Day 52: A Wine Cave and Some Waves

The anticipation of seeing someplace new always, in my mind, overrides the hesitance that accompanies the dangers of traveling alone. Even though I am traveling alone, I never truly feel alone. Everywhere I go I find something familiar, and the new age of technology makes me feel tethered to a thousand different people, and similarly places, all at once. The goal of the day was pretty simple in my agenda: make it to the ocean and find a place to camp on the coast. While I was heading to a place I had never visited it is in no way a strange place. There is something comforting and familiar about everywhere I go, and each place both creates memories, and triggers old ones to emerge back on the surface.
As I made my way to the West I noticed a sign that gained my attention. “Wine Cave, turn left 6 miles” it proclaimed. Who could say no to that? Here I was, in wine country, and there was a place that had both a cave and wine together? This cave geologist has a particular taste for pinot noir and here I was in the middle of the particular grape’s habitat. I turned left and started my short detour from my route to the sea.

Reustle Winery is located in the Oregon countryside, and although it has what they call a wine “cave” it does not actually have a cave on property (to my dissapointment). What it does have is an excellent selection of wine, and when you taste they give you culinary creations designed to compliment each specific wine on the taste list. The entire vineyard is gorgeous. The landscape is done tastefully with roses in bloom and plenty of outdoor places to mingle with friends. I was the only customer there at the time, it being the middle of the week and a bit chilly. There are plenty of areas to explore in the vineyard, each one of them as picturesque as the next.  I will say their pino noir was definitely worth the detour.

Umpque Lighthouse State Park was the campground of choice for the night. Sitting right on the far southern coast of Oregon, the campgrounds are convieniently located a short walk from the beach. The beach itself has dunes where you are allowed to drive 4x4s on (Although I recommend having tires specified for this use to do so, mine were not). I spent the evening on the beach, under the light of the Umpqua lighthouse, as the sun made it’s way down into the western extent of the Pacific.

I wasn’t alone. A surfer’s dog adopted me as a temporary friend, fending off the giant black birds that kept trying to steal my banana bread. I drank some wine and stayed until the sun was so far down in the sky it could no longer keep me warm, then I drove up to the lighthouse to watch the last few minutes of the sunset. I reminisced about today’s mixof intertwining interests: Pinot Noir, the Pacific coast, off-roading on a beach (for the first time), even the cave that wasn’t a cave. All things I enjoyed. I started wondering if I find contentment in my life because I always find what interests me, or because I can manage to find an interest in so many things.

So many people have said this, but I think it needs to be taken with more weight than it is:
“Life is what you make of it”
That is exactly it. This Grand Adventure didn’t happen because I dreamt of it, it’s because I pushed myself to find the drive and the ambition to accomplish it. The world around us doesn’t fill our lives with interesting things, we have to find an interest in the things that the world already provides. The rest of life falls into place after you accept that you can’t seek out something to make you happy. The world already exists, you simply have to change your point of view on what makes life worth living.
Happiness comes in a trifecta. It consists what already exists, what we put into it, and how we view both of those things. The first is a given that we can’t change anything about other than using the third. The other two are things one must consciously be aware of. You can’t expect the world to change for you, you have to find a way to enjoy the world and then do your part to make that part better for yourself and others.
I think my grandmother put it best on a note she gave me just days before I left on this journey: “Anyone can be a dreamer, but it takes someone special to make a dream a reality”.
Dreaming is the essence of inspiration, but you have to obey the trifecta if you plan on making anything out of it. The world is your canvas, the paints your input, and the brush your interpretation of them both. Everyone has the ability to accomplish their dreams, you just have to interpret the dream into a plan- and make it happen.
-Nicole