“Some trails are happy ones.
“Some are blue.
“It’s the way you ride the trail that counts.
“Here’s a happy one for you.”
--Dale Evens
Remember the Sons of the Pioneers with Roy Rogers?
Oh, you are too young?
Oh well, that song is the reason I have the handle of Jewell's Happy Trails.
I googled the Happy Trails song and found that Dale Evans had written it. I also found that she was as cute as bee’s knees, and had a wonderful lyrical voice. She was a singer long before she came on the Western scene with Roy Rogers.
Let's so to the coast I suggested to my husband one weekend. "Don't worry about the weather, it can rain, shine, or storm, I don't care. We can eat at two of our favorite restaurants, “The Waterfront Depot” in Florence one day, and “New Ocean,” in Newport Beach the next.
Sweetpea dined on Cajun- Salmon--the piece was larger than I could eat--the first day, and for dessert she ate the tail-end of my ice cream cone of vanilla with salted caramel swirl. Superb. BJ’s homemade ice cream in Florence is the best I have even eaten. It's a good thing we have to drive an hour and a half to get it.
Sweetpea was a happy camper. Me too.
Sweetpea is not always happy. She has developed a fear of loud noises, and now with her sensitivity, I notice how noisy the world is. If I roll down the car window, a truck will hit its air brakes. In parking lots, there are more slamming doors than seagulls on the breach. Everyplace has beeps, dings, dongs, and thuds.
And we have a quivering dog.
But on the beach, Sweetpea runs like a gazelle with no apparent thought to the ocean’s roar. The sand is her happy trail.
I supported the arts in Florence by buying a print. I liked looking at this tiger so much I had to bring it home with me. It's a watercolor titled Mr. Tiger by Lora Zombie.
We visited The Hot Shop in Newport Beach and watched a glass blower make a glass pumpkin start to finish.
I asked him if you could make glass from beach sand, and he told me how refined the glass is they use. It has silica, of course, to which they add sodium carbonate, and potassium, and calcium oxide. The glass makers vary the recipe, adding different chemicals for different uses. Sometime these artisan blowers need to order their supplies a year in advance.
While still hot the glass objects are placed in an annealing oven for slow cooling to prevent cracks. Some take days or weeks, and large items can take months.
Glass floats are popular on the Oregon coast, and since it’s rare to find those aqua glasses floats once tied to
fishing nets, now the glass blowers make beautiful decorative globes—still
called floats.
And then around the corner we ran into a lady pirate--not real. A good sculpture.
At
Nye beach, we watched kids in a kayak, and a golden retriever dog swimming
across a small channel. There was a man on one bank and the kids on the other, and they would throw sticks, and I
don’t know how many times that dog swam across that water way. He would pop out
of the water shake, splatter water on the people then jump back in. He was on a
happy trail.
Nye Beach, dog in the water.
“Happy trails to you until we meet again.”