Ahoy There Matey!

Our last day at the Bandon/Port Orford KOA, we went to church at the Port Orford Community Church (It was an AG church).  Okay, everyone, I don’t think I was prepared for small-town-America church.  There were about 30 people total and 75% of them were over 65.  The musicians consisted of a pianist (pastor’s wife) and a drummer.  The pastor was the worship leader (lead voice).  They sang a hymn first (and I do love the old hymns) and then maybe 4-5 worship songs … not one of which was written within the last 25 years!  It was like a blast to the Maranatha past.

They started off the service with the pastor praying for a few of the congregants, then one lady (it was her last time attending as she was moving out of the area) asked if they could sing Amazing Grace, which we did.  Then another woman stood up and asked if everyone could pray for her niece.  And then another woman loudly reminded the pastor that they had another prayer need and she said what it was.  It was just so different.

The pastor, however, made some great illustrative points during his sermon from the episode of Paul getting bit by the viper on the island.  Just as Paul shook off the viper, we need to shake off the enemy who is trying to kill and destroy us.  That was only one of many really good points he made.  Unfortunately he made so many only one or two stuck.

So, enough of small-town-Americana!  After church we went to the actual port in Port Orford.  Gary had scoped this out the day before when I was working.  He wanted us to go back to have lunch at this restaurant on the pier called Griff’s, so we did.  We were both going to order the fish and chips, but the waiter talked me into ordering the salmon and chips.  The salmon had just been caught that morning and he said it was non-fishy and excellent.  Can you imagine … me … I ordered it … and it was FANTASTIC!!!  Much better than Gary’s fish and chips, I might add.  It was steelhead salmon and it was so excellent I bought a nice sized fillet for our dinner that night (which, by the way, was also amazingly delicious and very non-fishy … here when they say “fresh”, they mean “fresh!”).  Here’s a picture of us standing in front of Griff’s.

The cool thing about Port Orford is that it is one of only six ports that actually bring their boats in every night because the tide swing is about 11-12 feet.  In the first photo below you can see the boats on the dock on wheeled dollies.  The second photo gives you a good overall shot along with the lifts to pull the boats out of the water. All the boats were on the dock today because it was too windy to go out fishing.

 

Here’s the bay at Port Orford.  What I really love about this picture is the evergreen trees almost coming all the way down to the water.  That along with the rocks and sandy, mostly uninhabited beach … well, it’s just beautiful.

The next day we took off thinking we had a 5-6 hour drive ahead of us.  As usual, things just didn’t work out that way.  It ended up to be more like an 8 hour drive and parts of it were quite harrowing not only for Gary, but also for me.  We were on some fairly narrow, bumpy, curvy roads the last 15-20 miles.  Our very special, very cool Magellan for RVs advised us against going the coastal route, so we headed east toward Eugene then up and around over to the coast on a small back-town highway.  We’re still not sure if we should have followed its advice, but hindsight is always better than foresight.  Gary was exhausted when we finally arrived.  But, thank you Lord, we made it just fine and are hoping we don’t duplicate that type of journey anytime in the near future.

We really like the RV park sign.  Don’t you?

How about this nice view from our dinette window?  You can see Netarts Bay from there.

Finally, here are two photos I took of the bay our second night at the park.  You can see the thick fog bank rolling in preparing to blanket the entire coastline.  The second photo I took was looking directly into the sun, but I think it still came out okay (but not too great either—maybe I could use a filter or two for the camera?).