A Day at the Beach

by Pa Rock
Traveling Fool

Yesterday morning I joined my daughter’s family on a trip to Salem’s (Ray and Joan) Kroc Center where young Judah was completing two weeks of swimming lessons.  Very soon all of the kids will be back in school, but summer is the time for special things – like swimming lessons.  Judah appears to have no fear, and he was quite at home in the big pool.

In the afternoon we all loaded into Molly’s van and headed fifty miles west to the Pacific seacoast community of Lincoln City.  It had been cool in Salem, but the weather on the coast was warmer and the kids had a great time playing at the seashore.  Besides enjoying the water, all three of the youngsters had fun playing in a large hole in the sand that kids in another family had spent quite a bit of time digging.   Sometimes the greatest pleasures in life are the simplest!

I enjoyed throwing a stick for a little dog who was playing on the beach.  He never tired of fetching and returning the prize to me - until his owner showed up and took the little fellow away.  Again, simple pleasures!

Lincoln City in located on the Pacific Coast Highway 101.  Our family drove the entire Oregon coast thirty years ago and I remember passing through that tourist community.

The drive out to the west was beautiful.  We went through a long agricultural valley where some farmers were plowing and stirring up large clouds of dust, and others were baling hay.  The hay bales were longer than the ones back in the Ozarks, and they stacked them five-high in the middle of their fields.  Most of the drive, however, was through hills forested with tall, beautiful evergreens.

In some ways Oregon is poor, like my area of the Ozarks – so we also saw small gatherings of rusty mobile homes and other signs of rural poverty, but much of the drive was picture-perfect postcard views of the Pacific northwest.

Portland later today –and home tomorrow.