We got to Long Beach, which claims to be the longest beach (17 miles) in the world, about mid-day. Our first stop was Fort Canby to see what it had to offer. We tried the Lewis and Clark Interpretive center which didn't get a rave, then we went off to North Head Lighthouse, which did. |
We found ourselves high on a wild flower covered cliff, watching hundreds of sea birds circle and dive. Solitary pelicans would lead flocks of plovers, looking to cash in on the schools of fish the pelican would find. Big waves crashed on the rocks below while birds nested in the crevasses in the cliffs. |
We climbed down to the edge of the cliff. I'm sure if we'd stayed there long enough we'd have seen a whale. The light house wasn't open so we didn't go up, but behind the lighthouse, there were two beautiful houses available for summer rentals. Too bad we were only there for the night. |
We spent the rest of the afternoon in an antique store, mostly looking at old books. Then we decided to find a place to spend the night. The first place that we drove up to, took one look at us and flipped to vacancy sign to no vacancy. What did we do? Then it became apparent that on a Friday night in June, there weren't any vacancies, especially with the world's longest beach run scheduled for the next day. We began to panic. We finally phoned a place at the other end of the peninsula called Heidi's Hide-Away and asked if they had a room. Yes, they did. Do they have one with three beds? Yes, they did. Did they take dogs? Well, how big? Medium-sized. Well, we only take small dogs, but we will take yours. Please, give us your credit card number to hold your space. We did, wondering what we had gotten ourselves into... Heidi's turned out to be fisherman central. When we got in that night, the parking lot was filled with huge vehicles with loud and happy fishermen wandering about. By 5 the next morning, the lot was empty; they had all gone out to sea. We went out that night to see the looooong beach. We didn't go far because vehicles were allowed on the beach and the main activity seemed to racing up and down the beach doing wheelies (360 degree turns), not exactly our scene. |
The next morning after breakfast (if you're ever there, give the Cottage Bakery a try!), we went for one more walk at Fort Canby before heading back for a trip into the Pike Place Market in Seattle. Below you can see a bird's nest I saw nestled in a bush on our walk that morning. I was amazed at the variation in size of the eggs. The egg most in front was about 1/3 the size of the biggest one. |
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