Like Seaside, only better.

The first day trip was a hike near the coast (near Seaside, but not quite), followed by Tillamook's 100th Anniversary Cheese Fest, followed by dinner and beach time at Manzanita. So, in that order...

Saddle Mountain was great. A nice, challenging hike up to the highest peak in NW Oregon, with green everywhere:

And lovely views of the Pacific ocean from the top:

I haven't seen fog like that since San Francisco. I was surprised at how happy it made me.

The clouds (and/or my newly cleaned but suspiciously creaky camera) were not cooperating, but we also had views of Mt. Adams, Mt. Rainier, Mt. St Helens and a few others off in the distance. I hope to return in early summer - the wildflowers we saw were mostly dead by this point, but the sheer volume of that dearly departed foliage promised some amazing pictures sometime around May of next year.

The next stop was the Tillamook 100th Anniversary party, which appealed to me for two reasons: "free cheese" and "petting zoo." The free cheese was alright, but the little disgruntled calf in the upper right corner of this photo made the entire trip worthwhile:

He's actually FROWNING. Come on. Calves can frown?! Maybe he's upset about the premature white. At any rate, there's an LOLcat caption in there somewhere. Add it to the comments if you wish.

After free cheese, it was decided that fish & chips were a mandatory end to the adventure, seeing as how we were on the coast and not having fresh fish would be a travesty. A tour up and down the 101 near Tillamook wound up in Manzanita, a lovely coastal town with lots of free parking and a ginormous, gorgeous beach...

... and a pub with amazing fish & chips - and if we were interested later, "Karoake from Hell!" (TM).

We were not interested in "Karoake from Hell!" (TM). But we were interested in this poor little jellyfish, all alone in the sand, apparently deceased, and decided to spiff it up a bit:

Unfortunately, with the help of the tide spiffing turned to vampiring, as is usually the case when I tend to be involved with things, for some reason... and the innocent jellyfish ended up being a part of something amazingly awful:

But then the tide washed the entire drawing and the entire jellyfish away, leaving a clean slate for the person wishing to draw some sort of nauseating initials/heart message.

The sunset wasn't much to look at, but the enormous coastal cloud surely was:

... it spanned the length of the coast as far as we could see. And the moon peeking through the pink was not too shabby either:

We've now started what you might call a "petition" to have a satellite office in Manzanita. I don't think it is going over too well with upper management.

This weekend is Seattle. It is, dammit. And then, a check mark.