There it is ... the return of the light!

As I write this we already gained a few minutes of daylight since the shortest day of the year on the 21st and it's officially winter!
I celebrated the solstice by lighting the candle on my Yule wreath:

For us this holiday season, which last pretty much the whole month of December, is more the 'Holly Jolly' kind of celebration, following the pagan traditions of bringing in a tree and lighting a fire (well, a 'fake' tree and a candle in our case) enjoying good food, watching sappy movies and listening to cheerful songs about Santa, reindeer, and snowmen.

Just like mankind has done for many, many years ... except for the movies of course.

                                   

We had such a low key and relaxed couple of days, spend mostly inside and in our lounge sweats, that I barely took any pictures except from the food .. of course:



And even the food was very simple this year, store-bought Panatone, cream-pie and Tiramisu, (frozen) Lasagna, some ready-made snacks .. although I did make the deviled eggs and the seafood-soup on Christmas eve.
Totally perfect!

I'd bought myself some great presents:

                                           

                        Two Paint-by-number sets and several small embroidery kits!

I'd ordered a few things through Temu lately, just to see if it was legit, and since everything went OK I tried some more and I must say I'm very impressed.
Everything arrives just fine, looks and works as advertised and this whole order cost me $40, which is an absolute steal!

To stay in the laid-back, relaxed spirit-of-the-season we've spend several evenings lately playing games and we like it a lot!
Here we're playing 'Mexican Train', one of our favorite domino-varieties:

It can get rowdy, but we try to keep it civil!

We're pretty much forced to spend most of our time indoors these days since the weather is quite terrible.
It just doesn't stop raining:

 

The Yamhill River, which runs through both Sheridan and Willamina, and who's trail along the shore is part of my morning walking routine, is way up.



Both towns are in the flood zone and the city has set up sandbag filling stations:

We are high enough above it all and although the ponds on the property have filled up completely, the big culverts in all three of them keep them from overflowing by draining into the lower one all the way down.

The full ponds do attract different ducks lately. This pair of  Hooded Mergansers (although no hoods were up) arrived in the pouring rain but didn't stay very long ..

  

The combination of soggy, saturated soil and a gusty night with several very strong gusts that had the RV shake, rattle and roll .. well, fortunately not 'roll' .. brought one of the large oaks on the edge of the grove down:

   

Fortunately no damage to any structures and it didn't even bring any others with it since it fell neatly out of the row and into the field.
I'm keeping a careful eye on the others when I walk through them!

Every now and than we have some clearings with blue sky in between showers and the sun will be out for a few hours:



And we see a lot of rainbows, this was almost a full one:

        

This one was very wide and bright, unfortunately the picture doesn't really do it justice ..

Like I said, the light is coming back, today we gain another whopping 41 seconds, but since December and January are Oregon's rain months we'll probably have a lot more rain coming our way.

Having said that I'm still keeping my hopes up for some snow this winter. So far nothing, but when I checked last winter's blog I found we didn't have snow until the 12th of January so who knows .. I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

Bandon Dunes Golf Resort

This week we went on a long-awaited mini-vacation to Bandon, a beautiful little sea-side town on the Oregon coast, well known for it's stunning beaches, but maybe even more so for the beautiful golf courses of the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort ... especially when you're a golfer of course.

James golfed three of the resort's six courses here last year with some of his golf buddies from the Newberg golf course he's a member of, and this year they booked the same arrangement to play the other three.
The very high golf fees of the summer are only half the price in the fall, especially if booked as a group and in combination with hotel rooms at the resort.
As luck would have it, for me that is, one of the guys couldn't make it and since I was due for a chance of scenery and some R&R, I decided to go with James and spend some relaxing time at the beach!

 

                            

                            

It was raining cats and dogs when we left on Tuesday morning and driving Highway 101 which borders the Pacific ocean for most of the way down to Bandon we enjoyed seeing the wild waves crashing on the rocks and grey fog swirling through the hills.

We stopped for coffee at the Ultralife Cafe in Newport. Donuts anyone? (We went for the raspberry/brie scone by the way)

              
 
            

From there the weather started to get much better and when we finally arrived in Bandon it was dry, although still very windy!

               

We walked through town for a little  ..

                                                 

                                                

And had lunch, very good fish & chips and a bowl of excellent fish chowder, at the Chowder House:

These pigeons caught my eye, all hunkering down, quite literary, on the roof of a nearby building in an effort to stay out of the still very strong wind:

Around 3pm we drove the 10 minutes back down the road to the main building of the resort, the Lodge, to check in:

Everything was taken care of smoothly and soon we were on our way to our room at the Lily Pond building:

   

The pic up above this one is the front of the building and this one is the back.
The middle unit below was ours.

And this is inside. Not too shabby is it? We even had a fireplace!

And yes, I brought our little Christmas tree!
This interesting contraption I found under the bathroom sink ...

                                                      

It's a golf-shoe dryer! Which says a lot about the circumstances the game is played under often around here and especially in the fall .. it rains, a lot!
There's a reason it's so much cheaper to play right now!

So yes, about the golf .. the courses here are world-famous and for a lot of golfers it's a bucket-list dream to ever play here.

This is 'Golf like it's meant to be', golfers say, played on rugged, wind-swept land just like this.
Every hole, every hazard, every shot is defined by the unpredictable pacific-coast weather. As the elements change, so does the game.
It’s all part of the tradition of links golf as it was played at it's start in Scotland in the 1500s.

As I mentioned, there are six courses, the Sheep Ranch, Pacific Dunes, Old MacDonald, Bandon Trails, Bandon Preserve, Bandon Dunes and a short par three course appropriately called Shorty's.
Many of the holes have incredible ocean views, like this one at Sheep Range where James played on Wednesday morning:

                           

Here's a few of the many pictures I took of the various courses, there just so photogenic!

 

As you can see in this last one the days started out a little foggy but around noon the clouds would lift and we even had a little blue skies and some sunshine on most days.
Which was a big difference with last year when it rained off and on every day and they even had to battle gale winds and horizontal rains which forced them to shorten their last round.

Some action pictures! James actually played halfway decent and even scored some birdies!

You're not allowed to ride a golf-cart here (unless you're handicapped) but you can hire a 'caddy' who'll carry your bag and give you pointers how to play a hole .. for $100 a bag .. plus tip!

             

Needless to say, all but two of the guys went without ..

                                              

                                          They look like they had fun!

I certainly had fun as well! Look at all those hiking trails:



The first day I actually drove all the way to the beach after dropping James off at Sheep Ranch and walked a couple of miles along the beach through the fog.
The waves were still high and there was lots of foam floating around from the storm they had here in recent days:

As they warn you here: Don't turn your back to the ocean, ever!

                     

I was the only one there braving the elements, except for a few gulls. It was great!

The next day I hiked the Beach trail which led me through the dunes to the ocean, at certain points crossing some of the holes of the Pacific Dunes and the Preserves courses.





                         


The last day I walked part of the Jamie McEwan trail, which skirts the Pacific Dunes course again, but now going the other way, and finished on the Woodland trail which leads you through the forest back to the Lodge.


   


                      


Again, I was the only one there. Just like I like it!




I walked part of this labyrinth which is intended for walking meditation.
It is a replica of the Labyrinth on the floor of the Chartres Cathedral in France and a memorial to Howard McKee, one of the founders of Bandon Dunes.

Nature is a little behind here if you compare it to our neck of the woods in Willamina and there were still quite a few mushrooms to be found:

Although I didn't come across any of the wildlife that supposedly call this area home, like beavers, skunks, coyotes and gray foxes but on arrival at our room the first day these three Black-tail deer were grazing right in front of our little patio:



                                                      

In one of the many ponds I came across this Hooded Merganser couple and in another one I detected a little Pied-billed Grebe next to a couple of (female) Redhead ducks:

And of course we ate! Lots of delicious food!

The resort has several very nice restaurants which are not really in our budget but we enjoyed a delicious shepherd's pie and a figgy-pudding at the Scottish McKees pub, and a delicious breakfast buffet at the The Gallery & Puffin Bar in the main lodge while we looked out over the golf course.

Our first morning we actually went into the town of Bandon for breakfast at the Bandon Coffee Cafe.
Earlier this year, on our way to the Redwoods with my sister and her partner, we stopped here for coffee and James almost went for their great looking bagel and lox some other people were having, but 'settled' for a pastry since we just had breakfast and it was early for lunch.

He has regretted it ever since so ... he had to make it right this time:

You think he's happy?

All in all we had a wonderful time!
Since James has played all courses of Bandon Dunes now he's thinking of going somewhere else next year (maybe around Bend, OR) and several of the guys seemed to be up to that as well so they're going to look into that.
And although I won't golf (my skill-level is not 'up to par' to spend that amount of money to play) and I don't intermingle with the group (I think the guys should be among guys if you know what I mean), I certainly would love to go with them again and see that part of the state which is equally beautiful but located in the mountains and woods!

We had a beautiful, sunny drive back on Friday afternoon:

Somewhere around Newport we had some coffee and witnessed the sunset.
Only one more day and the days will be getting longer again!