Cannon Beach

Last week I experienced a first. I've never been to the northwest, but some friends of ours grandmother has a condo on the Oregon coast so we decided to meet up there for a little vacation. Dave was roommates with the husband, Eric for 4 years and I was roommates with the wife, Jenni, for 4 as well. We love getting together with them!

Jen and Eric and their baby Matthew flew in from Houston and we rented a minivan and drove to Cannon Beach. The condo was literally 50 yards from the beach and we could see the ocean from the windows. We realized we weren't going during the ideal time to have nice weather and it rained almost the whole time, but we had a great time.

These pictures show our first attempt at a walk on the beach. It lasted long enough to get these pictures then we ran back inside. If it looks cold, wet and windy it was!

We had a nice walk on the beach later that afternoon and only got wet the last few minutes of our walk. No luck at finding tide pools on the beach by the condo, but we did find lots of sand dollars.

We saw these elk at a little grassy park at the entrance of the condo complex. We thought maybe they lived there, but we didn't see them the next couple of days.

One day we drove to the Tillamook factory to see how they make cheese and to try some Tillamook ice cream, which my sister Rachel had raved about. On the way there Jen swears she saw a sign that said Carly Rocks. We stopped about 200 yards down the highway from this so called sign to take pictures of the view. No one else saw the sign on the way back so I'll leave it up to you to decide if there is such a place as Carly Rocks.

The condo place had an indoor tennis court and pool, so that night we went and hit some dead balls around the court before swimming in the nice, warm pool.

After two attempts at dry weather we made it out to see Haystack Rock (THE thing to see in Cannon Beach). During low tide you can walk out to the base of the rock and see lots of tide pools and sea creatures. This last picture is a bunch of starfish attached to rocks. I didn't realize they could be such a beautiful purple color and so large!

Addison was so excited when we let her get down and run. Her new favorite thing to do is hold my hand and run while yelling "run, run, run".

While walking through the town, which is a quaint little seaside town, we saw this funny looking car which apparently some guy considers art and does this periodically for fun. It's an old car with random things attached to it like doll heads on a pole, or flamingos. There is also a computer keyboard on the front hood. Kind of strange if you ask me, but fun for pictures.

We had such a great time. Only partly because of of the sights we saw, but mostly because of the people we were with. We had so much fun just playing games with our friends and playing with this cute little boy. He had the biggest, cutest, gummy grin.