20th Wedding Aniversery!

We made it - 20 years of marriage!
 We took some time off to celebrate and recall the time we have been together.

Starting out with My Morning Jacket in concert here in Portland. Wow! what a great show. We took the bus into town and had dinner and beer (Portland you have to have beer, it is required to live here, which is why the bus service is so good here). We ate at the Laughing Planet, which is where we had dinner / beer (even the same table) as on our Portland recon trip two years ago.

It had been a while since our last concert. It was in a small'ish theater and was really great. People of all ages!

Note: you can click any image to get a larger version...

Next we were off the coast for four days of exploring and mainly R&R. Cannon Beach & Netarts / Oceanside.

We are very lucky here in Portland, in that the coast, or the mountains are only about an hour and a half drive. Driving to the coast you quickly leave the city, then through wine country, and over the coastal range of winding roads through forests of Douglas Fir trees.


We stuffed Mrs. Bean to the brim with fishing gear, food, champagne, music, and clothes. We usually travel with our picnic basket, but both places we were staying had kitchens. It still would have been nice to have our own picnic basket, but I have to figure out how to stuff that into our Smart Car with all our other gear. Here is Mrs. Bean in Miami on a previous adventure. I just needed to get a pic in here of her.

Mrs. Bean in Miami for Christmas now 3,400 miles away.

Fishing

 I did bring my fishing gear, not really sure I was going to fish, but ya just got to bring it. Actually, we did stop on the way out to Cannon Beach at the Fish Hatchery. I managed to catch a couple of Cutthroat Trout while Rose sat reading along the river.
  

Cannon Beach

We stayed at The Waves for a few days while in Cannon Beach. Really nice rooms; ours was right on the river and beach where we could see everything. We spent one evening just watching the tide go out and the people walking the beach. We brought some night music, champagne, so it was really nice with a cool breeze blowing through the windows.

He had another nice lunch at the owner / chef's Seasons Cafe'. We highly recommend this place. Reasonably priced, even for a resort beach town. Really nice food and selections of beer and wine. An added note, is that it is across the street from one of the candy stores. We did go out to breakfast a couple times, but nothing to write home about. 

As per usual for us, it was 'Picnic in the Hotel' for dinner. There is a good independent medium sized grocery store The Mariner Market that has most of the goodies you swore you would never eat! Hell, I'm on vacation, lead me to the ice cream sandwiches! Don't forget the candy stores, too!

Here are a couple views from our hotel room at The Waves.

Our room is the upper left - great views.

At sunset one evening I saw what looked like a horse cross the river way down by those sand dunes. Strange looking horse, I thought, until a heard of them came down the sand dune, swam the river. 

A heard of Caribou!

Beach Walk

The Oregon Coast is very 'Beachy'. Huge tide range here and when the tide is out the beach is huge. As one would expect, it is a great beach to walk, so everyone does.

Rose likes the beach. We found some sand sculptures along our walk.

Netarts & Oceanside

Next, we were off down the coast driving through Nehalem, Garibaldi, and Tillamook to Netarts.

Part of this trip was to check out some close by seaside towns for a quick (hopefully cheap) weekends break. Part of that was checking out some rental Cabins in some of these towns. The cabins I saw online were vastly cheaper than hotels, but we needed to check out if they were nice enough. Yes, I would save we had a good experience with the cabin. 

Here is the Edgewater Bay & Ocean cabin in Netarts we stayed. Only $90 / night instead of many hotels that are closer to $300 / night. Nice views!

Cape Meares Lighthouse.

 300 year old Octopus Tree.

I think it was a spruce tree that no one really knows why it grew that way. I suspect it got "topped" by a storm, lost its central leader, and grew limbs out from the base. You'd have to ask an Indian who was around if they knew. Anyway, us humans think we are sooooo great, yet there are many living things around that are hundreds, if not, thousands of years old.

Oceanside

 Just up the coast is Oceanside, another small town right on the beach. We had a really great breakfast at the Blue Agate Cafe. Visitors and locals alike seem to love this little family operated small cafe. I think this is a very good reason to stay in Oceanside, as we heard the lunches are to die for.  

Being on the lookout for cheap rooms we checked out the Ocean Front Cabins. Hey, right next to the Blue Agate Cafe, which is a good start. People were busily packing up for their next hop down the coast, so we had a change to peer inside a couple cabins and chat to a visitor. Again, very rustic (code for if your wife need a makeup table this is not the place for you), but adequate with kitchens which we like. The beach is just across the street. Off season, (Portlanders like to stay at the beach in cold bad weather storm watching - it is just a thing out here) you can get a cabin for like $50 / night. Being only 1.5 hours drive through beautiful Douglas Fir tree lined forest along the amazing Wilson River and your stress just falls off on the drive out, just in time for champagne and a walk on the beach!

Tillamook Forest Center

The drive from the coast back to Portlandia passes the Tillamook Forest Center. This is a must stop site. There website does not have a lot of good pictures, but worth checking out. They have an amazing wooden suspension bridge across the Wilson River; and a really really good exhibition of the history and logging in the Tillamook Forest. OK, and bathrooms, which at about the half way point on the trip is another good reason to stop - just being real about it.

Thoughts

We really enjoyed out 20th Honeymoon and exploring the coast. I think we found some really good weekend spots to relax, and to fish. The OR coast is just so beautiful. As Portlanders we are already looking forward to our 1st winter storm stay on the beach. Hold On!