Road Trip to the Coast

We pulled back the curtains on the hotel room at Cape Kiwanda this morning to find something very much like the picture above. It was a VERY sunny and nice day for January and so Rev. Shayla, Jason and I tore that coast to pieces:

1. Cape Kiwanda. Exploring the tidal pools! The timing worked out amazingly well and we got out just at low tide. The sea receded to reveal little pocket pools in the limestone rocks that had barnacles, starfish, little anemone looking things and fishes and crabs. After that we climbed the dunes to a outlook where we spotted a sea lion swimming around in the churn. It was so pretty that Jason asked if you could be too inundated with the sublime.

We also tried little bit o' beer at the Pelican Brewery near Cape Kiwanda, which supposedly has the best beer on the west coast? They had a lot of medals. And though we just had a taste, it seemed pretty darn good.

Lida Husik - Breeze

2. Oceanside. We found a cool tunnel through a bluff and crawled through it and wondered it if was the Cave of Time from the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series and would lead us to the beach in 1997 when I did not have a job and George Bush hadn't ruined the country yet.

Richard Buckner - (A Year Ahead)... And a Light

3. Cape Meares. Visited the stubby little lighthouse there and the Octopus Tree. Its a gigantic sitka spruce that has split into 8 or so gigantic spruce tentacles up on a ridge above the ocean. Legend has it that the tree, which is called council tree by Native Americans, was shaped that way because a particular chief put his canoes on its branches when the tree was younger and that made the tree form that way. I don't know the truth, except that it was a cool tree. I bought a box of Good and Plentys at a little store nearby. We headed on down the Three Capes Scenic Route.

Tv on the Radio - Family Tree

4. Tillamook. With about 5000 residents, it's the biggest town for many miles around. I told a handful of Oregonian people that I was going to the coast this weekend. I was looking for tips and insights. And almost everyone asked me, with a shifty look in their eye, with their voices in a slightly higher register, if we would be stopping by the Tillamook Cheese factory. People from Oregon get downright funny about this place. Sweaty palms, maybe some running in place. They sell this cheese in the Portland Airport, such is the passion of the people who have to have it when they fly far away. So passing through Tillamook we felt compelled to visit the factory and see what all the commotion was about. It being a Saturday, the assembly line was not in full swing, but we did see some gigantic blocks of cheese getting shrink wrapped. Rev. Shayla bought everyone ice cream cones. I got Marionberry Pie ice cream because it seemed a very Oregon thing to do. We also tried to buy some fresh oysters in Tillamook from a place called the Pearl Point. It's in a very old decommissioned bank that just looks like you want to rob it on horseback. As for the shellfish, all the coolers were empty, and the oystermonger said sorry, we are sold out. Rats. And so we kept heading north on HWY 101.

Devendra Banhart - Seahorse

5. Giarbaldi. This is a working class fishing village where we got up close with crab rings. Which are the regional name for crab pots. Which the rest of us call crab traps. We didn't eat any crabs. We were full of ice cream. And so we drove on a crazy winding logging road away from the coast back to fair Portland.

The Gris Gris - Winter Weather