Family Time!

Next week I head off to my favorite place on the planet, Cannon Beach Oregon.

Cannon Beach is about two hours out of Portland and is the home of the West Coast’s largest sea stack called Haystack Rock and the Needles.   Haystack Rock is a basalt sea stack and it rises 235 feet from the edge of the shoreline.  It is the place where Goonies and Kindergarten Cop were filmed. 

As a child, I crawled all over Haystack Rock and would spend hours finding crabs, starfish, sea anemones, jellyfish, and all kinds of fish and other mollusks.  It was here that I first learned to dig for razor clams, fish from the beach, and “wave dive”.   Do you see the cave in the attached picture, my brother, sister, and I explored it only to get trapped by the incoming tide.  Too embarrassed to call for help, we made it out but not without some serious mollusk burns on our legs and hands.  I was six years old. 

Haystack Rock is now a bird sanctuary and is off-limits to humans.  The tide pools that are uncovered in front of it at low tide are not as populated as they were in my youth, but you can still find the occasional hermit crab or starfish. 

The town of Cannon Beach is a quaint ocean town although it has grown to have far too many tourists for my liking these past 10 years.  However,  it has a huge artist population and some of the most eclectic shops I have ever seen.

Since birth, my family would vacation at Cannon Beach and we would stay two weeks over the summer vacations.  We did this when we moved from Oregon to Idaho to Utah and to California.  Maybe not every year in our teen years but consistently every one or two years. 

As adults, we continued the tradition and for a long period of time, we went back with our spouses and our growing families.  Each family would rent a house and each morning we would meet in front of the rock to determine what we were going to do for the day.   After my father passed, we paused for two years until my sister and I decided to visit Cannon Beach with our families on the week of the fourth of July as they always put on a great fireworks show out of Seaside which you can see from Cannon Beach.

I am looking forward to early morning walks and searching for sand dollars with my momma on the beach (a tradition since childhood, see picture), preventing Jonathon Livingston Seagull from absconding with our hotdogs, having an apple fritter at Cannon Beach Bakery, playing Exploding Kittens with my boys, building a sandcastle with Emmett and Wyatt (grandnephews), playing Fascination and Skeeball at Seaside, maybe even doing some crabbing in Nestucca Bay, but mostly just to hang out with my family, my momma and my sister’s family. 

Everyone needs a favorite place.  I shared mine… what is yours?   😊 

Happy Thursday all and Happy 4th of July next week.  

See you when I return on the tenth,

-srt