A Day on Cannon Beach

We got up early this morning to go find a church building where we were able to attend sacrament meeting.  There were so many cute kids there, it was kind of distracting!  Afterwards, we headed west for a several hour drive to Cannon Beach.  Eventually we reached the cute little coastal town, and parked to walk along the shore.

Oh my goodness, it was so beautiful!  While tropical beaches are so nice and sunny, when it comes to prettiness I prefer the overcast beaches of the Oregon Coast.  I've never been to this particular beach, but I was amazed by it!  It was a little bit cold outside, but not too bad at all.  Perfect Oregon beach weather, if you ask me.

We walked over by haystack rock and found a place to sit and admire the view.  Inspired by the gardens we visited the other day, Bailey built a sand garden while we sat!

After a little while we decided to find some seafood for lunch.  We drove about 15 minutes to find a place we found online, where we got deep fried razor clams and halibut.  Holy cow, it was delicious!  Though kind of a shabby place, it was probably our favorite meal in Oregon.  I forget how much better fresh fish is than the fish we find in Utah!

On our way back to the coast, we came across a little beach mall type thing.  They had all sorts of cute and interesting little shops where you could buy anything from unique yarn to ancient coins!  My favorite shop was definitely the candy shop, where we bought blue soda and marionberry fudge.

We decided that, since we were at the beach, we may as well build a sand castle.  So we hit a small convenience store on the coast where we bought a bucket and a shovel.  After leaving, we were walking back to the beach when we decided that we needed more sand toys.  I mean, why not be prepared to create the most amazing sand castle on the coast?!  So we bought all the sand supplies the store had, and the owner lady just laughed at us.

What we were really doing was killing time before the tide went out, because we really wanted to find some quality tide pools.  We still had several hours, so we took all that time to create this work of art:

Actually, Bailey did most all of it.  I mostly watched while snuggled up in all the towels.

We were pretty proud of the sand castle, and several people stopped to look at it, some grandparents even took pictures for their 10 year old granddaughter.  It was a shame when we had to leave it's side, because we knew that it would be a temptation for many children to destroy it.  But, that's how it goes with this type of art!

Right on the beach was a restaurant that we decided was a good place for dinner.  The wall facing the beach inside the restaurant was all glass, so we had the most amazing view of the beach while we ate.  We started off with some delicious clam chowder, and then ordered some seafood which we thought looked delicious.

It was definitely not the best seafood we've had - we didn't know about the tomato sauce it was soaking in.  But it was fun to eat!

Finally the moment we had been waiting for was here!  Bailey was so excited to find some tide pools, because he'd never seen any.  So we took off and ran up and down the beach, looking on every rock for sea life.

I could hardly keep up with Bailey!  Worried that I'd be cold, he wrapped me up in a blanket from his mom's car.  I was definitely warm, but moving was a bit hard!

Unfortunately.... we did not see a single living thing.  Bailey was so sad, and I was too!  We didn't give up, and kept on looking.  Even after Bailey got stuck on several rocks as the water came out.

Eventually some locals took pity on us and kindly explained that it was too early in the year and too late in the day to find anything.  Which is really too bad!  We had waited all day to see the tide pools, but we had so much fun waiting that it didn't really matter.  It was the perfect last day in Oregon!