Day 117, to Cannon Beach: A beach(es) day

August 24, 2022

Still wearing my MWABA jersey, I sit at Cannon Beach in the shade of our tent, which we set up with the rain fly up and the rest of the tent collapsed so that we would have shade but not be enclosed. I'm sitting in the open side of the tent but still in shade, with The Oregonian in one hand and a sandwich in the other, reading the paper and facing the ocean. In the background and to the right is Haystack Rock, which makes a shape fairly similar to that of our tent.

Wednesday stats

New bird sighting!: The common murre. A group of them on top of Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach looked a lot like penguins, from what we could tell through our binoculars.

The Daily Whale-y: 0. Total so far: 2

Start: Nehalem Bay State Park

End: Sea Ranch RV Park, Cannon Beach. Elevation: -6 (these elevation numbers that I've been recording generally come from my GPS bike computer, and the elevation is usually very accurate, so ... I guess this would be a terrible place to stay if there were any flood risk.)

The Daily Progress: 17.4. We are doing our best to go slowly. This is going to sound crazy, but it's actually a mental challenge for me: It feels weird to go through all the effort of packing everything up in the morning, finding another place to stay and setting up camp again when you're not going very far. That said, it was really nice to have our tent with us on the beach today, and it was totally worthwhile to go someplace new, so the fact that we moved "only" 17 miles doesn't really matter. It is definitely worth the effort I just described. It just feels weird.

Uphill / downhill: 1581 / 1568

Ice cream flavors: For me, Oregon hazelnut salted caramel and chocolate peanut butter, both from Tillamook. For Dani, green tea and Udderly Chocolate. This was at Suzy's Scoops.

Beer flavors: We each got a flight of four tasters at Public Coast Brewing. My favorite was the coconut brown ale. Dani's was the blueberry hefe, even over the three sour beers.

Lodging expenses: $55

Food expenses: $22 for lunch and a newspaper at a food market, $13 for ice cream, $3 for another snack and $24 for beer.

Wednesday wanderings

My kind of day. It included chilling on the beach with my mate, a sandwich and a newspaper (The Oregonian) to read. We looked at the birds on Haystack Rock. I took a quick dip in the ocean. We got ourselves some delicious ice cream and a flight of beers. Also, we biked a little. Pretty sweet.

Dani's daily digest

Another day of galavanting on the Oregon coast. We took in the views at Neahkahnie Viewpoint (water and fog, no whales).

Here's the view Dani just mentioned. In the center is a clear view of the ocean as it reaches the beach, but the land to the left and the open ocean to the right area shrouded in fog.

We hiked through cedar groves to a sandy beach in a rocky cove (Short Sand Beach).

Dani inspects the cross section of a giant tree stump during our hike. It has a mossy hole in the center, making it look like a geode.

We chilled in our half-constructed tent in front of Haystack Rock on Cannon Beach for hours. We saw common murres on Haystack Rock; they look like penguins. We ate ice cream for dinner, and we had beer for dessert.

Astoria is only 24 miles away but we are going to make it take two days to get there. Heck yeah.

Today's ride: 17 miles (27 km)
Total: 4,382 miles (7,052 km)

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