Southern Oregon Coast

We spent a month at Bandon By The Sea RV park, not to be confused with Bandon RV Park. The latter is in town right on the highway and not much more than a gravel parking lot.
The former, BBTS, has very roomy sites and if you get in the back, you can rarely hear the highway noise. It’s about 2 miles south of the town of Bandon and within 1/2 mile of no less than 6 beach and ocean access points.

Coquille Lighthouse, Bandon Oregon looking east

Coquille Lighthouse, Bandon Oregon standing east looking west.

Lots and lots of room

If you travel north of Bandon, just over the Coquille River bridge is Bullard’s beach, an enormous state park that allows free day use and has huge set ups for boat launching & overflow access parking, horse trails with staging areas and horse camping, and around 100 campsites both tenting and RVs but I can’t vouch as to whether they all have dumps and or power or if they’re dry camping spots.
If you follow the road out to the ocean there, about 2 miles, you’ll run into the old Coquille Lighthouse. Tours are offered during certain times of the year and it’s also a popular salmon fishing spot. The salmon were running while were were there so the Coquille River that runs to the ocean between the south and north jetty was full of boats. Occasionally we could watch the fight between angler and salmon which was pretty fun. Some of the salmon didn’t fit entirely into the nets.

Elephant Rock [Yeah, me neither]

Just one of the many carved artworks on the Bandon Boardwalk.

There are many benches at the trailhead set for perfect viewing just past the city park in Bandon. There is no fee.

This is the jetty on the south side of the river and we walked out there on a day with low tide and calm seas.
That was the only time we were able to get that far out.

Jetty on Coquille River

In old restored Bandon are so many excellent restaurants I couldn’t possible list them all, but for the best fish and chips we’ve ever had, we went to Bandon Fish Market and Chowder House. http://www.yelp.com/biz/bandon-fish-market-bandon They offer them with either halibut of cod, and your order doesn’t begin cooking until you’re placed it so you get extremely fresh and delicious fish. We went back three more times during our visit, they were so good.

We tried hard to visit a museum/art gallery that features art made from sea junk but it was never open when we went so we gave up.
There are also enough tourist trap stores to browse all day long and a Farmer’s/Flea/Craft Market every weekend. More importantly, there’s a sweet shop that sells home made fudge. We needed a couple of visits there to be sure we liked it.
I’ve seen many different dog and cat breeds traveling on the road with their owners, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen someone traveling with a capuchin monkey. This is Celeste, two years old and she
belonged to the teenager of the rig behind us. We did get to hold her but she preferred men, so she bee lined it over to my husband and stuck her head under his chin. She loved to hang out in the window and drop all her toys outside on the ground and lives with her cat and dog.