August 20 – Oregon’s Spectacular Coast

Today, our travels took us south along the beautiful Oregon coast.  Our first stop was in Cannon, Oregon’s answer to Carmel, California. It is a pretty town, decked out with flowers

and song birds flitting about the local shrubbery.

However, Cannon’s primary attractions are its 4 miles of white sand beaches and Haystack Rock, a 235’ monolith.

Thousands of gulls, cormorants, puffins and meres make their homes on this protected habitat;

with a quarter moon in the background …Other smaller monoliths and rocks surround Haystack

Even at low tide, the waves put on a spectacular show as they crashed ashore.

These provide a home for brilliant orange and purple starfish,

mussels and barnacles,

Shield limpets,

sea anemones

seals (absent during the time we were there) and other marine plants and animals.

Continuing down the coast, we were treated to more sandy beaches,

rock formations protruding from the coastal waters,

During a lunch break, we sat watching fishing and other boats on quiet inlets

We also passed a number of other eclectic things:

All concrete bridge

Western terminus of US Route 20; which runs east 3,365 miles to Boston, and was the main road through  Weston, MA, the Boston suburb where we lived when we met.

The first unicyclist we’ve seen on the trip

The “D” River, the world’s shortest at 120’, linking Devil’s Lake and the Pacific Ocean

The 195’ remnants of a smoke stack of former long demolished millAnother old train … it seems, along with museums, every other town seems to have put their hands on some relic of the glory days of the steam locomotive or caboose.

and last, but not least, scores of Espresso kiosks which seem to dot every town, sometimes several,even in a small town … this one fairly bland in its architecture.

The only downsides of the day were a detour which took us nine tortuous miles over an extremely winding, narrow and rough road with no shoulders, only to discover we had to retrace our route to get back on the main road … and taking 35 minutes to drive a mere 5 miles through the center of Lincoln (a seashore community which is the epitome of a typical beach town, Aywhere USA).