Where’s Nico?

I decided to go with a song off the 1983 Talking Heads album, Speaking in Tongues for this week’s post. By the way, I haven’t used this meme in a while and it’s too good not to throw in again today:

The trip has been amazing, but there have only been two spots so far where we stayed for a full fourteen days. For those unfamiliar, most national parks and forests set a fourteen day maximum for campers to stick around in one stretch. The two spots where we hit our max were Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah and now Tillicum Beach Campground in Siuslaw – two of the definite highlights of the trip so far.

After sticking around a place for two weeks, you get a chance to really get a lay of the land and feel a bit settled in. But by Monday, July 8th, it was time to pull up the roots and move on. Where did we move on to? i.e. Where is Nico???

Mt. Hood National Forest!

Mt. Hood is a really lovely area. Before I talk about that though, we did hit a couple other locations since you and I last talked. First off, since we last spoke, the three of us had some more fun on the coast.

I really fell in love with the Oregon coast – a place I’d only been to once before. Five years ago, Kristen and I had explored coast a bit north of Tillicum – we enjoyed the great beaches, the great seafood, and even went crabbing together. That was an amazing trip that filled me with positive feelings about this part of the country, and the extended time we’ve spent in Oregon on this trip has just really reinforced those feelings.

We hit a nice farmer’s market in Newport, where we scored some delicious local strawberries and marionberries. Perhaps you don’t know what a marionberry is, or if it makes you think of a pretty shady former mayor of Washington D.C. of the same name.

Actually, marionberries are a type of blackberry. And Oregon knows it’s blackberries!

We didn’t go crabbing ourselves this time, but we did buy some dungeness crabs that we broke down and made up as crabcakes, which tasted great, as well as some locally harvested oysters that we fried up.

We also got in some nice hikes – we did the Amanda Trail, which takes you up to a lovely viewpoint above the coast:

Another nice hike was the Cummins Creek Trail:

We also got to enjoy the La-de-da parade in Yachats on the 4th of July. Yachats is a cute coastal town full of weirdos, and I mean that in the most affectionate way you can say “weirdos”. One of the big elements of the parade is the marching basset hounds. That looks like pretty much what you’d think it would look like.

We also had a chance to celebrate Kristen’s birthday at a restaurant on the coast called ONA, and got in plenty of time along Tillicum, Rockaway and Hobbit Beaches, where Nico loved getting off leash and doing a bit of exploring.

The first place we headed after we left the beautiful Oregon coast was Tillamook State Forest, where we camped near the Wilson River.

You may have heard of Tillamook cheese or Tillamook ice cream or even Tillamook beef jerky before – if not, it’s all good stuff! Unsurprisingly, Tillamook cheese is made in the town of Tillamook, Oregon, within the county of Tillamook, which, also unsurprisingly, is very close to Tillamook State Forest. We found a nice boondock spot not far from the Jones Creek Campground, which gives us a place nearby to get potable water and dump our trash. Our trailer faced a hill covered with purple, white and yellow wildflowers, blackberries and thimbleberries – a nice view as we sat in our camp chairs and enjoy listening to the Royals baseball game as we had a drink in the early evening.

It also proved to be a good spot to see some cool bugs.

Additionally, there were some really nice places along Jones Creek and the Wilson River to hop into the water a bit. The water was a bit brisk, but Nico found he could avoid that by just hanging out on his neon pink floatie.

The hikes around there were pretty nice too!

Our site was also about an hour from Portland, where we scored some really great food and beer. My friend Steve had recommended Eem – an amazing Thai restaurant – and a brewery called Great Notion, which was terrific too!

And we found a really good pizza place called Reeva as well.

After we left Tillamook, we did a one night stay at a winery called Utopia in the Willamette Valley. There’s an app called “Harvest Hosts” that can set you up with a place to stay for the night for free, with the expectation that you’ll buy some stuff from the folks putting you up. There are a lot of breweries, wineries, museums, farms, and others that participate, and that’s how we found Utopia. The wines were great, the owner and staff were wonderful, and we got to set up our trailer right by the vines.

After a fun time at the winery, we finally got to Nico’s current location, Mount Hood. The area is beautiful, and Mount Hood stands over the entire forest very magesticly. We’ve only been here for a bit over 24 hours at this point, but we got a chance to do some nice hikes today and are excited to do more exploring going forward. Here’s a bit of our adventures today:

I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to post about Mount Hood in our next entry, after we’ve had more time here, but this is a place with a special tie for Kristen. Her folks both lived in Oregon growing up and her mom was raised in a different part of the Mount Hood area. Her mom even helped build out the trail around Lost Lake – it’s a hike that Kristen and I really enjoyed five years ago when we came to Oregon and we hope to get in again on this trip so Nico can get a chance to enjoy it as well.

The fun continues!

– Ken, 7/16/24