29.6 mi / mph / ft. climbing
Home: Tugman State Park hiker/biker campsite

Last night I was having a really tough time deciding how to plot the next couple days, mostly due to rain in the forecast again. When I finally let Rett know the trouble I was having, she worked through it with me, came up with a couple good ideas, and mostly convinced me not to stress too much about it. But it also led to a whispered discussion about how we’re not having as much fun as we feel like we should, and which of the seemingly endless list of variables we should target to improve that. No answers yet, but beyond making the days as long in October as they are three months earlier in July, the solutions should mostly be in our hands.

Even with very little in the way of laid plans, those plans changed quickly when an early day climb caused Rett more hip pain than she’d felt before. So we decided to shorten the day, stop at Tugman State Park, and spend two nights there.

But with the shortened day and the day off coming, we did laundry in Reedsport at a far junkier laundromat than the last one in Astoria.

Some more hills to climb brought us rare and quite pretty views of those forested hills layering into the distance. It took a moment to realize that we’re probably always surrounded by such terrain, and it’s only the sections of clear-cut forest (regrown to various stages) in that area that were allowing us to see into the distance at that moment. It’s like, most of the time, we can’t see the forest for the trees. Literally!

At Tugman, we tried to get into an unbooked yurt so that we wouldn’t have to wake up in a tent in the rain, but some sort of red tape didn’t allow that. The clerk said there are “bus shelters” in their hiker/biker sites and maybe we could rig up some protection involving those. I wondered what exactly “bus shelters” was a State Park euphemism for, only to shortly discover that our site had a literal bus shelter in it! They must have moved it from some transit operation that was getting rid of it. It (along with an extra storage box) made our site so nice that we felt a little dumb to have spent $59 reserving a yurt for the next night rather than getting by with a bus shelter for another $16. Ok, not that dumb.

Unplanned-replanned day worked out after all, Rett was right!