Depoe Bay | bigpurplebus

I’ve always loved Oregon, especially the coast, and we’re here now for a couple of months before the rainy season. We’d originally planned on wintering here but that’s turning out to be somewhat of a problem in a way we’ve never run into before.

We’re around McMinnville on the outskirts of Portland and while there are several RV Parks around the area, all of them do a background check! It’s not that I mind a background check, but I really wonder how that came about. It might be that they’re not used to snow birds wintering around the area but I don’t know for sure. The background check is fine but some of them also want financial information and at least one wanted to see our bank account. That is NOT going to happen. I don’t hand out my SS number, nor my bank account number to someone to stay in an RV park. That’s ridiculous, especially in this day and age with identity theft. We’ve been from the Keys to Alaska and this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this. We found one we liked and completed their background check since that’s all they asked for, but the woman who owns the park, Mulkey Rv Park, refuses to let anyone who has 50 amp in any other space than right in front of the office and wedged in between a rig on each side. I can’t stand fish bowl living and we talked to her about using 30 amp in another space with more privacy since we have 30 amp also, and have used it many times and it doesn’t exceed the wattage that will harm her hookups but she was adamant about it so we said so long and found another place we like better anyway.

Every time we’ve gone to the ocean we’ve been lucky enough to be treated to a display from the local animals. Whale watching at Boiler Bay is huge and just down from Depoe Bay where you can rent a space on a whale watching boat. There is a pod of California Gray Whales here that don’t migrate and you can see them feed in the rich kelp beds that are in that area. We’ve heard that last week, further out, the fishermen were being entertained by a Blue Whale! I can’t imagine how exciting it would be to see one of those. The other place we found in Lincoln City has a beach with a passage called the “Jaws of Death” and is the outlet of the Siletz River, extremely popular right now for salmon fishing. There is a group of Harbor Seals there that stay in the area and we got some pretty good photos of them while we were there.