Day 6 - ooo, EVOO

I woke up around 7 and had a small bowl of leftover fruit salad (leftover fruit salad is the second best thing about the fruit salad dinner; the fruit salad dinner being the first thing) and headed in to town to check out Cannon Beach Yoga Arts, which is upstairs over White Bird gallery in a space where Lynn and I once tried on lots of sweaters. It’s a very nice space indeed, sunny and open, and I liked Christen the teacher right away – she made everybody feel very comfortable. It was pretty much the same yoga I’m used to in FG, which was comforting, except she did more of the leg stretching right up front. I wasn’t too flexible right then, but I enjoyed the class and doing the same things in slightly different ways. One thing she did was ujjayi breathing, where you were supposed to make a hissing noise in the back of your throat. I’d not heard of it before, but at least one of the people in the class was very good at it (there were 6 students) and it was a little like doing yoga with Darth Vader. At the end during savasana she came around and put aromatherapy oil on our hands, which I liked, and also moved my arms and shoulders and head around, which I really, really, really liked.

It was a beautiful morning in Cannon Beach, bright and sunny but very empty. The bakeries and coffee shops were open, but the shops themselves don’t open until 10 or later, so it’s kind of a strange vibe. Lots of families with sleepy looking parents and very young children on the sidewalks, but I don’t think I saw a single teenager. I considered getting a gooey sticky bun on my way home, but decided that would not be a good idea – tonight is dinner at EVOO and they have some sort of date cake for dessert.

When I got home Dave was up and about and reading his book, so I bit the bullet and went back to the torture chamber, I mean bedroom, and did day 4 of bootcamp to complete the series. Day 4 is just mean. I don’t think it’s as hard as day 3 but it has too many pushups. It also has frog jumps, which really do shake the house. Tim determinedly slept through them – he knows the whole thing will be over in a half hour or so. Once I was finished with the workout and the accompanying killer abs and a shower, we got Tim up and headed to town for lunch. We took two cars so Tim wouldn’t have to hang out in town with us. This ends up saving us quite a bit of money, because then Dave doesn’t take Tim to the place-that-used-to-be-the-explorastore and talk him into wanting really fun but expensive toys.  We parked in the secret back lot which had plenty of space even though town was very crowded. We got to Bill’s and went in, figuring Tim would be right in – we’d seen him  coming from the regular lot. He hadn’t seen us, though, so he was standing outside waiting for us. Eventually I went out and got him. We all had our usual bacon cheeseburgers (mine with no cheese), but no onion rings. Tim skipped out as soon as he was done. Dave and I spend some time wandering around town seeing if we could get things fixed (kite parts, yes; sunglasses, no) and looking for hats (no luck). We tried out the new olive oil & balsamic tasting place, which turned out to be so-so base oil & vinegar infused with a variety of flavors. Not what we were hoping for. But right by there is a shoe place that had the wallet I’ve been looking for, which was very exciting. If only Dave had had similar luck with his hat search.

After we’d gone everywhere in town we needed to and I’d decided not to get any licorice at Bruce’s (what self control!), we drove to midtown and walked out towards Haystack Rock for a geocache. It was pretty much high tide at that point, but the beach was full of people doing beachy things. It’s a beautiful sunny day, but quite windy and chilly – maybe 58 degrees. So people were out there dressed I everything from bathing suits (mostly little kids) to sweatshirts and long pants. This is what I think of as normal beach attire. Dave found the cache, a pretty new one, and we had a nice walk back to the car.

We went back to the house briefly and I changed our reservation for tomorrow night from Stephanie Inn (good food, but nothing we can’t get at home) to Fishes. That made us all feel good. Then Dave and I headed off to Oswald West State Park to hike out to the Cape Falcon overlook. It’s a 5 mile hike (that’s less that 1/5^th of a marathon, for those of you who are Ironmen) that’s another part of the Oregon Coast Trail that we hiked on Wednesday. We parked at the well-marked trailhead and headed off. It’s so interesting to listen to the road noise and the ocean noise and the stream noises come and go. Like I said earlier, it was a sunny but cool day, really perfect for hiking. After a mile or so you get to where you can see Short Sands Beach (the trail can go there, but we went the other way), and it’s very scenic and lovely so you stop and take all these pictures of it. Then you continue on through more forest, which varies between trees with very little undergrowth, trees with lots of undergrowth, and just undergrowth, and then all of a sudden you come around a corner and there’s what looks like a meadow on the top of a hill like a knob. That’s the turnoff to the Cape Falcon overlook, and it turns out the meadow is actually bushes, and there’s a trail through that’s maybe two feet wide, and the bushes are 7 or 8 feet tall. It’s kind of the Pacific NW version of the ice crevasse that Dave walked through on the glacier. We followed that (not much chance of getting lost) for some time and then suddenly it pops you our and you are waaaay up high looking what feels like straight down 4 or 500 feet into the ocean. My fear of heights popped right back out – I couldn’t even look at Dave standing close to the edge, much less stand there myself. Eventually I got myself under control and went to look down. It’s a scary amazing view, made even more spectacular because it was such a clear day and the ocean was so very blue.

 

It turns out that Dave has an app on his iPhone that has all these trails marked on it, which was very helpful because the turnoff to the overlook was not marked.  Other factoids from the hike: apparently Nia has kept me in pretty good shape, because for the first time on this hike and the previous one Dave was having to push to keep up with me. Although my right knee started hurting on the way back – it really didn’t like bending with weight on it. I favored it a little and it seemed to get a little better, and after some advil when we got home it is feeling fine. We’re thinking it would be fun to do the long hike from the place where we left the van for the two bridges hike to Short Sands, but we’d need to bring food and water and snacks.

When we got home we had a little time to shower and relax, and then it was off to the dinner show at EVOO. Bob the Chef (I’ll be your chef tonight, he always says, and tonight wondered out loud why he says that, since he’s the chef every night) and his wife Lenore do a 4 course meal, with much of the cooking done right in front of you. Lots of talking and hints and tips, and also yummy food. One thing we learned tonight that was interesting to me is that when they designed the kitchen, they limited themselves to non-professional equipment, that is, the kind of stuff that is available to the home cook. So unlike the Mythbusters, they do want you to try it a home. Highlights: homemade pulled pork ravioli; a tomato-basil sorbet with a hint of cayenne that can’t even be described, perfectly cooked salmon, and a sticky date cake covered with caramel and pecan-coconut brittle that they made right there in front of you.  The food exceeded expectations, but it’s really the show and the cooking hints that make the night. We’ve learned a lot from Bob over the years, and want to try making ravioli sometime soon. We do not want to learn to make the date cakes with caramel and brittle, because I would not be able to stop eating them.

The dinner show is supposed to be two hours, but as usual we rolled out of there after over 3.5 hours stuffed, happy, and with some fennel pollen and 40 year old balsamic vinegar, and also a small bottle of olive oil from Oregon Olive Mill that Lenore gave Dave when she saw that he had a bone in his salmon. When we got home Tim was watching TV in the bedroom. He’d been in to town to Osborn’s and also stopped at Mariner to get Oreos, but he had chickened out of going back to Castaways and just had leftover spaghetti that we’d brought from home. He forgot to get milk, though, so we can’t have Oreos and milk tonight. We also can’t have Oreos and milk tonight because Dave and I are completely stuffed.

Tim made a fire and we’re sitting here happily digesting. Today we didn’t think of anything we forgot, although I didn’t have the right shoes to go with my new pants for dinner tonight.