Today is a rainy day, which seemed like a good day for laundry, yet another lighthouse and an aquarium before heading to Beverly Beach State Park for a two-night stay.

Yaquina Bay Lighthouse

Laundry Queen was our first stop which sits up on a hill with a very slanted parking lot. We chose to do street side parking for the ease of parking our long van.

Then we were off to the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse which is on Oregon state park land near the Yaquina Bay Bridge which was clear as we crossed it heading to the laundry, but is now shrouded in fog as we near it again.

There is no cost to step into the keeper house that is attached to the tower at this lighthouse. This is a unique design in Oregon to have the living quarters and the tower together. The house is set up to show how the keeper’s family would have lived in it from 1871-1874. It was only active for those three years as a better positioned Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Oregon’s tallest, came online in 1873. My parents have a coffee mug from a Yaquina lighthouse; now I have to go look again to see which one is featured on it. I’ll get my chance in a few weeks when we will be in Ft. Collins.

Oregon Coast Aquarium

The Oregon Coast Aquarium is different from others we have visited due to the variety of west coast animals on display, though they currently have a traveling exhibit of Amazon organisms, too. Some are rescues that can’t return to the wild. It was really nice to see up close the ocean critters that are in this area. Some of the star fish were really big and the sea cucumbers are very colorful. And they did have an octopus, but he was tucked up against the side, perhaps sleeping. It was interesting to watch the tips of his tentacles gently moving. My favorite exhibits were the Seabird Aviary with puffins, murres, and a very curious black oystercatcher, and the sea otters, which were very actively playing with each other.

There were so many interesting things to photograph and record; I’m just sharing some samples:)

Side note on sea otters: I asked the Fish and Wildlife volunteers back at Sunset Bay about seeing se otters along the Oregon coast, and she said the only ones in Oregon reside here at this aquarium. They were completely wiped out by hunters in the early 1900s. With a million hairs per square inch of skin, their fur is incredibly soft and warm. Sea otters do not roam far from where they are born, so trying to reintroduce them to this coast has been unsuccessful. Experiments have been tried, but the otters just swam back to California. Otters are needed to keep the kelp beds healthy as they are the main predator of the sea urchins that eat the kelp. If the sea urchins are not kept in check, the whole ecosystem suffers.

Beverly Beach State Park

The Beverly Beach State park campground is a large one with loops A-H, and we are in two different H spots for our two nights here. The sites are all set into the rainforest with paved parking spots. A creek runs along the south side, and the west end leads out to the beach under a bridge for the 101 traffic above and the creek to meet the ocean. The ocean surf drowns out the traffic noise.

The rain cleared off for a beach walk to give us some exercise tonight. The skies were beautiful as evidenced in the bottom picture below.