Over the Easter weekend, we took a trip to Pacific City on the beautiful Oregon Coast. Since the stock market is closed on Good Friday, I decided to take Thursday off in order to make it into a 4-day weekend. So, Gauss, Evan, Jen, and I headed west Thursday morning, and we were joined late in the afternoon by our friends, Tim & Kim (and canines Shasta and Cody, of course).

The next three nights were to be spent in the “Wind Jammer,” a vacation rental (shown at right) that we had all agreed to try out for this trip. The house was fine, but it certainly had its quirks. For example, I’ve never seen a house so many lofts! And with a gas stove, multiple wall heaters, and several mysterious thermostats on the walls, we never did quite figure out how the house managed to stay at a mostly uniform temperature! The kitchen (as they usually do in rentals like these) also left a bit to be desired. Of course, what the “Wind Jammer” really has going for it is its location. If you stayed in a place any more “ocean front” than the “Wind Jammer,” you’d better like sleeping on a water bed! With fantastic views of both Haystack Rock and Cape Kiwanda along with instant beach access, this is what a vacation to the Oregon Coast is all about.

Of course, no visit to PC would be complete without a couple visits to the Pelican Brewery. (I’m still talking about the Soy-Lime Grilled Chicken Salad — mm-mmm good!) Fortunately, it is located just a couple minutes away by car. But if the weather had been more cooperative, we would have walked their on the beach instead. Indeed, we had quite a nasty collection of weather — howling winds, thunder & lightning, pounding rain, and even some hail/sleet! But c’mon, this is the Oregon Coast in April! If you don’t go expecting at least a little weather like that, you probably moved here from California! Even so, we had a few nice breaks — just take a look at the blue sky in the photo at right.

One of the more interesting things we saw during our stay in Pacific City were little creatures called “By-The-Wind Sailors”, or Velella velella. These jellyfish-like animals have a rigid, upright, sail structure on their tops that, as their name implies, allows them to “sail” around the oceans. During our visit, they were being washed up on the beach in Pacific City by the thousands. When I’ve seen these in the past, they were about 1-2 inches in diameter. This time, however, they were much, much smaller, perhaps just 1/4 to 1 inch in size. And at times they were covering large swaths of beach. Oh, and Gauss ate at least one — yuck ! If you’d like to know more about Velella, here are three links: Monterey Bay Aquarium, Wikipedia, and a 360° QuickTime VR.

The one bummer about this trip is that Evan, Jen, and I all came down with a cold virus after the first night. It made for a couple semi-miserable nights and a little baby that was glad to get home Sunday afternoon. Still, it was great to get away for a few days and just chat, play some games, eat good food, and generally relax.

I’ve put a dozen of my better shots of Haystack Rock, Cape Kiwanda, and the beach in general into a public album and a few shots of Evan into his private gallery for the month of April:

This entry was posted by Steve on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Family, Friends, Local/Regional, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.