8 Apr 2024
Over a decade ago, Matt and I took a roadtrip down the west coast. We only stayed a night at most places, trying to see as much as possible in our 2-ish week timeframe, but we made a list of places we’d like to come back to.
Cannon Beach was at the top of the list.
It took much longer than I expected for us to make it back here, but last year I learned about the tide pools they have here and all the critters (like nudibranchs!) that you can find when the tides are especially low. And this year, some especially low tides lined up with time I had already taken off work, so it’s finally time for us to come back to the Pacific Northwest!
Fortunately, today’s flight wasn’t nearly as early as last week’s flight:
We even look mostly awake!
Greetings from the PDX airport!
My name was on the car rental sign, so we were able to skip the desk and go right to our car!
Apparently we were upgraded?
I always book us a compact car- they’re cheap and usually get pretty good gas mileage. This is a Dodge Hornet (which I’d never heard of before); it’s a hybrid, but still an SUV-ish vehicle, so we’ll see how it does on mileage…
It was overcast and a bit drizzly as we left the airport, but trees here have leaves! Things are actually green!
That yellow sign above the tunnel warns that if the lights are flashing, there’s a bicyclist inside the tunnel- yikes!
The tunnel was narrow and the shoulder was blocked with pillars- not sure I’d want to ride a bike through that!
View from a pull-off:
As we came out of the mountains, we ran into actual rain:
The forecast for this week doesn’t look great:
I’m hoping we can get one good day of hiking in on Wednesday, but we’ll be playing most of this week by ear.
Our hotel is the same one we stayed at last time we were in town, the Surfsand Resort, though they’re in the middle of some renovations, so it’s changed a lot since our last visit.
Welcome to our home for the week! I thought I had booked us the same room type as last time (at sand level, looking out to the ocean), but we’ve got a full-on suite:
Through the door on the right is our bathroom, which is massive!
and has a TV you can watch from the tube (which, honestly, I might do depending on how cold I get after playing in the tide pools)
It also has a Matt-sized bench:
Which is slightly too tall to comfortably sit on to put on your shoes and has no hooks for jackets. Definitely not as functional as it could/should be.
Moving inside, this is the main living area/”kitchen” (there’s a microwave in the cabinet about the sink along with utensils and dishes):
and to the left is our room:
(that bump-out on the left is a closet)
and through that door (or through the one in the living area) is our patio!
Out in the misty haze is Haystack Rock, where my tide pools will be.
But I think my favorite feature is the fireplace:
and maybe the warm cookies they have every day 🙂
The cookies tided us over for a while, and I was hoping the wind and rain would die down before we got too hungry, but no luck, so we suited up:
and walked down to Pelican Brewing for dinner- Matt’s beer came with a little sample of a similar, but different beer, for him to try:
I got homemade root beer, which tasted like a root beer barrel- YUM!
For dinner, I had crab mac’n’cheese and Matt ordered fish’n’chips:
Both were amazing! So fresh, so tasty… so filling! We ended up bringing a good portion of it home (along with a slice of lemon cheesecake which, not gonna lie, is totally going to be my breakfast tomorrow 🙂 )
Then we walked back to our room and settled in for the night. I realized I forgot part of my underwater camera setup, so I’ll have to just hand-hold my light tomorrow when I’m (hopefully) taking pictures of things in the tide pools, which is a bit of a bummer. Oops.
Low tide is at 0748 tomorrow, and I’m not quite sure how hard it’ll be to spot the nudibranchs I want to photograph, so my alarm will be going off early as I scout things out. Definitely calling it an early night tonight!