At Cape Meares

We went for a beautiful drive along the coast this Memorial Day!
Mostly because the weather was gorgeous, and James wanted to make up for the 'week at the beach that never happened' when we came up from Arizona, but also because we're starting to check out areas that we might want to move to, after we leave Newberg somewhere in the future.
(I know, that's still like 2 years away, but better too early than too late .. or something like that).

We first had to drive west, to the coast (Lincoln City), which takes about an hour, and from there we went north. First stop, the town of Neskowin.
Apparently James used to have an uncle who lived there more than 50 years ago and he had been there to visit as a youngster.

We drove through town, parked the car and walked straight onto the beach. What a beautiful sight!

               

It was quite a bit cooler here than inland, probably about 10 degrees and mostly because of the (light) sea-breeze but we sat down to have coffee (and my home-made Strawberry-rhubarb pie) ..
This is looking North: 

Neskowin itself is about the cutest sea-side town I have ever seen, and I've seen quite a few the last 10 years!
It's only 2 blocks wide and the roads are very narrow, the houses are tiny but all  incredibly beautiful and different and sort of cape-cod style.

                             

Off course we had to check out the 9-hole public golf course. They had just opened 8 holes for the season and were still working on drying out the 9th.  Apparently they have a tendency to flood ..

Their rates are cheap though: $15 for 9 holes! Now that's more like it!

OK. This tiny town is definitely a contender for our future residence!
Moving on. Driving further north we split of the 101 and took the scenic 'beach-road', which keeps you closest to the ocean.

We passed several bays, where hordes of people were out clamming. Apparently it being Memorial Day brought whole families to the coast ..

I definitely want to try my hand on this one time. It looks like fun ..

We past Oceanside:

                                      

And a couple of miles after that we drove into Cape Meares National Forest ...

                       

We'd hoped to 'round the cape' and drive to Tillamook from the other side, but it turned out that that road has closed a couple of years ago, so the cape is as far as you can go.

    

The view from here is stunning!

There's a cute little lighthouse at the point ..

And it's a popular breeding spot for all three Cormorrants, Mures and Tufted Puffins.

After retracing our steps for a couple of miles , we drove the 9 miles inland to Tillamook, where we had some fish and chips at a roadside food-truck.
Next time we will explore the area north of Tillamook, but for now we had enough and made our way back home, taking the 22 this time, a small, very windy cut-off road, which turned out to be very pretty, but had nothing to add to our 'possible places to stay'.

And while we made the trip in the truck, which does fine, next time we will be using our 'new-to-us' Subaru: 

Ain't she pretty? The car, I mean .. not bad for 15 years old! It has very low mileage and we got it for dirt-cheap, so we're happy campers!
We even have a carport to store it under. Sweet!

James is still working on restoring the damage from our little mishap with the RV. It's a slow process because he had to wait for parts and for warm and dry weather, but he's almost there!

And look at that, we bought a small freezer for in our 'shed', under the front of the RV ..

                                   
 

It fits just fine and now I can finally have a pizza or two in stock (they don't fit in the RV's freezer), and freeze the fruit and veggies that are hopefully coming from our garden!

Talking about fruit, I made a rhubarb-strawberry pie (from rhubarb that's growing in Doug's yard) for Memorial Day:

I was pleasantly surprised how well it came out. No sloppy mess, but a neat little pie, sweet and tart, just perfect!

OK, and that's all she wrote for this week folks! See you next time!