"Doing nothing is very hard to do ... you never know when you're finished." - Leslie Nielsen

Is it just me or is the Penn State thing starting to look a lot like the Roman Catholic mess? An institution blinded by its own stature, protecting its own to preserve that stature, and blind to the victims' suffering. Other parallels occur to me, but their hats are different.

Hot showers!!
Port Orford State Park has very - almost too - hot showers and the water comes out in surprising volume. At Honeyman State Park the little spit of water that did come out started at freezing and eventually warmed to tepid. This, folks, is luxury by camping standards!

But even a hot shower couldn't take the chill off the morning air and Pam quickly accepted my offer to go into town for breakfast at the Paradise Cafe. Fascinating!
I ordered two eggs, bacon, toast and hash browns. I got eight pieces of bacon and half the large oval plate was piled with hash browns. The eggs and toast were normal.
You could tell the locals from the campers by the way the one waitress greeted them. The 30-something cook was HUGE. Think Lurch on steroids. Nobody complains about the food!

After breakfast we stopped at the sites associated with the park. Three or four spots down is the strangest tent we've ever seen. I'm thinking it's a changing tent. They sleep in their van and use this to change clothes. eh?

From there to the edge of the cliff overlooking the bay. Two dimensions don't do it justice and it doesn't capture the howling wind that made it difficult to stand still for picture taking. But yesterday the whole area was hidden in fog, so the sight needed capturing while weather allowed.

Then we went to the pioneer cemetery. This shot shows five plots, but the explanation board at the entrance says there aren't any bodies here. I guess that means they were dug up and moved but it doesn't say why or where. The tombstones all had inscriptions that said the deceased were born in Ireland and died right around the turn of the last century. To the right of this row is an open grassy area that was the site of the Catholic Church, and on the far side is the largest headstone of the patriarch who first settled the area. His name was Hughes.

And here's the house he had built for his family. We took a tour of the inside which I found both interesting and disturbing. It was built  in 1903. Our house on Porter was built in 1897 and the house in Hudsonville in 1905, so many of the features were familiar. But this house has been attacked by the government to make it safe for all of us to tour, so way too many features have been removed, or covered over, or .... It's not necessary to build walls out in order to add electricity, especially with balloon framing. And it ruins the visual effect of the trim and it's reveal. Oh well. I enjoyed giving it all the twice over. I noted some features that the docents had never spotted, like the patched-over boards in the kitchen. We had the same thing on Perry, and it had been the location of a dumb waiter for bringing coal up from the basement. They wouldn't let me down in the basement to look at it from underneath.

From there to the lighthouse, the oldest on the Oregon coast. We took the tour there, too. It's been in continuous operation since 1870 (?) and still has a beacon monitored by the Coast Guard. It's electric now, but still operational. Too bad that years ago they tore down all the other buildings on the site.

We're now up in Bandon, 20 minutes north, to walk the waterfront and old town. Cape Blanco is enjoying an unusually good weather day, but that means it only takes three layers to keep from freezing. Here in Bandon it's a balmy 70 degrees. We'll have salmon done in the microwave for dinner and then sit by the fire if the wind doesn't blow it out. But the worst day camping....