Today was our longest day of driving. It would have been a bit longer had we gone to Crater Lake. Looks like we made the right call! Crater Lake has webcams. Unfortunately the one that shows an actual view of Crater Lake was struck by lightening over the weekend and is offline 🤨 But the other two were working.
The drive up the coast before cutting east to Eugene was clear and cool. We tried to soak up as much cool air as we could before the heat wave. We also stopped at the one lighthouse we missed on our drive down.
We’re staying in a fun area of Eugene and a swanky hotel that just opened in September. (Why Eugene you ask… No good reason other than it made the drive reasonable so wine country is only about 1 1/2 hours away.) Everything is not quite open yet (like the rooftop restaurant) I think that’s why we got a good deal. The restaurants, wine tasting rooms and cute boutique shops right outside our door are open. I know this because 1) I can see them from the balcony and 2) the room came with it’s own iPad/Lenovo highlighting the neighborhood and hotel.
Signs like this are common all over Oregon. We first noticed them along the coast. The brewery we enjoyed in Yachats had a sign for the weekend “Closed Saturday and Sunday” because they didn’t have enough workers. Imagine having to close on what are your busiest days. Many of the restaurants’ new post-COVID hours are Thursday through Sunday. Had we wanted breakfast this morning we would’ve had a difficult time. The barista said three breakfast restaurants have already closed permanently in a Brookings and the other two weren’t open. Mondays are a common day to be closed. The coast is full of small family restaurants. They don’t have the resources to survive like the bigger fast food or chain restaurants. We rarely saw the McDonald’s, Starbucks, Applebee’s or Pizza Hut along the coast. It was one of the reasons we loved it!
Halfway Round the Planet, Part 2 