Day 3 - Three's Our Crowd

How can it only be the third day?

Two things I have forgotten to mention:

1.          --Yesterday I saw a snake on the path down to the beach. It was black and moving very fast. I don’t mind snakes but I wish they wouldn’t suddenly start moving.

2.       --We hit blackberry season just right. We’ve eaten all the ones that can be reached from the bridge.

We all got up before 8 because we’d planned a hike in Astoria, followed by lunch. We were out the door right about on time, Tim and I in my car and Dave in his. We left Dave’s car at the Sunset Beach end of Fort to Sea Trail, and mine at the Fort Clatsop end, right near Fort Mlustard. Last year Dave and I had done the 2 mile (ish) hike to the overlook, so this year we set up to do the whole thing. It was a cool cloudy morning, so we all wore jeans and long sleeved shirts. Shorts, or lightweight long pants with short sleeved shirts under a lightweight sweater would have been better, because it cleared up along the hike and we were all a little warm. Also we forgot to bring the right kind of water bottles and a daypack from home. 

That’s about all that went wrong, though, because it is a very fun hike over the forested ridge and then down by the Presbyterian Church at Camp Rilea through meadows and along a creek that might be the Skipanon River. It goes under Hwy 101 and has all of these things along the path to keep cows from escaping – they’re like fences made of interlocking L’s that you walk through. I can’t describe it at all and we didn’t get any pictures of them, but some of them were quite narrow. Also I ate quite a lot of blackberries as we went along. The information about the trail says it’s 5 miles, but once you’re on it all the mile markers say it’s 6. It was long enough.

After the hike we went to the Ft George brewpub and had tasty food and beer. Tim had forgotten his ID so he could only have tasty food. While he was in Canada he developed a taste for poutine, and was pleased to find it on the menu. Dave found the prices more reasonable than Pelican. Tim drove home and as we approached Cannon Beach it went from being a beautiful sunny day to completely clouded over, but after we all settled in for reading/blogging/napping it began to clear up. Then it clouded back up while we were sleeping. I went for a walk on the beach anyway. I am trying to get to the big rock to the north, but I think it’s not going to be accessible this trip. I think I may have seen a starfish on it – the only one I’ve seen so far.

Cauliflower for dessert? Absolutely!

After my walk we all got cleaned up and headed down to Manzanita for dinner at Blackbird. This is the third summer they’ve been open, and the second time we’ve been, and it may be the best restaurant around. We had four appetizers – fried cauliflower, roasted Brussel sprouts, radicchio ceasar, and green chick pea/quinoa/farro salad. The Brussel sprouts were the weakest, in the same way Katie Ledecky’s weakest event is the 200 free – they all just crushed it. For entrées we split the mussel pasta and the green garlic spaetzle – the latter was so delicious that Tim even ate the mushrooms in it. They only have two desserts, a buttermilk ice cream and a chocolate pot de crème, both of which are small and spectacular. Tim supplemented the desserts with another order of the fried cauliflower – its two aiolis, one with cilantro and one with harissa – are so good that we had to mop them up with bread during the appetizer course. Sometimes restaurants suffer from what we call second time syndrome, where the expectations are so high from the first visit that the second, while good, is still disappointing.  In this case, either we’d forgotten how good the food was or it’s gotten even better, because this was one amazing dinner. It would be worth driving out for.

When we got home I had to do some packing and preparing, because I head to work early tomorrow morning. I’ll be at work Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, returning for our dinner at EVOO on Thursday night. This having a job sure gets in the way! I’m hoping we’ll have a guest blogger to keep us all up to date on coastal happenings. In the meantime, I am going to enjoy the fire in the fireplace and the sound of the waves.

Trouble Addendum:

As faithful readers no doubt recall, we are big fans of the game Trouble. A couple of years ago I bought a new one, because the inside of the old pop-a-matic was so scratched up you could hardly see the number on the dice inside. The thing is, the new one seemed to have a non-random distribution – pairs of rolls tended to end up adding up to 7 and repeating (4,3;5,2;6,1). Tonight we played one game with the new set, then one with the old. We sat in the same place for all three games, and Dave was yellow, Tim was green, and I was blue. This is a picture of the point in the second game (on the old board) where we realized something had gone wrong. Can you tell what the difference is between the two boards is by looking at this picture? When we realized what I’d done it made me laugh so hard I forgot to breathe. We gave this game up and played Yahtzee, which I won definitively, just as I had won the first game of trouble. They won’t miss me when I’m gone.

Here is a bonus picture of the chardonnay, fermenting in the shower.