To the coast!

Sunday morning, we had another flurry of activity, with Liam and Mary heading to the airport, me and John meeting our Portland-based friends Alex and David for breakfast, and Paddy and Kathleen taking a stroll around the neighborhood to again admire the lovely gardens. I have a few photos not posted previously to show how high the bar is for Portland gardens!

We then checked out of our Airbnb and met up with miles for a walk and coffee before big hugs for the new graduate and piling into our van to drive to the coast. It’s a really pretty 1.5 hour drive to Tillamook, the ‘big’ town near our final destination of Oceanside, and we were running a bit early so we stopped at the namesake dairy/cheesemonger in town, Tillamook. Very interesting viewing area of the operations! We all agreed Anne should schedule a visit (for work of course 😀. )

Well informed about how the cheese gets from cow to Costco, we then drove on to Oceanside. Truly we couldn’t believe the place and the view that we’d booked, so amazing!

We took a walk along the beach with tide up fairly high, and then headed to the nearby schooner for dinner. Readers may enjoy revisiting this blog post from our visit here in 2019 – this beach varies so much with the tides that it feels like a new beach even from one time of day to the next! Note the clouds here which is remarkable bc we’ve had blue skies every day since. Lucky us!

Monday we started with a walk on the beach. I thought this additional info about sand dollars was interesting.

Then we drive north to Oswald West state park. there, we walked on a trail through an old growth forest to a beautiful beach.

After this adventure, we rested for a bit then had dinner #2 at Schooners! We’re all officially about 1/3 steelhead trout at this point! The seafood and all food in general has been really delicious. We went down to the beach to catch sunset, at 8:35. Great day!