A Spring Trip to the Oregon Coast – Beach Walks, Light Houses and Sea Creatures

It’s been a cold and rainy spring in the Pacific Northwest, but we wanted to get away. So we picked a few days of forecasted sunshine and headed south to the Oregon Coast, with our first stop, in Long Beach, Washington.

There we enjoyed walking on the newly refurbished boardwalk,

and later that night, sunset.

The next day we visited nearby Cape Disappointment and North Head Lighthouse where the skies were blue and the views were tremendous.

We arrived at our first stop in Oregon later that day – Cannon Beach – where we took advantage of low tide and beautiful sea creatures.

We had great views of sunset from our hotel that night,

and of Terrible Tilly, a decommissioned lighthouse off Tillamook Head, originally built in 1881. The Tillamook Rock Lighthouse must have been a terrible place for lightkeepers to live surrounded by the turbulent ocean, over a mile from shore.

We continued our journey the next day, stopping by the overlook on Neahkahnie Mountain,

before arriving at our destination in Lincoln City at Spanish Head, where we spent our honeymoon over 43 years ago!

We walked the sandy beach, which was covered by strange creatures, papery thin, white and blue, called Velella velella. Not true jellyfish, but floating hydrozoans — they live on the surface of the ocean, and drift with the wind on clear sails.

According to Wikipedia, “Having no means of locomotion other than its sail, V. velella is at the mercy of prevailing winds for moving around the seas and are thereby also subject to mass-strandings on beaches throughout the world.”

There was more white and blue in the sky the next morning, before we headed inland for more adventures.

That will do for now.

~ Susanne

#OregonCoast, #CannonBeach, #LongBeach, #LincolnCity