder, but not the best. We really liked Kelly's Cantina, one of the most relaxed places to sit and rock in a cushy chair while you nosh on great appetizers and a nice dinner.

We never know what we might see on our travels. This race car was on the streets of Florence. It looks like an old Indy race car. Eldy said he was pretty sure it was.

And there are sand dunes just down the street from the Thousand Trails park we are staying at, (South Jetty)...If you've got the money or your own ATV's, have a blast on the dunes! The dunes in this area are the largest coastal sand dunes in the U.S. (? read that somewhere) and there are 42 miles of them. Plenty of space to run around in!

OK, What's this? and why am I mentioning it? This was at Kelly's Cantina, a great restaurant in Florence, and it was hanging in an open doorway. I had to ask, because it's just a Zip-Loc bag of water hanging by a pushpin.

The restaurant owner says, this bag of water makes a GREAT fly repellant. And here's the logic behind it...flies have eyes that are many faceted or compound in structure. When light reflects or bounces back to the fly eye from the water in the bag, it gets refracted into MANY reflections. (Uh, Sparky, are you sure you have that explanation right?) Uh, nope! But it's something like that. The fly can't tell what it is seeing--object or human or something to check out, so it backs off from it. The restaurant owners at Kelly's swear it really works. Supposedly, you see these all the time hanging in doorways in the Caribbean open air restaurants. I must say while eating dinner directly in front of an open doorway on the Siuslau River, that we weren't bothered by a single fly. A couple of little gnats, maybe, but no flies.

We've enjoyed our stay at Thousand Trails, even if we did get ourselves into a very tight site just to get cable. We were as snug as a bug in a rug! We could hardly walk around the rig! It's beautifully forested but a little difficult for big rigs to maneuver around, we'd say. A large section of the park is currently not available as they are upgrading to 50 amp service but there were plenty of spaces when we came in. We are just stayed to see the Sea Lion Caves, the Heceta Lighthouse, and Sweetwater Falls, so now it's time to leave for our next destination...Newport....see you on the road!

Maybe we'll have more visitors like this little bird who plopped down on our side mirrors for awhile and tried to make the acquaintance of the little bird staring back at him. (Black capped chickadee?) It took him awhile before giving up and moving on.....just like we will be.....see you later! Tomorrow, we head for Newport, Oregon....LOTS of interesting things to do there....

Sweet Creek Falls Hike

A hike! Woo-hoo! We found a hike that sounded really great...about two miles along a rushing creek, easy,     little kids can do it, they said, a "great family hike"....It took us about a 45 minute drive to get there, but it was worth it, every bit! Take highway 126 out of Florence, towards Eugene. and Mapleton. Right after the bridge in Mapleton is Sweet Creek Road. Turn right and follow that road for about ten miles. There's a small paved parking lot on the right and a sign for the trailhead, to the Sweet Creek Falls.

We used our walking poles today....trail got a little narrow, a little rocky, a little bumpy underfoot with tree roots so we LOVE our walking poles. We went all the way to the end of the trail to the top of the waterfalls. There really are about 10 or 11 waterfalls along this hike in what appears to be a temperate rainforest. I read somewhere that this hike is through forest that is denser than the Amazon. It sure seemed like it....check out the photos!

When we got to the top of the trail, we decided to climb over the rail (tch! tch!) to get a better view of the falls at the top. You really couldn't see the main falls, all of it unless you peered over the rail or got on the other side of it. Well, Sparky just had to get a better look so we got a photo of me over the rail first, (bottom left corner) then Eldy. Rocks were moss covered and slippery but we were careful. In order to get back on the "safe" side of the observation area, we had to slide under the wooden rail. It looked like doing the limbo, so I caught Eldy going under it with the camera. When he saw I was catching him in the photo, he laughed his head off...

It was a beautiful day for a hike, cloudy and a little drizzle at first, then the sun came out and reflected off the rushing creek, creating sparkly rushing water vistas everywhere you looked. That's when the people started coming out to the trail as we left.....glad we went earlier in the day!  See you tomorrow!