Churchill Family Yurt Tour 2013: Cape Disappointment

Our fourth yurt tour stop took the Churchill family down to the very southwestern end of Washington to Cape Disappointment State Park. Don't ask me why it's called Cape Disappointment. Despite reading all of the state park placards (with determination) I did not learn. Sure, I could look it up. But I wanted to read it on a flippen' placard, okay?

Well, that got off to a more sour note than intended.

Let me start again.

This was the BEST YURT TOUR STOP YET! Really. We discussed this in detail during several of our beach walks and we both agreed. There's a TON to do at this state park, and we didn't even do it all in our first visit (assumption here is we'll be going back). First though, before I jump into the weekend activities, I've got an announcement to make: we bought a new car! It's a dark gray 2004 Volkswagon Golf. Call us modest people, but it's pretty much our dream car. We hope to have him for a long time (in this non-rust-creating state we now live in). We bought him on a Friday and set off for yurt tour early, early Saturday morning. It was nice to take him on a nice long drive right away. Here he is parked outside our YURT!

Saturday was spent doing two different hikes to the two different lighthouses at the park. That's right. There's not only one but two lighthouses to visit here. This is because this is where the mighty Columbia River meets the Pacific, creating one of the most unpredictable and difficult to navigate sandbars in the world (according to the placards).

 

The other cool thing about this area (among other things) is that it's where Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery first made it to the Pacific Ocean. We skipped the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center this time (who brings $5 in cash on a hike in the woods?) but agreed it was something we could do at a later trip. The view of the ocean, the mountainous Oregon coast, and the Columbia River bar were spectacular. The lighthouses were super cool, too, and really made me want to live in a lighthouse. Can you do that? Do people still do that? Hmmm...must search for a degree program in lighthouseology. Oh! I almost forgot to talk about the old military battery on the top of the hill. It was build pre-WWI to guard the Columbia River entrance (again, nod to the placards). It was pretty cool to explore.

There was one major disappointing thing about Cape Disappointment (couldn't resist). Our fire. Major disappointment. The wood the camp store sold us was super wet. Seriously, it wasn't smoking...it was steaming. So after burning up all of our kindling, old man's beard (a type of lichen), and paper and still not being able to get the bigger logs to really catch, we turned on the old propane grill and cooked out bison burgers and asparagus there. It was so sad. Even our Oregonian neighbors took pity on us and came over to offer more kindling. They probably thought we were city slickers who didn't know how to build a fire. I mean, that's what I would have thought. It was sort of comical really. The guy came over with some really dry kindling, obviously got it to light up right away, starting piling on some of our wet wood, stood back, looked pretty proud of himself, said something smug like "that'll do 'er" (I don't really think he said that), wiped his hands and went back to his camp. Yeah, guy. 15 minutes later your dry kindling was ash and our wet wood continued to steam. We got enough heat to make s'mores and lined our fire pit with the rest of the wood so it could hopefully dry out from the (little bit of) heat and be good to go in the morning. Really, it was more of a smoke than a fire, and the wind was so unpredictable we kept getting harassed by random smoke plumes. We kept joking that we were turning into smoked salamis. Ha!

Then, we took a walk down to the beach, did some beach combing, climbed around the rocks a bit, then discovered a new fun beach activity:

It's a beach see-saw! Or shall I say SEA-saw. Pun intended (always). This one was already set up and we saw some other people doing it first so we knew it was acceptable beach behavior. I think these are the kinds of things people who live near beaches where it's always too cold to swim and too chilly to even take your sweater off 80% of the time come up with. But, since we're those kind of people now, we loved it.

Sunday, we were able to get our now drier wood going better than the night before and were able to make ourselves some fire-coffee, fried tomatoes, eggs, and beans for breakie. Yum. We used the cast iron we broke in at the last yurt tour stop and it's seriously my favorite camping thing.

Sunday we went out on the North Jetty on the north side of the Columbia and Kevin tried some fishing. He didn't really know what he was fishing for. Maybe more surf perch, but we weren't really sure what lives in the in-between of the Columbia and the Pacific. There were plenty of other fishermen (including a sea lion) so there must be something in there, but he didn't catch any of it. I did my usual of finding a nice spot to sit and read.

Previous stops of the Churchill Family Yurt Tour can be found here, here, and here.