A Weekend Getaway to the Coast

Shaun and I decided to take a weekend getaway to Long Beach, WA - partly just because, partly because we got a great deal, and ... partly because it was the 6 month anniversary of our wedding. Yay for small victories!

We lucked out with great weather: the sun shone in a cloudless sky over the dune grass, and the mica glittered like little stars in the sand. There was frost on the beach in the early morning hours, and puddles in the sand were glazed over with ice, but the cold soon wore off and we even found ourselves with a bit of sunburn at the end of the day.

We pulled up to our hotel just as the sun was setting on Sunday night. The Adrift Hotel is located right at the edge of the beach, and we got an ocean view. We had dinner at a restaurant in town called the Roo, which didn't so much have good Aussie food as it did good burgers. In the evening, we walked along the boardwalk from our hotel north along the Long Beach peninsula, admiring the sky, the smell of sand and salt, and the stars. Long Beach has a great boardwalk that you can walk along for several miles, and there are landmarks that tell the tale of how Lewis & Clark explored the area (the peninsula is just north of the Colombia River), of cranberry fields, shipwrecks, and of buried treasure.

The next morning, we had breakfast and then took off on beach cruiser bikes, borrowed complimentary of our hotel. The cruisers weren't anything special, but they got the job done, and we had a blast riding along the beach bike path to the south end of the beach, where cliffs rise to Beard's Viewpoint, the North Head Lighthouse, and Cape Disappointment. The terrain of the Long Beach peninsula has changed much over the past few centuries, and the coastline is actually endangered. There are lots of "sloughs," or wetlands, along the southern coast of Washington, encroaching on shoreline and beachheads. We passed shore pine, yarrow, and dune grass along the beach.

We parked our bikes at the North Head trailhead, and hiked a mile or so to the town of Ilwaco. Upon entering the town, we asked a lady walking her dog if she knew of any good restaurants to have lunch. She laughed, and then said, "Well, you could try down by the waterfront."

We were a little wary of being caught hungry in a hovel of an old fisherman's town, but we found a decent waterfront spot called Ole Bob's, which sounded promising, and we got some fish n' chips and sat out on a picnic bench in the sunshine. It was all a hiker could ask for. We then headed back along the trail to the North Head Lighthouse, passing sword fern, salal, and salmonberry. We didn't see much in the way of wildlife, except for a hawk along the beach, and elk as we were driving to Long Beach from Raymond.

In the evening, we had a four-course meal at The Depot Restaurant, which didn't look like much from the outside, but proved a delicious dining experience. Shaun mentioned over dinner that the trip had been a lot of fun, but that he wasn't sure he could top it for our first-year anniversary. Neither of us had really expected the trip to go so well; it was the off-season, and we were expecting to just read inside all day while it rained. Even if it had, it would still have been a great little weekend getaway.
View all our photos from this trip here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/DsN3iegCVtp54JpZ6