We got up fairly early the next day so we could hit the road. I had a lot of touristy things planned. I wanted to start in Astoria but decided I needed to cut a few things from our trip so we started in Seaside instead.

In Portland the day before it was rainy off and on but our drive just past Beaverton opened up to blue skies. The drive was beautiful. Once in Seaside we saw a bunch of cute little shops that I wanted to shop in. So we found a parking spot and the first shop we saw was Jaelee’s dream. It was full of all kind of Mermaid stuff. She saw a sweatshirt she had to have, it was a a teal color that faded to white. After we got her shirt, Jayse wanted to pick out a sweatshirt himself or a hat. We went to a few stores but my picky boy couldn’t find anything. Luckily we found a shop where he could pick out a plain sweatshirt and then add any design to it. It was perfect for him and he thought it was so cool getting his own custom shirt. Once we’d been to a few shops and they had their sweatshirts we headed on.

Our next stop was in Canon Beach. We found a great parking spot near the beach. We headed straight to the beach and then to the famous Haystack Rock. The tide was low so we were lucky that there were a bunch of tide pods around the rock where we could look for shells, little fish and starfish. We didn’t see any starfish but other people did. We did get to see little black crabs that were cool but creepy. They looked almost like tarantulas among all the shells.

After the beach the kids were already done and just wanted to get to Grandma and Grandpas so I decided not to do a few of the other touristy things I wanted to do and just decided to stop at the Tillamook Cheese Factory. Sadly it was under renovation and they just had a building you could go in to taste a few things of cheese and get ice cream. It was kinda boring so we didn’t spend much time there. There were a lot of people there and we didn’t want to wait in this huge line just for a scoop of ice cream so I bought a pint which is basically the same thing you can get at any grocery store around here. Gonna have to add this to the list to visit again when we can actually go to the factory. After that the kids were begging just to go to G & G’s so that’s what we did. I think they have too much of their dad in them sometimes. Love ya Greg! I did get one other stop in though. We pulled off the road near Newport I believe and there was a group of elderly volunteers with binoculars pointing out whales. They also had a sample of the whale’s baleen. The lady we spoke with gave us some great information about the gray whales and how they eat. It was a nice precursor to our whale watching trip we had scheduled in a few days.

This is the only picture I got in Tillamook, boring but it was a kinda boring stop.