Yurt camping at the beach! One of Nene’s colleagues recommended the Fort Stevens State Park yurt village, and it is awesome.
It’s at the mouth of the Columbia River and has the Pacific Ocean on one side, so you get a stunning beach (complete with sand dunes and a shipwreck) along with gorgeous forest marshland.
We made taco soup, and Nene brought a portable campfire (which was delightful–it’s made with eucalyptus essential oil, so between that and the smoke it kept the mosquitos off of us when we were in camp).
The first thing we did was walk to the beach.
This is what remains of the Peter Iredale (built in 1890) that ran aground in 1906 while looking for the Columbia River. It was made with steel plates over an iron frame, so part of it is still there today.
The beach was glorious. It was wide and shallow so the waves came in six at a time.
And it was basically empty! (The area around the shipwreck had people though.) This is the view from the top of the dune.
And the other side of the dune. It acts as a clear border between beach and forest.
That evening we walked to Battery Russell through the marshland.

When we first got to camp, our neighbor said something about mosquitos, how they can get really bad. They didn’t seem too bad in camp.

Well, we found the mosquitos on our twilight waterside walk! They were so thick that I was breathing them and could feel them bouncing off my swinging wrists while walking. If we held still they were on us like pins in a cushion. I had about three seconds to stop and take a picture before they covered my hands.

Miraculously I only had six mosquito bites, two on my face (since that was exposed), and the rest on my shins, which means they bit through my leggings.

But mosquitos are a great exercise tool! We didn’t just walk the three miles to Battery Russell and back, we walked while constantly windshield-wipering our arms and (in my case) occasionally leaping around to shake them off my legs.
But away from the water (like at Battery Russell) the mosquitos weren’t as thick.

Battery Russell took fire from a Japanese submarine in 1942 (one of the handful of times since the War of 1812 the US was fired on by a foreign power). They didn’t fire back because they didn’t want to give away their exact position. (This is the empty gun emplacement.)
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