Aged Like Fine Wine

Above: Florence, Oregon; base of a small sand dune, near the Port campground

Current weather conditions in Beautiful Beaverton.

Tahkenitch Dune, 1982

So, another year, another birthday. It's cool here for an August day -- sixty-three F. at the moment, which, through a bit of coincidence, is the same as my age in years ...

We had a fine birthday trip to the coast -- my wife's BD is two days before mine -- ate good food, walked, read, and enjoyed a mostly sunny weekend, though we woke up Monday to a steady rain in Florence, which precluded any more tromping around the dunes.

Twenty-five or so years ago on our birthdays, we had a private re-marriage ceremony at Tahkenitch Dune, which is a couple miles hike from Hwy 101, a place we discovered shortly after we moved to Oregon. That time, we hiked in, read re-dedication vows, exchanged small gifts, drank a bottle of champagne, and tried not to get sand in places that are better left unsandy.

In the middle of the ceremony it started raining and my ink-on-notepaper vows turned into an blurry blotch. Got us laughing something fierce, standing there in the rain. Late August, in Oregon: You never know what the skies will do.

Hard to tell from the center image how big Tahkenitch Dune is, nothing to scale it by, but it's about a quarter-mile away from where I shot the picture with a 1x lens. Probably about fifty feet or so high in this picture. Doesn't look quite like that today -- there has been some more plant growth, and the winds have shapeshifted it a bit. Some of the dunes are quite a bit higher, going on for miles. If you ever get down that way, you should check it out. Quite amazing to see what looks like the middle of the Sahara Desert plunked down on the Oregon coast that way.