Day 7 - The “Secret” Beach (Brandon)

Since we got to camp late and didn’t have a chance to wander down to the beach, we got up early for a stroll before our ride. It was a beautiful beach, just a short walk from our campsite. No sand dollars, sorry mom. 😢 After cleaning the sand from our feet and packing up camp it was onto the road, we had 50 miles and some serious elevation to get through today, and it started with the mountain our campsite was named for, “Humbug.” The views on this ride, however, were far from Humbug.

One of the dozens of “haystack” rocks we’ve seen on this trip, it’s a running joke now. 

Today was the first day we bumped into another cyclist on this route, his name was Jeff, and you can read all about his journey on Christi’s blog post, but it was great to socialize a little bit with a fellow traveler. Jeff quickly lost us as we stopped frequently for pictures of the magnificent Oregon coast along this stretch of highway. We also just couldn’t keep up with his pace on the hills. 😂

Haystack rock #25

We hit Gold Beach at about lunchtime, so the hunt was on for a place to eat. When a Mexican restaurant popped up on the horizon we were in agreement that it was burrito time! Christi got a monster steak burrito, and I grabbed 2 bean and cheese burritos, knowing we probably wouldn’t want to ride into Brookings that night to grab food, and I could eat the second burrito for dinner. 😋 Since the Mexican restaurant was take-out only, due to Covid, I started searching for a bar or cafe nearby to do some blogging. In my search, I stumbled upon a small brewery in Hunter’s Creek named Arch Rock Brewing, just up the road. While the brewery didn’t have seating or WiFi, it had great beer, and the bar next door served it on tap... next door we went. A couple hours later we had our blog posts completed, and a suggestion from the bartender on a “secret” beach between us and Brookings. We also met some lovely people in the bar who were interested in our journey, and one of them picked up our drink tab. Thank you!

Christi might make me delete this one, we’ll see 😂

With daylight fading, and a “secret” beach to visit, we had to get moving, but heavy legs from multiple long days, and plenty of photo stops slowed us down a bit. We made it to the beach just after 5pm, which happened to be low tide, allowing us to visit all three of the small beaches. According to the bartender this actually was a secret beach until somebody tagged it on google maps, and there were several other visitors on this “secret” beach with us. That did not remotely detract from the beauty and seclusion of this beach, it was pretty great!

“Secret” beach, shhhh!

After doing the math on how much more riding we had to do, and what time the sun would set, we headed back up the trail to our bikes, which we’d hidden in some bushes at the pullout for the secret beach trail. We had one more stop to make at the suggestion of our new favorite Hunter’s Creek bartender. I think the place was called Natural Arch, and it was very pretty. I’m kinda sad we didn’t have time to walk all the way down to the arch itself, but I also didn’t really want to get to camp after dark, so we snapped some pictures and continued on. 

There is a trail down to the rocks, and there was someone out on the Arch while we were there.

We pulled into camp at dusk, set up the tent, ate some food, and quickly went to sleep after a long day of riding. Crossing the border in the morning!

Cheers!