Day 7 - It's all she wrote

Started off with my last yoga session, again with Christen. Enjoyable, but once again she was moving from pose to pose faster than I was comfortable with. We’d made a plan to meet Rhonda and Tracy for lunch at Bill’s, so I just got some hot water at Bella Espresso, added my own teabag, and sat in the sun until Bill’s opened at 11:30. Dave and Tim got there just as the doors were opening; R&T had gotten there a little earlier. They are headed to Hawaii for 10 days on Monday, and tonight is Rhonda’s last night at the Coaster for this play, so they are feeling very relaxed.

After lunch Tim went down for his nap and Dave and I hiked from the Neahkanie north trailhead to Short Sands beach – a really nice hike with lots of pretty views. It was on our old friend the elk flats trail that we’d walked on a couple days ago for a short stretch. It started with a walk out to the Devil’s Punchbowl overlook, which has a nice cabled off area at the end which gave me something to hang on to. Dave walked further out towards the tip, which gave me the willies. It had been warm and sunny in town, but as we’d headed south it got foggier. So it was sunny where we were standing, but misty out over the ocean and inland.

The thing that was funny about the hike was that we kept running into people who all wanted to know where the trail was going, how long it was, and other questions like that. Don’t they know you can just download the .pdf of the trails? There’s good signal almost everywhere. It’s understandable, though, because that area is riddled with crisscrossing trails. All the trails are really well marked, but the names – Sitka sruce trail, old growth trail, cedar crossing trail – are not that helpful. We eventually got to the suspension bridge on the elk flats trail that we’d crossed on Thursday, and took the old growth trail back to the walk-in parking lot where we’d left the car. We still need to take the sitka spruce trail and of course do the long connector between the falcon cove overlook trail and the arch cape trail, but that’s going to have to wait for another trip. Once again my knees started acting up on the downhill – I’m going to have to get that figured out before we do the long hike. The parking area for the walk-in had been pretty full when we dropped the car off there, but when we got back at 2:30 it was completely full, so we need to remember that you need to get there early-ish on a sunny Saturday.

It was completely warm and sunny at Short Sands beach, but when we got back to the house it was foggy. I ate some leftover melon and fruit salad and had a nice nap in the brown chair – my first nap for several days.  When I woke up the fog had burned off, so it was time for Tim and me to go down to the beach. Sadly Dave has caught my cold, but he’s very lucky that with the sun streaming in the skylights our bed is one of the best nap places ever, so he took care of himself by doing some serious napping. We were going to take a kite, but Tim’s kite didn’t get in the bag and we weren’t sure there’d be enough wind for the other kites, so he took the board and we headed down. My knees were pretty much fine on the stairs. My plan was to bounce around in the waves. At first the water seemed much colder than yesterday so I wasn’t sure I’d make it in, but once my feet and calves went numb it was pretty easy. Right in front of our house there’s kind of a flat spot between where the waves form, so I went out to the edge of that and had a great time. The water seems extra clear to me this year, and it’s fun to look at the light patterns through the water. It took Tim a little while to get the skim thing down – as he said, he has to relearn it every year. But he got it before very long and was skimming back and forth. Eventually I had to go up to shower and regain the feeling in my feet, but he stayed down a little longer and eventually got totally immersed himself. I was so chilled even after my shower that I had to sit in the brown chair in front of the window with the sun streaming in, where it is about 10,000 degrees.

One thing that’s very strange this year is that there are no pebbles on the beach. Usually one of the things I do while I’m here is take a long walk on the beach and think about my dad, and then take a little rock with me to put on his headstone when I go to Connecticut to visit Margaret. Except that this year there aren’t any – it’s all sand and crab bits and mussel shells. And of course I won’t be visiting Margaret either. And I really haven’t taken any long walks on the beach by myself.  So everything is different. I did pick up one rock – there were two that I saw. It’s just weird that there aren’t any rocks. Sometimes there are depressions in the sand during low tide that are just filled with exposed pebbles, and we wonder where they come from. This year we’re wondering where they’ve gone.

Dave and I went to dinner at the Stephanie Inn, which is very good food that for some reason never quite seems to be completely satisfying. And I do mean very good food – while my first course, a grilled peach salad, was an almost complete failure, the remainder of the dishes were better than just about anything we’ve had. Two particularly mentionable things were my caprese salad which had a really nice balsamic reduction and big crunchy salt crystals that made it stand out. In a way caprese salad to me is like enchiladas in a Mexican restaurant – it’s always edible, but rarely memorable. This one was memorable. Dave’s salmon had orzo cooked in mushroom broth and some chanterelles that were worth the trip by themselves. Also the desserts are always good – made with fresh ingredients and never too sweet. I’m not sure what it is about the restaurant that keeps it from being a top choice – the bread is not very good, the service is very earnest and friendly but not quite there, and the décor is, again, missing something. In a way it reminds me of Wayfarer before it went bad – the food outshines the restaurant. Two things that were odd – they had a prix fixe menu that was basically all things that were on the regular menu, but if you ordered them as a prix fixe package they’d be at least $12 more than you’d pay if you ordered them separately – huh? Also this is one of those restaurants where they don’t write down your order, an affectation I find irritating. Our earnest server had to come back twice to double check what Dave had ordered. I don’t think it takes away from the experience when a server writes down my order, but maybe I’m unusual in that.

We got done with dinner and into the parking lot just as the sun was setting, and it was a very good one. There were too many clouds for there to be a green flash, but it was clear all the way down to the horizon. When we got back to the house Tim and my van were gone, but unlike most Cannon Beach stories where we get somewhere and Tim is missing he showed up shortly afterwards. He’d been on an unsuccessful Osborne’s run – how can they be closed at 8:00 on a Saturday? We spent some time researching hotels for our trip to Santa Cruz (CA, not Mexico) and made a reservation. Then Dave tried to make a reservation for dinner there using Open Table. It didn’t go well – eventually he was just poking the dot on his iPad where Santa Cruz was and saying “why doesn’t this work? Why doesn’t this work?” while Tim laughed very hard. At that point it was time for some trouble. I won. Twice. I rolled so many 6s all the spots wore off. When we got Dave to stop poking the iPad and play trouble, he kept poking the pop-o-matic and saying, “why doesn’t this work?” It was a rough night for Dave, and also for Tim who was laughing so hard it hurt. Then Tim took Dave’s wallet and started making it talk like walletzilla.

It has been a good week.