Cannon Beach, Oregon October 15-18, 2024

Travel Day, October 15, 2024

It’s been a really long time since I’ve been on vacation.  Aside from the Scotland trip last year, any travels have been for purposes other than vacation.  So when a friend invited me to go with her to the Oregon Coast, I jumped at the chance.  Living in Washington State, and having grown up in the Seattle area, with family in Bellingham, WA and Portland, OR, I had spent a lot of time in the San Juan Islands, on the water, and at the ocean beaches.  But time can get away from you, and it has with me.  When I started thinking about how long it had been since I’d been to the coast, I was amazed at how much time had actually passed, and was excited to go.

The trip is short, Tuesday to Friday, but just to get away is huge.  And it was a novelty to not have to pack with airline regulations in mind.  But I’m not used to shopping for food and planning menus.  It’s a good thing Lee is.   We headed out on Friday at about 9:30 thinking that we would be missing the Seattle Traffic.  Less than an hour later, we were at a dead stop on the express lanes on I-5.  Like 0 mph.  Not moving.  Lee was driving, and she had lived in the Central Area of Seattle for many years, so we got off the freeway, and took a scenic trip through Capital Hill, Beacon Hill and the Rainer Valley.  We may not have saved much time, but we weren’t sitting on I-5, and Lee got to visit some old haunts.

We decided to drive the picturesque highways, and just after Olympia, cut off over west towards Aberdeen and hooked up with Highway 101 south down the Washington coast.  It’s easy to think of Washington as the Seattle/Bellevue/Tacoma metropolis, but Washington is a big state, and most of it isn’t densely populated.  I was strongly reminded of this as we travelled west.  Most of the land was just forest.  Eastern Washington is mostly dry and agricultural, but western Washington, outside of the I-5 corridor is pretty sparsely populated.  Logging was the main industry for years, but now that that has dried up, the economy is the area is very depressed.  So for the majority of trip south, we were on a two lane highway traversing forests that had been logged at one time.  New forest was in various states, with that odd height similarity of replanted tracts.

We crossed into Oregon at the Astoria-Megler Bridge.  This bridge over the Columbia river, 14 miles east of the mouth, is the longest truss bridge in North America at 4 miles in length.  At the south end, the bridge rises in order to let ships pass underneath.  It looks as though it goes straight up, and we were a little dumbfounded at the slope.

When we got to Astoria, we took our first real stop.  My dad, a retired Research Marine Biologist with NOAA, had spent a great deal of time on the NOAA Research Ships up and down the West Coast and into Alaska.  I had heard stories about the rough seas at the mouth of the Columbia River all my life, and in his blogging, he had talked about the Maritime Museum in Astoria.  (I’ve attached a link to his blog post, and it’s fascinating as he talks about tying up in Astoria and other ports. Return to the Oregon coast – April 2013 | Carmel Finley (wordpress.com) )  On his recommendation, we visited the Columbia River Maritime Museum.

Above: Astoria looking East along the Columbia River.

The museum had a number of excellent exhibits.  One of the most interesting was called ‘Crossing the Bar: Perilous Passage’.  This examined the mouth of the Columbia River where it meets the Pacific Ocean.  Dad had talked of the rough seas he had encountered in this area, but I’d never really understood how bad it could be until I looked at the film and exhibit.  ‘The Graveyard of the Pacific’ exhibit was also fascinating.  The exhibit talks about the over 2000 vessels that have sunk at the bar since 1792. 

The danger of the river, (which really surprised me as to how wide it really was at Astoria), the Pacific Ocean, and the shallow, shifting sand bars of the area have made it one of the most dangerous areas on the West Coast.  The history of the Coast Guard is directly intertwined with the history of the river.  The museum is fascinating as it examines the everchanging flow, and how people interact with it.

After that, we headed on South, towards Cannon Beach, following the Oregon Coast.  The Oregon Coast in an amazing stretch of sandy beaches broken up by rocky promontories. Our beach house was on Chapman Beach, just next to Chapman Point.  The navigation system kept telling us to turn right, turn left, etc. about every block, but we got through the labyrinth to the house. 

The first thing we did was take a walk on the beach.  Surprisingly, there was no wind, and the weather was mild.  Unbelievable for mid-October!  I had forgotten how loud the sound of the surf crashing on the beach could be. 

The Oregon Coast is truly exhilarating.  I didn’t realize how much I had missed it! We finally ended up on our deck, looking out over the dunes to the Ocean having a drink. Nothing more exciting than Cranberry Juice, but it made for a nice picture!

We finished up with a late dinner at Pelican Brewing in Cannon Beach (fish and chips of course!), and called it a night.  I left my window open a crack, and it was wonderful to hear the roar of the waves all night. As always, I’m finishing with a few more pictures.