As of yesterday we were married for 21 years! Can you believe it? Where did that time go?
The only reasonable conclusion has to be, there was apparent international consensus to speed the earths rotation and thus shorten hours ... most likely somewhere overnight, when nobody noticed ..
Any-who, despite all Corona restrictions, some of which (facemasks!) have been re-instated since last Saturday, we tried to celebrate this impressive feat!

First there were kisses, and cards, and than off course there was coffee and pie!

                                        

                                          Chocolate cherry. M-m good!

After work, we had happy hour in the garden, and ordered 'food-to-go' at the very appropriately named Thai restaurant .. "Thai the knot"!                                       

We loaded up the car with some chairs and utensils, picked up the food and drove to Rodger's Landing, a small public park here in Newberg, very picturesquely situated on the shores of the Willamette River.
Perfect for a romantic dinner!

There were nicely sauteed vegetables and a delicious 'house specialty' pork curry.
And while the sun was slowly setting, we toasted (with our glasses of Chai-tea) to our amazing life together so far, and to at least another 21 to come!
What the heck .. let's make that 42!

OK, what else did we do this week?
O, yeah, since the temperatures were still happily (or actually not so happily) into the 90s, we decided it would be a good plan to go to the beach where, due to a marine layer, temps were at least 20 degrees cooler!
Which turned out to be an excellent idea! Look how "cool' it looked!

   We'd brought some coffee (of course) and even had to put on sweaters! O Bliss!

This pretty spot right on the ocean is in the town of Cape Meares, just a couple of miles outside Tillamook.
The previous time we went to the coast, we ended up on Cape Meares itself, which is right around the corner of that rock sticking out there in the ocean on the right ...

                                                        

There used to be a road connecting these two areas, but it is now closed due to unstable soil conditions, which is quite a bummer since it would be such a nice drive to do 'the loop' and end up back in Tillamook.
The area around town is very pretty. There's a huge park at the bay, which is Tillamook Bay, by the way:


   
Where we saw this Bald Eagle, fishing for clams in the mud at low tide ..

      

I hope he knows how much he gets to keep!

All in all, we really liked this little town and where it's situated.
Close to Tillamook and it's golf course, a little out of the way, so not too touristy, right on the ocean with lots of places for me to walk and explore.
We'll definitely keep it in mind for the future.

                              
 

  

Following the shores of the bay back towards Tillamook, you can see the town of Garibaldi, on the other side of the bay .. well, if it wasn't this foggy the view would be better ..



Which is where we ended up when driving further north:

Garibaldi

And a little further, the smaller town of Bay City, where we even checked out some real estate at Bayridge, a gated community, some of which seemed to have good views of the bay:

      

And how about this (5 acres!) lot in between these two towns:

It looks like there certainly are a lot of possibilities here! I think we liked it better than the towns we previously saw to the south of Tillamook. Less touristy ..

Talking about touristy, we finally managed to find a small diner that served seafood in the much busier town of Rockaway Beach, so we stopped to have lunch.
Unfortunately, (seafood) restaurants are hard to find in this area .. oh, well, there has to be something ..

The food was actually not bad, but nothing to write home about, and the decor definitely had seen better days, firmly stuck in the 70s as it was, but as a typical 'Ma and Pa' place it had a certain charm as well. It surely was a place where all the locals went, since everybody seemed to know each other.

We'd actually talked about changing our plans for the rest of our day during lunch, and had decided to drive all the way north to check out the (larger) towns of Seaside and Astoria as well, but when we neared the famous town of Cannon Beach the traffic got really bad and we bailed for home instead!
(Later I read that those towns up north, although pretty and with beautiful beaches, are crazy touristy in the summer, so they might not be where we want to end up anyways. 

But we'll probably go for a visit later in the season or Fall, when things quiet down a little. Just to say 'we've been there' ..)

Gorgeous Cannon Beach!

OK, I think this is it for this week. TGIF (Thank God It's Friday)!
Time for Happy hour! And a pizza!