OUR SEASIDE TRIP, PART 2

After our morning at the aquarium, we headed south to Cannon Beach for lunch. While there, we enjoyed the nice surprise of bumping into friends from Idaho. When the tide headed out, we decided to head for the beach at Hug Point, a beach which we'd passed many times but never stopped at. (Thanks for the recommendation, Williams family!) It's a really neat place, with caves, a waterfall, and a rocky outcropping which was blasted to make way for cars to "hug the point" and get around at low tide as they drove on the original coast highway (a.k.a., the beach). We enjoyed tidepooling, walking in the rain, exploring the caves (they're not deep), rock scrambling, throwing rocks, chasing waves, drawing in the sand, and metal detecting. After our fun, albeit wet, afternoon, we cleaned up at the hotel and enjoyed some Mexican food before turning in, exhausted.

                                         

On Friday morning, we headed north to Warrenton. We drove out on the spit by Fort Stevens and spied a few elk in the distance, but the weather was less than inviting, so we didn't stay long. We stopped in at the little lighthouse museum in Warrenton to see these cool harpoon guns. It happened to be the first day the museum itself was open for the season, so we enjoyed looking around for a few moments and each child left with an intact sand dollar. (Now we know how to find an unbroken one - go crabbing. The museum had a bucketful and the curator said they get pulled in with the crab pots. The kids were thrilled to have whole sand dollars, because they'd looked long and hard at the beach just to find HALF a shell!)

We continued toward home, stopping at a few shops and then the bakery in Astoria for tasty treats before climbing the column.

Our last stop before coming home was at the Astoria Column. It was such a rainy, gray day we could barely see the parking lot from the top, let alone the ocean, but we climbed the steps nonetheless. Tired and slightly damp, we piled into the van for a pleasant ride home. Ascha napped and the rest of us enjoyed listening to Ralph Moody's Come On, Seabiscuit. It was a great end to a great time of refreshing fellowship for our family.