bobanddenisewanderlust

Monday June 6- I worked on HEDIS until after the east coast offices closed, which was 1:30 Pacific time. Before lunch, Bob drove south to Sixes Oregon to pick up our forwarded mail. We were not sure where we were going to end up when I was sending the email to the mail forwarding service, so we picked a small post office and had the mail sent there. If there are two post offices in a town, then only one accepts General Delivery, so if we pick a small town, we don’t have any General Delivery mail issues. We ended up staying about 24 miles north, but that was okay.

Then we took the dogs and drove down through Bandon on the Charleston-Bandon Scenic By-way, which goes off of Rt. 101. We had driven some
of this the other day, when we visited Devil’s Kitchen. This time we did the northern part of this loop, which is along the cliffs overlooking the ocean and the scenic rocks.

We stopped at Bandon Rocks,

Face Rock State Scenic viewpoint,

and another small part of the park where we ran into another volunteer couple. This couple, are 10/12’vers, which they defined as still owning their house and traveling 10 out of 12 months. They are here for 6 months, April 1-Oct 31, and guarding some fragile bird nests on the beach. We talked with them for a while, as they were heading over to Crater Lake, this week, and we were discussing options. At each stop the dogs really enjoyed the chance to sniff everything in sight.

We had been wondering about all the yellow plants that we have seen, just about everywhere! We found this information out from the National Park Service Rangers. They consider these two plants as “un-intended consequences” of trying to solve environmental problems. This first one, Gorse, was imported to a single dairy farm in the 1880’s as a hedge row plant used at the farmers former home in Scotland. This fiercely armed ‘plant from hell’ has spread along Highway 101 from the California border to north of Florence OR. Gorse is highly flammable during dry seasons and was a major contributor to the severity of a fire in 1936 which destroyed the town of Bandon. It is ‘prickly’ and is taking over the entire area, choking out the native plants.

This second one is Scottish Broom,  a very widely spread invasive plant originally imported from the Hawaiian Islands in the 1880’s. A member of the pea family, it quickly colonized open sites, disturbed soil, construction zones and natural meadows crowding out natural plants. Broom was heavily planted by highway departments, state parks, the CCC and civic organizations  beginning in the early 1900’s to help stabilize the sand dunes and highway road cuts from erosion.

You can see them in this picture of a wetlands  area.

We  walked the dogs along the cliffs over looking the ocean. The area was just so beautiful,  just don’t have words to describe the scenes. We saw these pretty wild flowers

After our driving tour, we returned to the motor home and I finished the HEDIS project! All done, finally… After dinner, we went for a bike ride, riding around the campground, then down to the boat ramp on the Coquille river and out to the ocean beach. It was a nice, semi flat, scenic ride. We saw some deer and squirrels, but that was about it.

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