Thursday, July 31, 2014

Sunset Bay to Bandon, including Bullards Beach

Another mellow part of the trip, but with a monocular search and a stay at the hiker biker camp with the nicest amenities (of all camps, I suspect).

It was a beautiful ride in this section on some hilly (small hills) roads with cool names (7 Devils Road, Whiskey Run).  A UPS driver saw me looking at my maps and stopped his truck in the middle of an intersection to give me directions and suggest a side visit to a beach along the way.  

The beach turned out to have a surf break and was full of kiteboarders.  The surf was extremely consistent (no lulls at all that I can see...nice beach break) and around head high.  It would have been great except for the howling onshore wind - hence the kiteboarders. I debated going in for a while, but the wind was making it not quite work for surfing, so I sat down and had some lunch with the kiteboarders.  There was a crew of nice folks visiting from CA who drove up in about four vans.  Interesting that it didn't cause a problem within the kiteboarding spots (four vanloads of CA surfers in an OR surf spot would likely have some issues :). ).

That evening I stayed at Bullards Beach - an Oregon state park with a campground.  They have made the hiker biker site with by far the nicest amenities I have seen.  It has a solar station with lockers and inside the lockers there are USB receptacles to charge electronics (see photos) plus a bike stand for repairs - full on luxury!  There are also many individual bike racks to make it easy to lock your bike.  It was a pleasure to stay there.

Interestingly, there was only one other bicyclist there who kept to himself for the most part (we chatted briefly and it seemed this was his living situation potentially and he was moving to another spot the next day due to hitting the limit of his stay there).  It isn't one of the campgrounds that many bicyclists go to apparently, but it is super posh.

The next day I scoured the stores in Bandon to try to buy a monocular (single eyepiece instead of binoculars - to save weight).  I heard that puffins nest on the rocks just offshore at Bandon.  Unfortunately, none of the stores sold monoculars or binoculars.  This included the guns and ammo store - where it was interesting to see all the gear being sold for bug out kits.

So, no luck with the monocular, but the rocks at Bandon are spectacular, so I spent lots of time walking along the cliffs and the beach enjoying them.  The wind was blowing hard and I was glad to have my rain gear to help block the wind while walking around with sand whipping down the beach.  Then continued on - which I'll take up in the next post.

2 comments :

  1. That campsite looks so rad. Go Peter Go!

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  2. Thanks, Alice!! I want to find a way to encourage folks from the CA State Park system to visit that campground. I know we've had budget cuts in CA, but I don't think all the cuts are being done in the optimal way (for example, not having liquid hand soap in the restrooms and reducing the cleaning frequency seem like things that won't help balance the CA park budget... sorry, a bit of a rant). Anyways, Bullards Beach is definitely top notch and the parks in Oregon in general are really impressive for how nicely they are set up and maintained.

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