Road Trip 2010 Day 13: Cannon Beach, Ecola State Park, Wright’s for Camping

Today, we were pretty slow to get ourselves going. We were meeting one of my cousins for lunch at noon, so we didn’t need to rush. We had a leisurely breakfast, then did a little research on finding a place to stay. Since we were headed to the coast, we found that all the places to stay in the resort towns were pretty expensive. Our first stop was supposed to be Cannon Beach, so I looked up camping options in the area. The first Google hit was Wright’s for Camping, and it looked pretty good. I called them and they were all booked up except for one site where they were waiting to see if the occupant was leaving or not. She double checked and saw that he was packing up, so I reserved the site for two nights. It was $27 per night, which didn’t seem too bad.

Once we had our sleeping arrangements taken care of, we headed to a mall just south of Portland to meet my cousin Kristey, It was actually the first time I had met her, so I was pretty excited. To make a long story short, I was adopted and Kristey is my birth father’s brother’s daughter. My birth father died before I was born, and she is the first person I’ve gotten to meet on that side of the family. I feel pretty lucky because I have the most amazing parents (don’t ever ask an adoptee what happened to their real parents, because most of us consider our adoptive parents to be our real parents), but I also have the fortune to know where I came from. Anyway, Kristey and I really hit it off. I liked her a lot and we didn’t run out of things to talk about (which is what her 12 year old daughter feared). Imagine that two women couldn’t think of anything to talk about!

After lunch, we drove to Cannon Beach. It was a little overcast and drizzly along the way, but we figured as long as it wasn’t pouring rain, camping would be okay. We got to Wright’s, checked in and got our tent set up. It was a pretty nice little campground.

We decided to do a quick scout around for locations by car. We drove through the town of Cannon Beach and stopped at the visitor center. As visitor centers go, it was an excellent one. They were very helpful and we got a lot of information that will be helpful on our drive down the coast.

Next we headed over to Ecola State Park, just a few minutes drive from the visitor center. We walked up to the viewpoint and saw the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse. It was a little far, but there were some closer interesting rocks to take pictures of. We went back to the campground then, and we were going to eat dinner, but I told Stephen I was afraid we would take too long and lose the light, so we walked down to Cannon Beach instead. This turned out to be a good decision, because it was the only time we saw the sun in the Cannon Beach area.

We probably spent nearly two hours on the beach taking photographs and I think Stephen got some good shots when the sun peaked from behind the clouds. We stayed until the sun went down and then walked back to camp. Stephen made macaroni & cheese for dinner and we went to bed as soon as we got everything cleaned up. It was probably 10:30 pm by that time.