Central Oregon Coast -- September 2012

[MarkBC]

WARNING: This trip does not include a camper, so if that offends you please tune elsewhere.

Just a couple of camp-life photos (so far), and phone-photos at that....more in the days to come.

Beachside State Park, site #11

Now this is camping!
Huh...who needs a camper?

A new phenomenon on the Oregon coast. This beach-level campground is in the so-called "tsunami hazard zone", but the tsunami debris referred to in the photo below is that from the Japanese tsunami which has crossed the Pacific...possibly harboring illegal aliens.

 

[craig333]

Thats interesting about the tsunami debris but theres now way I'm gonna read a thread without campers. Nice site, wish more had grass.

 

[MarkBC]

Blowing sand:

More phone photos...I have my real camera...lenses...tripod, but just being casual lazy so far. I also shot "Blowing Sand -- The Movie" with my phone, and that's a little more effective at showing blowing sand (with audio, too) than the stills, but it's too big to upload.
It's quite windy on the beach.

 

[MarkBC]

... there's no way I'm gonna read a thread without campers. Nice site, wish more had grass.

Your disgust is understandable...but my car gets almost 40 mpg, so when I don't need my 12 mpg truck/camper...

It's a nice site, just 50 feet from the beach...but it's also just 50 yards from 101, and the white-noise of traffic competes with the white-noise of the surf.

 

[craig333]

Car! You own a car! OMG. Turn in your man card now! Cars, bah. Now if it was a Jeep that'd be okay.



P.S. I really wish I had a commuter ummm one of those smaller than a truck things

 

[ntsqd]

Where was "Blowing Sand, the movie" shot? Looks too flat to be Sand Lake, but then I've never seen that beach this late in the year.

[hijack]I have one of them car-thingys, a small project DD. First vehicle lacking a front drive axle in ~5 years. Prolly won't do 40 mpg, but I like it all the same. Sneek peek:

Thread: http://www.slantsix.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=49591[/hijack]

 

[MarkBC]

Where was "Blowing Sand, the movie" shot? Looks too flat to be Sand Lake, but then I've never seen that beach this late in the year.

It's the beach at Beachside State Park, 4 miles south of Waldport.

 

[ski3pin]

Yeah, but Mr. BC's car doesn't have running boards.

 

[Hittheroad]

Thats interesting about the tsunami debris but theres now way I'm gonna read a thread without campers. Nice site, wish more had grass.


I can supply the missing camper

Back in May I was staying at some cottages just up the road. The beach was just as shown (and many miles long). The first of the Tsunami Debris were coming ashore.
I was not camping, had no camper or even a tent. But next door was a FWC on a Tundra. Found the owner to be from Alberta and he had never heard of Wander the West.
If he is reading this perhaps he will identify himself.

 

[MarkBC]

I can supply the missing camper.

Back in May I was staying at some cottages just up the road. The beach was just as shown (and many miles long). The first of the Tsunami Debris were coming ashore.
I was not camping, had no camper or even a tent. But next door was a FWC on a Tundra. Found the owner to be from Alberta and he had never heard of Wander the West.
If he is reading this perhaps he will identify himself.

You should post this on the Sightings Thread.

 

[Foy]

A CAR.......for road trips..........well, I'll be........who knew such was possible?

I learn something every day.

Have fun, Mark. Looking forward to reading/seeing more.

Foy, who has owned nothing but trucks since 1973. Even my sons' and wife's daily drivers have been trucks, Jeeps, Troopers, or such............

 

[Smokecreek1]

Your disgust is understandable...but my car gets almost 40 mpg, so when I don't need my 12 mpg truck/camper...

It's a nice site, just 50 feet from the beach...but it's also just 50 yards from 101, and the white-noise of traffic competes with the white-noise of the surf.


Mark
Hey your camp looks Okay, I'll just pretend there is a FWC hidden in the picture! Or maybe the invisible wave from Japan took it away-hey that's it your FWC was washed away by it----it makes a better story!

Enjoy anyway! heading north on Thursday!

Smoke

 

[MarkBC]

After a couple days at Beachside SP I decided that the closeness of the beach didn't make up for the loudness of the nearby 101 traffic...so I moved north a few miles, north of Newport, to Beverly Beach State Park.
It's a huge campground and on the far side of the highway from the ocean, but it's beautiful deep forest and quiet...at least, it's quiet right now where I'm camped on this mostly empty tents-only loop.

Site D31

As I posted on the Sightings Thread, on my way here this morning I passed DirtyDog going the other way in his custom flatbed rig. Small world.

 

[MarkBC]

Westside rainforest camping ain't so bad, when not rainin'!

Kinda purdy.

Giant leaves and glowing trees:

We got nothin' like this back home on the high desert!

These are still fone-fotos... I've taken a few 360° panoramas with my real camera, but sharing those will have to wait...I only have smartphone and tablet with me, and I don't have the kind of software in Android version needed for that kind of processing.

 

[highz]

Hey, Mark - are you still wandering and posting from your tent, or are you back home? Looking forward to those panoramas.

 

[MarkBC]

Hey, Mark - are you still wandering and posting from your tent, or are you back home? Looking forward to those panoramas.

Home -- got home a couple of days ago.
Thanks for asking...I do need to get on this trip report!

 

[MarkBC]

As I said earlier, I shot a couple/few 360° panoramas on this trip.

Here's one showing where I spent 2 nights camped in Beverly Beach State Park.
Below is a thumbnail of one "frame" of the pano:

And here's the link to the actual, rotatable 360° panorama:
Beverly Beach S.P. E25 Pano

(as usual, you need QuickTime Player installed to view this. Be warned that this pano file is almost 5MB -- all the detail that's present in a forest close-up makes it hard to jpeg-compress as much as can be done with a less detailed landscape)

Notice that in addition to panning round-and-round you can pan up and look up into the trees!

This was when I still had this part of the campground almost to myself...before the weekend hordes, including 6 boisterous/obnoxious 20-somethings, showed up

-- the reason why I didn't spend a third night here.

(more to come)

 

[MarkBC]

If anyone cares about technical digital-image-processing stuff...
As I mentioned earlier, I didn't have a real computer with me on this trip, so I couldn't do the processing to create the panorama (nor the HDR processing of the multiple exposures that made each frame) until I got home to my desktop PC.
A "tablet" (e.g., "iPad", though mine is an Android) computer would be very slow and would probably choke on the memory requirement...if the software was even available.

The software I use -- Panorama Factory -- conveniently has the ability to split the job/calculations across multiple processors/threads in parallel, if available. (Few consumer software/programs have this parallelization ability, but it's a huge benefit for big data/number-crunching tasks)
Here's a screenshot of my CPU monitor showing all 8 logical processors (quad-core CPU with 2 threads each) working hard to crunch out this panorama -- and it still took over a minute of run time.

With such big image files it also helps having 16GB of RAM.

 

[SunMan]

As I said earlier, I shot a couple/few 360° panoramas on this trip.

Here's one showing where I spent 2 nights camped in Beverly Beach State Park.
Below is a thumbnail of one "frame" of the pano:

I want to camp here, nice looking park.

 

[highz]

Another sweet pano. I'll bet this would be a good place for winter camping - between storms - with fewer campers.

And thanks for geeking out on Panorama Factory. Some good info there.