Seeking Sun

We did it!  We are now two officially certified Wilderness First Responders.  An intense nine days to be sure, many many acronyms remembered, two exams passed and a bunch of new friends made.  Pretty awesome.  Oh, and we are much better prepared to assess, identify and stabilize life threatening injuries and illnesses in the wilderness.  Win!

Western Washington in late late spring can be a very wet place.  It is probably pretty wet most of the time actually and I think we were fairly lucky with the weather we had to deal with.  Our first rain didn't come until Friday night/Saturday morning, luckily this was the day of our night scenario so we had planned to drive in anyway - we were even smart enough to pack up the tarp before bed so we wouldn't have to deal with so much wet gear.  Then Saturday night we were offered an indoor place to stay which definitely made life that rainy night much easier.  It continued to rain on Sunday night, but after exams were done on Monday it started to clear a little while we had a celebratory lunch.

Now by 'clear a little' I mean it wasn't actually raining at time.  Our gear was wet and we desperately wanted to find somewhere dry so that we could dry out a little.  Unfortunately the weather forecast for pretty much all of Washington wasn't going to cooperate with us that easily.  We needed to head south although we weren't in a rush but we were tired so that's the direction we went.  We skipped on the first two campgrounds we stopped at - Washington likes to turn a lot of 'stands of old-growth forest' into state park campgrounds.  I'm sorry, but the last place we want to be when it's cold and raining out is in a dark, damp forest.  We ended up heading towards the coast and stopping at a county park with a little less forest and a view over the ocean.  It wasn't raining when we pulled in so we got dinner sorted and camp set up without too many issues.  And then it rained most of the night.  We slept in and managed to wait out the rain this time, though we did make a smart decision to pack down and move out fairly quickly because yep, it started raining again.

The view over Astoria

The Astoria Column

We were in desperate need of some sunshine.  Headed in to Oregon and stopped for a wander around Astoria and climbed up the tower.  Oregon must have been happy to see us because while we were there the sun came out.  Yay!  Continued South along 101 - the Oregon Coast Highway - with gorgeous views, stopped at Cannon Beach, a cute little coastal town, and then by 5PM we found a state park where the sun was shining, right next to the beach.  Popped the tent to dry, pulled everything out of it and had all our gear dry and sorted out before the sun went down.  A sunset we made a point of watching!  We feel so much better now and the forecast for tomorrow is pretty good too.

The Oregon Coast Highway

Sunset at Nehalem State Park