The OrWa road trip diaries, Day 2: The cod and the light

Was Day 2 of my Oregon-Washington coastal road trip better than Day 1?

Let’s put it this way: Do a great lunch and transcendent lodging beat a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?

The worst part of Day 1 was Horizon Airlines’ failure to deliver my suitcase, despite having plenty of time and a far from full plane. But all that bad blood is over now, because at 11:45 a.m. a messenger arrived at my Gold Beach hotel with the luggage in question. With that chore done, it was time to ramble. And it was a great day for it — brilliant blue skies and bracing winds.

The great lunch came at the Crazy Norwegian’s, a fish joint in Port Orford, Ore., that was recommended to me by a couple of bikers I met in the shadow of a concrete dinosaur at the the Prehistoric Gardens, a tourist trap/kitsch haven north of Gold Beach that goes back more than 50 years. (The restaurant people use cod in their fish and chips; I subbed pasta salad for the chips and licked the plate clean.)

By the way, everybody in Oregon already seems to know about the Crazy Norwegian’s. I had to wait 15 minutes for a seat on a Tuesday afternoon.

All right, on to Part 2 of today’s wonders: The Heceta Head Light Station Bed & Breakfast. You don’t actually sleep in the lighthouse, but in a great old building next door. My room — a splurge at $209, but worth it unless the plumbing explodes tonight or they poison me at breakfast — looked directly at the lighthouse. And the lighthouse is still in service, so as the sky darkens, you see its beams revolving and revolving, throwing light all the way to the cliffs on the other side of the inlet. Pictures (especially mine) can’t do the effect justice, but the only other place I’ve seen nature, light and human invention so wonderfully mixed up was at the Lightning Field, an art site in New Mexico. Anyway, check the lighthouse picture here. I’ll be falling asleep in the middle building.

— Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times

Photos: Top: The Heceta Head Light Station goes back to 1894; middle: fish and chips (minus chips) in Port Orford; bottom: the view south from Cape Blanco begins with a lonely seastack and goes more or less to infinity. Credit: Christopher Reynolds

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 1:17 pm by Christopher Reynolds and is filed under Oregon, Oregon Washington road trip, Pacific Northwest, Restaurants, Washington. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.