The great escape - Crescent City, California - Oregon Coast road trip

We decided it was time for a mini - vacation. We only had from Saturday to Wednesday night to get away. Our goal - find a little sun and go to the coast.

We started Saturday, drove down I-5 to Woodland, Wa. We obviously didn't get very far the first day. The next day we drove to Grants Pass and took hwy 199 to Crescent City, California. Hwy 199 follows the Smith river. It is a very scenic route to get to the coast.

Waterfall along hwy 199

 It's been really wet this year and everywhere we went we heard how weary people are of the rain. When we got to Crescent City we found out that hwy 199 had been closed about a 1/2 hour after we got through it. A large tree had fallen across the road and completely blocked the highway. Whew were we lucky!

We found sun and warmth (at least to us) that evening.
(Click on any of the photos below to enlarge.)

climbing on a "scary" rock! ;-)

The next day we headed south and stopped at the Trees of Mystery, we had driven by many times on other trips, but had never stopped. We decided this would be a good time to be tourists. We enjoyed it much more than we had expected.

 They have a great "Tall tales" area of the short trail you can walk that is dedicated to Paul Bunyan. Wonderful.........



They have a Gondola that you can ride up and down, or you can just ride it up and then walk the "wilderness" trail down. The wilderness trail had a 45 degree down incline. They provided a rope hand rail for the steep sections.

They had a photo "op" area. So my husband stood by it so I could have a picture to remind me of his "Love"! So cute....

Time to head north,
we spent his birthday at the Dunes national recreation area and the Sea Lion caves. Here's one of his introspective moments of his special day.

The birthday man & his beast

"Us" enjoying? the rainy day at the beach

One of the things I enjoyed seeing was the Yurts at the Oregon State campgrounds.

Here's a peak at the inside

our beast enjoying some alone time

Elk herd just out of Astoria, Oregon

 All in All, it was a most excellent "escape"!

Chuckanut 50k

No, we didn't run it but we did run part of the course while the event was going. It was fun bumping in to them on various sections of our route, and yes we were very trail courteous. We always moved to the side when we heard them coming up from behind. We were planning on running 15 miles on the Chuckanut mountain trails, but were pleasantly surprised to see that it totaled up to 15.68! Yay, I even felt good when we were done.

The trail went up, up, up for us, but very pretty and lo and behold we finally had a nice sunny day although it was still a bit chilly in some sections with a tiny bit of snow on the ground in the higher sections. After running/walking up what seemed like forever we finally saw some 50k runners coming and we came across the 50k - 16 mile (halfway) checkpoint. Our friend and former race director of the event Doug McKeever was manning it!

Dick running ahead of me and spotting our first 50k runner

halfway checkpoint for the 50k

Me - at the checkpoint after we'd
run/walked our first 2.2 miles.
most of it uphill!

Yes, it really is Doug McKeever

The trail was really muddy in sections, I could have taken 100 shots of the goo, 

but I'll only put in this one:

The 20.2 mile aid station was at the start of the trail section called "chinscraper". Up, and Up. Luckily we didn't join them on this section, but we did stop and visit with the great crew at the aid station.

The view when we started running on the road was fantastic. We ran down the road for about 3 miles. Then we met up with the interurban trail and ran back to our car at the north Chuckanut trail head parking lot. Fun day and I have the muddy shoes to prove it!