Wednesday, August 6 – Ecola State Park, bike ride, Hotel in Rockaway Beach with pizza and sunset

In the morning we go to Ecola State Park, the first state park with a traffic jam to get in. We would soon find out why. First, we go to the public parking lot and enjoy the view of Cannon Beach from this side of the bay, pretty beautiful but a bit clowdy still.

Then we hike about an hour north to Indian Beach. By now the clouds are gone, the sky is blue, and the shoreline is just amazing. While Selma and Markus (apparently a bit bored of beaches) stay on the beach on a log, Erik and Klaus scramble on and climb up some rocks on a tiny peninsula, from where you can see the beach on both sides, the other side completely empty and again with an gorgeous shoreline.

Then all of a sudden, at first it seems like just another rock in the water, I say: “Hey, it must be a whale”. Just in time for Erik to turn his head and there it is, right in front of us a huge whale jumps out of the water! We grab our cameras, and indeed it comes back to stick his (or her?) head out of the water a couple of times, but no more jumps…

We run to get the other two to come sit on the rocks and have a clif bar. Erik starts his tradition of first dropping his clif bar down the rocks before eating it. We stay for another while, seems like forever, to enjoy the beautiful sky, water, beach and rocks. No more whales.

Then we walk over to the other beach and Klaus has the glorious idea of hiking straight up the hill to meet the trail. Turns out to be not a very good idea, and after about 1 hour of hiking through jungle, fern, slippery mud, animal poop and dead trees, Selma takes over the lead and we are on the trail in about one minute. I think it is not JUST because of her taking the lead, but everyone else agrees that next time she will go ahead from the beginning.

After that we go along the coast to a few more bays, one of them (Nehalem Bay State Park) serves us as a picnic spot and the boys and I go on a bike ride to the “Jetty”. Interesting ride, once again on a horse trail, about 2 miles, no ocean in sight. Then at the end there is a big pile of dead trees which of course we scramble over to get to the beach. And then back to the car. Quite exhausting.

Then we go on to try to find an empty RV place, but we are quite unfortunate, so we decide to try a motel in Rockaway Beach, a beatuful but not touristy community directly on a sand beach with two rocks in the water. The first motel has two rooms but not in the same building and regulations do not allow the kids to be alone. So she calls around and another hotel actually has a room for us, the suite. Bad luck! We take it and go there, just to find out that the door of the room does not open. The lady does not know how to reprogram the door and tells us that she can give us two normal rooms. Klaus of course wants to fix this, and after seeing that it is a Kaba lock tries to reprogram it – successfully of course. Thank you, Mr Miller!

We spend the evening at this suite, with direct view of the beach and the sunset. After that, we jump in the hot tub. Then Klaus and Erik jog over to the Pizza place to grab a Pizza. We end the day by watching a rather “interesting” movie about some musician and even Markus goes to bed before the movie ends. Beautiful day!