Day 4

When I woke up is was cloudy and foggy, but with a feeling in the air that it wouldn’t last. The weather forecast said cool and completely cloudy in the morning, partly cloudy in the afternoon. So I figured we’d hang out here in the morning and get some laundry done, then go in to town for lunch at JPs and then do some geocaching in Ecola State Park. Thing is it completely cleared up by 10, so we should have gotten Tim up and headed out before lunch, but we didn’t. So we hung around and played with buckyballs and waited for the laundry to be done, and then went to lunch. JPs was very good – they had a spaghettis soup, which Dave and Tim had and said tasted like high-class beefaroni. That’s a good thing. After lunch we headed up to Ecola and started looking for our first geocache. We both have geocaching apps on our phones, but there’s something of a learning curve. Plus, it is much harder to use them in the trees, which makes them less accurate, than it was in the wide open spaces of OSP. It’s just not that helpful when it tells you you’re 10 feet away – plus or minus 26 feet. Also because of yesterday’s rain the trail to the first one we went to find was very slippery. Tim got bored of the part where we stand around saying “it’s got to be around here somewhere” and took off to go exploring, but didn’t tell us. So after a while when he didn’t come back we had parental mental images of him having fallen off a cliff, which freaked us out. So we went looking for him and yelling his name, and eventually heard him yelling back at us. Then we were really freaked out because he was ¾ of the way up a steep cliff. We met him back in the parking lot and took him in to town, where he could walk around on level ground and buy chocolate milk at the Mariner market.

We drove back out to the viewpoint parking place and decided we’d try a different cache. It was up the crescent beach trail a short way and was pretty easy to find, except at that time I didn’t know how to figure out how much error my gps might be showing, so I was in a very wrong place. Dave found the cache and we took a plastic frog and left a plastic car.

Then we went back to the first place and spent a very long time slipping around in the mud and following little paths that went nowhere. Eventually I completely misinterpreted something someone who had found the cache had written and crawled under some trees branches and found the cache. When Dave came, he just pushed the branches aside, which was a much easier solution. The cache is called “Jim’s viewpoint”, and it did indeed have a very nice view of the ocean.

Feeling successful, we drove back to town, picked up Tim (somewhat chocolate stained) and headed back to the house. It is an absolutely gorgeous day – sunny and warm – and we put the solar shades down and had the door open. Everything is better when it Is sunny.

Tonight’s dinner destination was Newman’s at 988. Chef John Newman used to be the executive chef at the Stephanie Inn, but about 5 years ago opened his own place in Midtown. It is very small, and is probably the most interesting food in Cannon Beach. They offer a 5 course prix fixe menu, and that’s what we like to get if it sounds at all good. Tonight it was centered around a wonderful grilled Chinook salmon, so we went for it. One of the fun things about the prix fixe dinner is that you can get the wine pairing with it – a different wine for every course. Dave and I shared one pairing, which was a good thing because the pours were quite generous – if we’d each had one, we would have had to send a cab for Tim to come drive us home.

Because Tim did not go with us. Traditionally Josh and Tim always had a dinner without us – when they were younger, we’d get a sitter, and lately they’d just stay home and have mac’n’cheese’n’dogs. This year we brought some leftover spaghetti for Tim, and he had a very nice evening on his own. The only thing is we forgot to chop any wood, so no fire tonight.

Tomorrow the Laughing Ladies (who used to be the New Moms) (except Colleen, who is in Michigan dropping Sarah off) are coming out. The weather is supposed to be beautiful, so we are looking forward to a great day.