July 4th on the Oregon Coast

This past weekend Cheryl and I joined a good group of friends in renting a house on the Oregon coast near Lincoln City (about a 5.5 hour drive from Seattle). This was primarily organized by Trang and Henry – Thanks guys!

The full list of photos is here.

We decided to leave after the initial holiday traffic died off, so didn’t actually arrive in Lincoln City until well after midnight Thursday night. We were not the last ones in, I believe Shawn and Megan didn’t make it in until well after 1am – Henry and I stayed up to greet them.

The morning came quickly, and we were greeted to a warm day. The sun was having a hard time breaking through the ocean mist near the coastline, but 100 yards off the shore it was clear blue sky. We had each signed up for a meal (breakfast or dinner), and Cheryl and I decided take Friday night dinner. Our first breakfast was an amazing combination of crepes, and quiche – something both Cheryl and I appreciated.

After breakfast we spent some time hanging out on the beach playing with a soccer ball, football, disc, etc…) then headed south to go body boarding at a local beach… We headed down to Devil’s Punchbowl.

We also rented wetsuits because the water on the Oregon coast is freezing cold:

The wetsuits really helped, but we regretted not getting gloves. As soon as my hands hit the water I could feel the pain brought on by the cold water. After a few minutes my hands were numb. Regardless, we bodysurfed for over an hour, and had a great time. Every 5 minutes or so on the way back that night Cheryl would comment on how much fun she had in the waves. There were a bunch of surfers out there hanging out, but I think we caught way more waves, and had more fun :)

Since it was our turn to cook, on the way home we stopped in and bought the ingredients for Cheryl’s famous lasagna, and a bunch of Rainier cherries which were on a great sale – Rainier cherries are so good! We made dinner, and sat back to watch the sun set.

Here was the view from the house:

The next morning, Shawn, Megan, Cheryl and I drove further south with Trang and Henry to go sandboarding in the Oregon Dunes just south of Florence. On our way there we went to the ‘worlds largest sea cave’ to check out the local sea lions.

The view – even without the sea lions was spectacular:

After hanging out with the sea lions it was time to go sandboarding. We rented sand boards from a local place at Sand Master Park, and went south to Honeyman State Park. Sand boards seem like a cross between a wakeboard and a skateboard with a construction similar to the 7ply skateboards I used to ride, wakeboard-ish bindings, and a laminated bottom that has to be waxed prior to every single run. I had set my expectations very very low for sandboarding, it definitely exceeded my expectations though I don’t think it will catch on to be mainstream for a wide variety of (relatively obvious) reasons – until the climate changes a ton at least :)

Here’s Henry getting ready for his first run:

Cheryl surfing the sand:

Shawn and Aaron doing figure 8’s at the end of the day:

Cheryl also took some video. This one is a bit funny because a dune buggy in the background is revving up making it sound like the sand board has an engine. It does not :)

After finishing up on the dunes we headed back north to the house. It was Eric and Oliver’s turn to cook dinner, and they prepared an outstanding salmon dinner - with more Rainier cherries :)

Here’s Cheryl and I hanging out on the deck of the house:

We then sat back and watched a pretty impressive fireworks presentation – given it was not an organized event, just a bunch of random people launching fireworks from the beach. We didn’t bring any, but we had fun watching.

After the fireworks died down, Shawn broke out his guitar, and we massacred a bunch of popular tunes :)

The next day we decided to head out early. Cheryl really wanted to rescue Boots and Charlie from the kennel, so we wanted to beat the holiday traffic rush. We didn’t quite beat the rush, but we did make it back just in the nick of time. Boots and Charlie were very glad to see us.

Until next time!