How Did We End Up at Trask River?

My wife and I decided to take advantage of another nice weekend.

With our budget in mind, we grabbed our tents and sleeping bags and took off from Portland.

We headed out Friday night with friends to Saddle Mountain; a campground off of Highway 26 that we heard has great hikes. We planned on staying there for two nights to explore as much as possible.

Turns out fate had other plans - which we didn't know about.

Too Late

When we arrived at Saddle Mountain, all of the spots were already taken!

We knew this was a possibility (it was a first-come, first-serve campsite) but we thought that by coming up Friday night, we would beat the system.

We were wrong.

At 9 p.m., tired from our week and with no backup plan, we went through our options.

We could go home and try somewhere new tomorrow.

Or, we could continue heading west toward the coast and find another campground - maybe spend the weekend at the beach!

Let's go, Adventure!

Since it was already late and we wanted to relax, we decided to stop at every campground we came across on our drive west.

9 p.m. turned in to 10 p.m., which turned in to 11 p.m., then 12 a.m.

Every...campground...was...full!

To be fair, not all of them were completely full. But the ones that were not full, did not accept tent campers! (This one blows my mind but I won't digress...)

We had traveled the rest of the way to the coast and then went south on Highway 101.

We hit Tillamook at 12 a.m., out of our coffee (brought for the entire weekend) that we pulled out in Cannon Beach, and decided that we may need to call the trip off at this point.

Highway 6 goes from Tillamook back up to Highway 26 - and was an easy route back to Portland.

Having driven more than originally expected, we needed to stop for gas (and now some Red Bull).

Lucky us! The attendants at the gas station were curious about why we were up so late. We told them our story/curse and to our surprise...they knew of a place that is usually half empty!

It was back to the mountains!

About 20 miles east of Tillamook, and along the Trask River, is the Trask River County Campground.

We pulled in around 1 a.m. and found an empty campsite...finally...

We weighed the cost of staying in the campground to that of driving back to Portland, plus (if we went back to Portland) the cost of trying to go somewhere the next day (hey, this was still only Friday night!).

Stay it was.

We were exhausted but still not done, unless we wanted to sleep in the cars!

Tents went up, we mumbled our goodnights to our friends, and then crashed in our sleeping bags.

What a start to our weekend!

What did you do this last weekend to exploit life? Any adventures?

Yours in exploiting life!
Quinn