Today is the beginning of a three-day road trip to and through Oregon. Today is the Oregon Coast.
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We eat hamburgers at Pirate's Cove Restaurant in Warrenton. I order a BBQ Bacon Cheese Burger. I order it without mayonnaise, but it arrives with mayo. The waitress realizes the mistake at the same time that both the cook and I do. The cook becomes extremely worried and wants to fix the mistake. I insist that I will scrape the mayo off, which I do. He insists on making a new burger, which I will not allow.
The wife orders a Fish Sandwich and instead gets fish and chips. We realize the waitress has given us another table's food, which explains the two "mistakes" on our order. The cook takes back the fish and chips and makes a fish sandwich, all the while continuing to apologize. I assure him that all is well.
The child enjoys mini corndogs and french fries.
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As we eat, we all enjoy pirate themed music. It is Pirate's Cove, after all.
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We make our way to Cannon Beach and the child plays in the sand. The child makes a sand castle. A group of Japanese teenagers next to us are creating a sushi roll sand sculpture, complete with a set of large chopsticks.
The sea begins to flow toward us, the tide coming in. Soon the castle is vanquished and the sushi effigy is returned to the ocean from whence it came (in it literal and imaginative forms).
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We walk near Haystack Rock and the soft sand is warm under and around my toes. The sea is cold. After standing in shallow waves for a few moments, my feet are wet and numb. The warm sand sticks to them like fine grit.
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We drive south, marveling at the wonders of creation—sand, sea, sky, gulls, pelicans, basalt cliffs, rugged manzanita trees.
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We arrive in Tillamook to learn about the process of making cheese. The Tillamook Cheese Factory is full of other tourists. The plant is mostly non-operational this day, with only large forty pound bricks of white cheddar being vacuum sealed and sent to the warehouse for aging. We sample cheese curds and various types of cheddar. We buy a mini-brick of Habañero Hot Jack Cheese to enjoy in our hotel room.
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Tillamook smells like cow manure, sickly and sweet, like slightly decomposed clover and grass. A cheese factory that processes approximately 70 tons of cheese per day would need a lot of milk supplied to it. That milk is all from local dairy farms, hence the aroma.
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Dinner is pizza and beer. The restaurant claims its pizza to be the best on the Oregon Coast. If this is so, then I feel sorry for the other pizza joints because this pizza is mediocre and too greasy. The beer is a Kona Longboard Lager, which matches the pizza. It isn't bad, but it isn't good either. It is, to put a positive spin on it, inoffensive.
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We swim in our hotel pool. We splash. This is mostly the child. The child cannot really swim, but the child can splash.
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The wife and I play three rounds of Bananagrams, two of which I lose. Then it is time for bed, to sleep and ready ourselves for another day.
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