Shakespear Festival and Beaches:
Pacific Coast Hiway 101 will lead you to the Pacific rain forest country.
Along the coastal towns there are list of places to visit such as:
The Yaquina Head Lighthouse near Newport along the Oregon coast features tours. Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach is in the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge and is home to gulls and puffins. One of the many lovely spots.
Sightseeing:
If you love nature and natural beauty environment, you will like the Pacific scenery in Oregon better than anywhere else on the West Coast. In the fog and rain, it is blissfully gorgeous. Whenever the sun does shine of course, makes it even better. The only place on earth with comparable sea stacks is the southcoast of Australia.
Some of the most spectacular -and popular- vista spots are along the coast between Lincoln City and Florence, and the scenery is spectacular from 50 miles or so going north from California. Probably the best view on the whole coast is at the Cape Perpetu, a Scenic Area just south of the Yachats. The view takes in 150 miles of coastline.
Good restaurants:
Restaurants and bars or pubs in Oregon is right up there with California, especially in Pacific Rim and West Coast nouveau cuisine. The growing excellence of the state's wineries, coupled with abundant supply of oceanic catches, means a chance to eat well while staring at all those gorgeous sea stacks.
Whales:
The cetacean freeway from Alaska to the Baja runs, as you may already know, past all the U.S. West Coast states. And all three claim to be the whale watching capitals of the earth. Oregon gets high marks because there are a ton of state parks and vista points high on the coast.
Lighthouses:
Oregon is famous for many of the lighthouses on the coast. Several of the lighthouses are still in use as navigational aids, and a few are open to the public. Most of the structures were built between 1870 and 1900 by the U.S. Lighthouse Board and are now operated by the Coast Guard. Regularly scheduled tours are available at Cape Blanco, Haceta Head, Umpqua River,Yaquina Bay and Yaquina Head. There are public display areas at Cape Mearesand Coquille River. The Tillamook Rock lighthouse, now privately owned, is used as a columbarium, a storage place for the ashes of the deceases, so there is no tour there.
For information about the structures, contact Oregon Chapter of the U.S.Lighthouse Society
P.O. Box 600
Lakeside, Ore. 97449
(541) 759-3920 or visit our link below.
Dune the beach:
No way can California- or anywhere else this side of the Sahara, for that matter- compete with the great stretches of coastal sanddunes in Oregon. You can hike, or you can hire a dune buggy. Winter is a good time to drive one the dunes because there are fewer vehicles. Although the sand is smoother in the summer, but the lack of vehicles more than make up for it. The highest of the sand dunes are located at Umpqua Dunes.
City escapes:
After travelling along PC Hiway 1 and 101 coast, any one can usually gets a chance to pick out his or her favorite spots, places to visit and come back again. In Northern California, it could be the Mendocino Headlands or Davenport or Eureka orwherever. Our favorites on the Oregon coast are Newport and Florence, but the choices are many. Newport is a swinging coastal settlement, big enough to have good food and accommodations, not so big to be too crowded.
If you're interested, call:
Portland Oregon Visitors Assoc.
(800) 962-3700
For reservations in the Portland area, call (888) 606-6363.
"Oregon's Wineries:
Route 99, the main road from Portland down to the vineyards in the Dundee Hills, is a succession of takeout joints and strip malls. If you are not careful, you will drive right out of wine country without having seen any vineyard. In fact, there are dozens of wineries along 99, beginning with one of the best, Ponzi Vineyards.
- Erath Vineyards, in Dundee, is one of the best-known.
- Big wineries such as Willamette Valley Vineyards, near Salem, produces 90,000 cases a year, and King Estate, near Eugene plans to produce 170,000 cases in the future.
