Goldrush Art Festival

We left Crescent City about 11:30 a.m. and headed towards Brookings, OR. When we crossed the border into Oregon, we stopped at the Oregon State Parks Welcome Center and picked up an Oregon map. This is my first visit here, but Ken lived in Oregon for some time during the 1980s. He recalled eating some great clam chowder in Brookings, so we stopped at the Beachcomber Restaurant for lunch and enjoyed the clam chowder and fish and chips.

Then we moved on to Gold Beach, where the Goldrush Art Festival is underway. We set up camp at Secret Camp RV & Tent Park just outside of town, along the Rogue River, in a lovely pull through under the trees, and then headed into town. First we stopped at the Rogue River Myrtlewood Shop and Factory, where we admired the myrtlewood lighthouses and many other gift and home decor items made of this evergreen tree native to northern California and the Oregon coast.

We went to Gold Beach Books, Biscuit Art Gallery & Biscuit Coffeehouse for a presentation that was part of the Goldrush Art Festival: The Art of China: Brush Calligraphy, the Dance of Tai Ji, and Symbolic Metaphors. We weren't sure what to expect, but we certainly weren't disappointed. Chungliang Al Huang, the presenter, is "the founder-president of the Living Tao Foundation. A philosopher, artist-calligrapher, bamboo flute player, and Tai Ji master-mentor . . . ."


He demonstrated brush calligraphy, showing how the brush strokes embody the visual or emotional depiction of concepts like human, heart, Tao, nature. He went beyond the Chinese character to the body movements/dance that it inspires to the philosophy it expresses--bringing oppositions into unity (not Yin and Yang, but Yin Yang, an integration of body and mind, male and female, sky and earth.

The bookstore was quite impressive--a large collection of both new and used books, with an art gallery integrated--and of course the coffeeshop. Ken wistfully suggested maybe we could get a trailer to put behind Venture just to carry books . . . .

By the way, we decided to stop before reaching Humbug Mountain State Park so we would be closer to Gold Beach. One advantage of our lifestyle is that we generally have lots of freedom to change our minds!

We finally had the experience of breaking camp in a real shower, so our raincoats came in handy. The weather on the Oregon coast is as wet and chilly as Ken remembers it. Rain is expected the next five days, with highs in the very low 50s (brrrrr--that's cold for Southern Californians!).

For dinner we had chicken enchiladas, refried black beans, and green bean/corn/red pepper mix with lime cole slaw.