A few weeks ago, I went camping for the first time! My great aunt and uncle, Martha Sue and Jim, had reserved a couple camping spots at a state park in Newport, Oregon. Grandma was planning on going down to join them and Nick and I decided to tag along.

One of the yurts at the campground. We slept in a tent, though!

The weather had other plans.

There was a bad storm in the Pacific Northwest on the Saturday we were going to drive down and there were high wind advisories… not ideal weather for camping in a tent. We canceled our plans and I went down with Grandma on Sunday instead. Nick wasn’t able to take an extra day off work, so he had a relaxing weekend alone at home.

We drove down in Grandma’s Tesla, an electric car that gets ~250 miles per charge. It’s over 300 miles to Newport and we wanted to be cautious, so we stopped a couple times each way to charge up. The drive took a little longer in the electric car because of needing to charge it, but it’s awesome to not have to pay for fuel. Plus, the Tesla charging stations are located near restaurants and shopping areas, so you have something to do while you wait.

My handheld photo of the moon

Despite the bad weather on Saturday, the weather was pretty nice (albeit cool) while we were in Newport (Sunday through Tuesday morning). I wanted to take advantage of the reduced light pollution and get some nice photos of the night sky… but there was a full moon. Oh well, I hadn’t taken any photos of the moon yet, so I decided to try that instead. I brought my tripod with me, but after I setting everything up in the dark, I realized that I didn’t have the part that holds my camera onto the tripod. Uff da! >< So I took a few handheld photos of the moon. They came out blurry, of course, but I was surprised they came out as well as they did.

Our campsite was only a 5 minute walk to the Pacific Ocean. On Monday, we walked along the beach in the morning and around Newport’s historic bayfront in the evening. There were some floating docks where the sea lions like to hang out and we stayed to watch them for a while. It was funny to watch them bark at each other and try to push each other off the docks. There was also a jetty in the bay that was covered in sea lions. Crazy!

Snuggling sea lions

I had a good trip and would do it again. 🙂 Hopefully, Nick will be able to come next time! If you’d like to see more photos, I have a few more in my Newport Flickr album.