Epic RVing with the Gradys - Day 12 - The Oregon Coast

OK, first an answer to yesterday’s mystery. I’m sure if you are my “audience” (hi dad), you were saying something like, “well duh, it’s the airport code for Portland.” Yes, of course it is that. But why PDX?? I think I have half an answer. Airport codes were first used in the 1930s when airliners started assigning two letter codes to all airports. By the 1940s, however there were too many airports for the codes, so they had to switch to three letter codes. So Portland used to be “PD,” but when they expanded to three letters, one of the “filler” letters was “X.” So Los Angeles (LA) became LAX, and Portland (PD) became PDX. I suppose the “D” was just the last letter of Portland, so, there you go…

Another blast from the past - the other day when we were traveling on the Olympic Peninsula, I saw what really looked like cooling towers for a nuclear power plant. So I did a little research and found out that there is only one nuclear power plant in Washington, and it’s not where I saw it… However, I did find out that there was a project in the 70s to build what would have been one of the most ambitious nuclear power plants to date at that spot. They even completed the cooling towers and everything before the project experienced some money troubles. After years of litigation and issues, they scrapped the project. However, they did salvage the towers and built offices in the park. They call it something like Power Plant Office Park or something like that. Sort of interesting…

We headed out to the coast today. The first stop was, wait for it, another waterfall hike! Drift Creek Falls is about 10 miles off the beaten path, much of it was a one way road. So the trip itself was sort of an interesting adventure in and of itself. The trail was nice - it was a 3 mile out and back on packed dirt. We were apparently the speed demons of the trail as we overtook several hikers meandering their way down. Perhaps we have done too many waterfall hikes to really enjoy the experience!!! At the bottom of the trail is a longish suspension bridge over the creek and overlooking the falls. It made for a nice hike!

After the waterfall, we retraced our tracks back to the highway and completed the trip to the coast, settling in Lincoln City where we ate a nice seafood lunch at Kyllo’s.

We ended our trip up near Pacific City where we hoofed around at some big beach features.

The most intersting thing for me today was gaining the understanding of the Oregon agricultural area in the Willamette Valley. Near our campground are tons of farms, wineries, orchards, and the like. We saw sales for hazelnuts, wine, all sorts of fruits, and I definitely saw hops being grown. Tomorrow we plan on sticking around the campground for once, so we should hopefully be able to get some better intelligence on the local crops!