Bend, OR

Remember when Ripley’s Believe it or Not used to be on TV all the time and for some of us we’d watch each episode with comments like OMG! & no way, how cool or I didn’t know that? Well somewhere between then and now the show has disappointingly disappeared as it was rich with real historical & amazing facts.

During my recent visit to the coast, the UnderseaGardens was on my list of places to visit, simply because I had never been there. The gardens are a much smaller version of the Oregon Coast Aquarium and takes maybe 45 minutes to go through their complete set of exhibits but it had a couple of unique things that I haven’t seen anywhere else which also set them apart.

Across the way from Cooks Chasm is the Heceta Head lighthouse. The lighthouse some of you may remember, was in the middle of a controversial subject of demolition not to long back. So far Heceta, built in 1894 still stands and still shines as one of the Oregon Coasts brightest and farthest reaching lights out upon the sea.

Enter in through the gift shop, make your way along the path that sits above the coastline and provides for a magnificent view and ends at the elevator that will take you down into the ocean’s cavern, 200′ below. The path also has whale watching viewers and the whales are there and they are huge!

Unbeknown to many, Cooks Chasm is actually considered a bay. This is despite the fact that it looks totally like the part of the ocean. Resting at the base of the Cummins Creek Wilderness, Cooks is one of those amazing sites. The difference between high and low tides totally changes the look and accessibility of different parts of the chasm. At high tide you get a wonderful display of the surging ocean that pounds against the walls of this chasm as well as forces the ocean into a blow hole to give the show of the spouting horn, likened to a minature geyser.

Upon showing up at the Asian Festival at the Lane County Fairgrounds there was hardly any parking and after hunting we finally found a spot way out in left field. I kept remarking about the amount of cars and that I was surprised at the amount of people who would choose to go to the festival. Well to my surprise the festival was great. We had a blast. There were a million streaming people and the whole place was redolent w/ not only the different smells of Asian food fare but the different arts were amazing.

My favorite all time place on any of the Oregon Coast is the Devil’s Churn. This place turns me into a crazy freak photographer and risk taker. I have been fascinated with the churn since I was 12 or 13 years old. It was my first time viewing this place and it happened to be low tide and I was able to see a small sea faring vessel back inside the cave that rests inside the punch bowl itself and ever since I have had this passionate desire to repel down inside.

Waldport seems to be a town frozen in time as much hasn’t seemed to change since I went to school there over 20 years ago. This is still a tiny little town that sits between Florence and Newport. Waldport sits at the mouth of the Alsea River, once famous for it’s steelhead and salmon fishing and still famous for its’ beauty. This little area seems to keep time well with the earlier periods of the late 1900’s and on the surface, technology doesn’t seem to have caught up with the rest of the world.

I love this place! The mystifying moments of the deep where one can walk through, under and over all those creatures we never see, those that swim in the depths of our vast Pacific Ocean. The tunnels of glass allowed me to see, in a 360 degree view, the different species of fish, sharks, starfish, eels, stingrays and a bunch of other species of which I have no clue as to what they are. What I do know is that being inside this glass tunnel was mesmerizing. You can reach out and touch all these creatures or so it seems.

As a young child I well remember Agate Beach. We used to camp right on the beach for days on end and my brother and I would spend much of most days exploring and playing in the surf. Today I do not believe camping on this particular beach is allowed but nonetheless I still visit; sometimes for the memory, sometimes to see the changes, sometimes to find the famous agates that this beach is named for.