We organised to have our breakfast delivered at 9-9:30am today (the hotel provided a free in-room continental breakfast), to give ourselves a chance to sleep in. It was definitely on the late side by the time we hit the road, and I knew it would be cutting it fine for the trip I had planned for us, which was a smallish circuit around the northern beaches, coming back through a large inland town called Tillamook.
We stopped for lunch at the point where the circuit began, about an hour's drive from the hotel. We were glad we did in the end, because the drive was pretty isolated for the US with not many other opportunities. We had a view of this nice beach from the little café.
As we continued our journey, we spotted something in the bushes on the side of the road. We just managed to catch this deer before it disappeared.
Our first real stop was Cape Lookout. Since we'd set off so late in the end, we didn't really have time to do any of the full walks, so we decided to walk as far as the plane crash memorial and turn around. For the first few hundred metres, we couldn't see anything through the trees, and wondered if we were even close to the ocean at all lol! Soon enough though, we came to the edge of the ridge, and were rewarded with magnificent views.
We could hear some strange noises coming from the ocean, and saw some small objects moving around in the water below us. I used my camera as a pair of binoculars by zooming the whole 60x, and we discovered that the objects were in fact seals.
The memorial plaque wasn't much further, where we turned around and headed back to the car.
As we continued our journey, there were some great views going down the cliff towards the beach access part of Cape Lookout.
The beach was practically deserted, but there were enough car spaces and picnic tables to accommodate half of Melbourne lol!
We stopped again a bit further along in a town called Oceanside, which gave us some more great views.
Our next stop was Cape Meares, where there were some more wild coastal cliffs.
Also at Cape Meares was the shortest lighthouse on the Oregon coast.
On the other side of the cape were some lovely views back towards Oceanside.
We were rather intrigued by signs leading to the 'Octopus Tree'. It turned out to just be a large tree with lots of branches jutting out at the bottom of the trunk. We did meet a lovely 'local' there from Washington State, who was very interested in Australia and why we had chosen to visit Oregon. She seemed pretty thrilled that we had been interested enough to make the trip.
It was getting pretty late, and I estimated our arrival in Tillamook to be close to 5pm. I had been planning to visit the famous Tillamook Cheese factory, but assumed we had missed our chance. Also, our GPS didn't know where it was. We decided to drive north of Tillamook anyway, to a historic bridge.
Then we saw the Tillamook Cheese factory! And there were still cars there! It turned out it was open until 6pm, so we could still visit!
There was a small self-guided tour, basically windows into the factory area with information signs.
On the way out, there were free samples of all the different types of cheeses they produce.
There was of course a shop at the end where you could purchase cheeses, fudge, ice-cream, and heaps of other local produce. I had been hoping to have an ice-cream, but it was too close to dinner time so I begrudgingly walked past the ice-cream stand. We bought a few other less perishable goods to take back to the hotel.
Since it was so late, we decided to stop in Tillamook for dinner, and found a convenient Denny's. As we were driving back to the hotel, we saw an interesting looking HUGE shed like structure. We could just make out the words AIR MUSEUM in the dark. DH was immediately intrigued, and very disappointed that we had missed it, so we ended up making plans to go back in the morning, even though it would be a bit out of our way.
