With the weather in our favor for this visit to Ecola State Park north of Cannon Beach, we were prepared to give this place the time it deserved. We were not in a rush to get anywhere else today, so we just might be here all day.

Making our way deeper into the park.

At some point, the trail split, and we headed down to the beach where Caroline found this trophy chunk of Styrofoam that we can now be confident won’t be a whale snack later this year. I don’t believe we have ever left a beach where Caroline doesn’t have a pocket full of trash. Sometimes, I think she’s busy with a myopic view of what’s in front of her feet as she looks for plastic and forgets to see the bigger picture. This probably has something to do with why she likes my photos so much, they allow her to see where she was.

We have moved along to the upper trail with a great view of the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, though you may not know just how cool it was, seeing how I used my phone to take this photo. Someone sent a drone out there and shot this GREAT video! In the comments on the video is some history of being a lightkeeper on this desolate rock; read it here.

The landscape is varied here at Ecola and is well worth the visit if the weather is on your side. On our first visit, the winds were howling, and the rain was shredding sideways.

We’ll need to make a third visit here so I can bring a proper camera, do justice to the finer details, and get the shots that might have worked with a better lens. It’s all still pretty beautiful and a great reminder of our time here.

After lunch at a small cafe in Manzanita, we headed over to Manhattan Beach State Park in Rockaway Beach and took a long walk on a wide-open beach where we couldn’t see anyone else for miles.

You walk along and think that you’ve pretty much seen it all, just beach and more beach, and then you run into something strange like these patterns and little sand islets. Just in front of me, you might be able to see that the water is greener; that’s because it is deeper right there, as though a pocket has been carved out of the beach.

Getting later and hungry, it was time to return north for our reservation at the Wayfarer Restaurant.

Facing the ocean is the Wayfarer Restaurant in Cannon Beach. Being on vacation and seeing they make them, Caroline opted to start with an Old Fashioned.

After dinner, it was time for more walking; who could blame us when this was the scenery we were walking through?

With the sunset, the temperature chills quickly, but the light lingers for a good long time. A full day and a perfect return to the Oregon coast for our first April visit.