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Sunday stats

New animal sighting: A whale! Presumably a gray whale.

Start: Nancy's house, Neskowin, Ore.

End: Cape Lookout State Park, elevation: 16 feet

The Daily Progress: 28.7 miles

Uphill / downhill: 1873 / 1902

Ice cream: NA

Beer: At Pelican Brewery in Pacific City, Dani had Raspberried At Sea, and I tasted the cream ale, the Bronzed God and the Tsunami stout.

Lodging expenses: $16

Food expenses: $50 at the brewery, $26 on groceries at the Pacific City grocery store, $28 at the Pacific City RV convenience store

Dani's daily digest

I poked my head out of our tent this morning to find salmon-pink clouds streaked over the Pacific Ocean. And thus began our most excellent day on the Oregon Coast.

For breakfast, we had coffee and home-made coffee cake at the big wooden table in our host's kitchen.

We then started our exploration of the beach. The dominating feature of Neskowin's beach is a basalt prominence and sometimes island known as Proposal Rock. This morning, a nearly full moon floated nestled in a gap in the canopy of the trees that grow on the rock. The effect was quite becoming.

Next, we investigated the stumps of a "ghost forest" -- 2000-year old Sitka spruce trees that died when the land subsided several hundred years ago during an earthquake. Now the stumps are encrusted with sea life and make vertical tide pools of sorts. Some of the bigger stumps have actual tide pools in their hollow centers. We watched barnacles in one of these pools collect food from the water. It was mesmerizing to see a barnacle in action.

Among the stumps I found a big purple starfish. I was so excited to find it, I stared at it for five minutes. (Chris spent these five minutes taking photos of me staring at the starfish). This now strikes me as adorably naive because by the end of the morning I had seen thousands of starfish. And mussels. And giant green anemones.

Nancy (our host) had told us that if we timed out walk right, we might find a narrow passage in the rocks at the end of South Beach that would lead us to Secret Beach. (She also told us that when she was a little girl, the rule was you could only go to Secret Beach if your dad was with you). We found the passage twenty minutes before low tide. We attempted to pass through but we weren't wild about the narrow exit of the passage or the pool just before it, so we looked at going through the ocean. The ocean route looked a little wooly for folks who were hoping to stay dry, so we looked at the passage again. The end of the passage still looked foreboding so we opted for the ocean route. We got wet up to our waists but we managed to keep our phones out of the ocean. And Secret Beach was worth it -- a rocky cove with a sandy bottom, all to ourselves. We explored the caves and tide pools of Secret Beach for twenty minutes before reversing our steps and returning to our campsite but way of the west side of Proposal Rock.

We broke camp and said good-bye to Nancy then biked 10 miles up the coast to Pacific City, where there was a brewery Chris wanted to visit because he had debated between three of their beers when deciding his evening libations the day before. When we sat down to eat, I noticed that my butt felt weird -- kinda like it was numb. But it kinda makes sense for a person who was spent two months on a hard leather seat to have a numb bum, plus a lady never mentions her numb bum at lunch, so I said nothing for a minute or two. Then I realized that my bum didn't feel numb, it felt COLD. And a beat later I realized my bum didn't feel cold, it felt WET. And that's how I discovered I had spent three minutes sitting in the spilled contents of my water bottle. I had to call my mom to tell her. She understands these things.

Besides getting lunch, our second goal for Pacific City was to buy groceries for the next 24 hours. There was a market affiliated with an RV park directly across from the brewery, so Chris suggested we check it out and backtrack to the downtown market only if necessary, but I got it into my head that the market downtown was more of a "real" grocery store, so Chris agreed to backtrack. When we got to the downtown market, we found long, empty shelves and a soundtrack of classic hard rock. The food options were bleak and the music selection was delightfully unusual. We bought a few things and hoped to augment with whatever was available at the RV park market. The RV park market was clean and shiny and full of appetizing food products both healthy and indulgent. We should have gone here first, like Chris said.

We biked another 15 miles, climbing 800 feet in the last six miles. We've been joking on these coastal climbs that our effort is the sacrifice demanded by whales to earn the privilege of seeing them. "We hope this appeases your majesties!" is a totally normal thing for us to shout while grinding up a six percent grade.

At the top of the climb, we found the Cape Lookout trailhead. The trail to the lookout was longer than we thought (2.4 miles one-way) and it was getting pretty late to start a long hike (5 pm), but we decided to hike an hour in, see what we could see, and turn around.

The hike was beautiful. The trail took us through a coastal rainforest that could have been the set for Jurassic Park or live-action Fern Gully. The trees were enormous and layered with lichen and epiphytes. We found salal berries and sampled them (reminiscent of cranberries). We saw banana slugs.

But the highlight of our hike was the first ocean vista. We were so far up the ocean didn't look like liquid anymore. We could see the big wave patterns that bear the little waves we see on the surface. And then Chris saw a puff of steam arise from the surface. "Is that a whale?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "That looks like what I saw yesterday, but the guy said when you see it you'll know and I'm not sure that..."

"Look! Again!"

And I raised my binoculars to the spot where the puff had come from just in time to see the disproportionately small dorsal fin of a whale curve into the ocean.

DUDE, WE SAW A WHALE!!!

Seeing the whale supercharged me. I was determined to hike the whole trail to the lookout point (because there would be more whales at the lookout point?). I unilaterally cranked up the pace from "purposeful but pleasant" to "forced march."

This was a mistake. Even at the aggressive pace, we had not reached the lookout point by 6:30, and we didn't have the time to appreciate the beauty along the way. I wish we had arrived earlier and had the time to hike the trail properly -- slowly and all the way to the lookout point. But, as Chris wisely noted, "If we had done anything differently, we might not have seen the whale."

The Cape Lookout State Park campground was three downhill miles from the trailhead. We whizzed down the hill and pulled up to the check-in kiosk just as the sea swallowed the sun. Signs said the campground was full, but thankfully they had hiker/biker sites. Hiker/biker sites are awesome.

The hiker/biker campground here is sepated from the main campground by a trail a few hundred yards long through a weedy forest. As I made my way to the main campground for a shower, I noted the differences between the two campgrounds. The main campground was chaotic: babies crying, dogs barking, fires crackling, people laughing, RVs humming, children zooming about on scooters with LED wheels. By contrast, the hiker/biker campground is silent. A bunch of exhausted people eating peanut butter straight from the jar by the light of their headlamps. (Chris ate his peanut butter on a graham cracker with white cheddar cheese Chex Mix on top, an indication of how truly depraved we've become).

"What time should we set our alarms for?" Chris asked as we tucked ourselves into our sleeping bags.

"I don't think I'm going to set an alarm."

"Oh, boy!"