Record Road Trip

I spent a Sunday the other weekend at home listening to new, old records, selecting one after another and discovering I had started my new record collection with some great music.  How grateful I am for the generosity of Sue, a local Oregon author I discovered just a year or two ago.  I was still living in Wisconsin when I first read her book, Shoes Full of Sand.  I so loved reading her story of moving from California to Oregon and then following her adventure through her blog, Unleashed in Oregon. The summer before moving to Oregon, a friend and I did a week long road trip down the Oregon coast.  Sue kindly accepted my request to meet for lunch to pick her brain about Oregon and she was just as nice as I expected her to be.  Little did I know that in just one year, I too would be having my own adventure of moving to Oregon.  Today marks the sixth month I've been an Oregonian myself and I could not be happier!

Sue posted on Facebook last month that due to inclement weather during her garage sale, she had some items left over and wanted to give them away to anyone who was interested in putting them to good use.  One item in particular on the list caught my eye, records.  I quickly expressed my interest and we arranged a time for me to stop out to her coastal home the weekend after my trip to Wisconsin to pick them up.

Morgan, Cole and I arrived at Sue's in the early to mid-afternoon and visited for awhile.  It was fun to see, in person, the places she writes about in her blog, meet her dog, Annie, and even her neighbor for a bit.  The neighborhood was just as she describes in her writing, quiet and tucked away, surrounded by tall trees in all directions.  It seems like the perfect place for a writer to work and live.  Once inside, I was delighted to learn there were four boxes of records waiting for me with a selection that varied from Frank Sinatra to Johnny Mathis to Jackie Gleason. It was hard to contain my excitement as I flipped from one record to the next. 

South Beach State Park, Oregon

South Beach State Park, Oregon

After leaving Sue's house, we headed just a little bit down the road to South Beach State Park.  There, Morgan and I let Cole off his leash to romp around in the soft sand.  The sun was slowly beginning to make it's decent toward the edge of the ocean and the light that came down through the mostly clear skies cast a beautiful golden glow upon everything around us.  There is a point where the waves stop rolling in on top of the sand and then retreat back out to the ocean.  We strolled down that point of the beach for some time and reveled in the surprisingly warm, calm, sunny December air.


Once we had our fill of sun and sand, we hoped to check out a bookstore that we heard good things about in Newport.  Unfortunately when we got there we learned it had already closed for the day.  We decided to grab an early dinner instead and chose a dog-friendly seafood place where we devoured tasty scallops, mine grilled and Morgan's fried.  It doesn't get much better than dining on a seaside patio in December on a warm night among good company, with beer in hand and your dog by your side. I suppose a trunk full of records waiting to be played is just icing on the cake.

My new records, day one

To check out photos from the beach, as well as my other nature photography, please visit my Flickr page here.