Adventures with Luna: Day 71 - Beachside State Park

After breakfast and a shower, Luna and I headed to the beach. I left my camera in the car as I love running and playing in the water with Luna and the camera slamming against me is definitely distracting; as it turned out, leaving the camera behind was a good call on this particular morning. Wearing my shorts, I started running in deeper water than before, not realizing that this beach had a bunch of small, deep dips in it. My smile as wide as the Pacific as I ran through the waves with Luna at my side, the ground suddenly disappeared beneath me and I went sprawling, laughing as I went down. From my hips down was entirely soaked along with my arms and much of my torso. I moved to shallow waters and kept running with her for a little ways. My entire front sopping wet, I thought that, although it was quite funny and fun to have tripped in such a manner, it was too bad that all the dog treats and my keys would be soaked, checking my pockets I was extremely impressed to find that they were entirely dry, good job jacket! We walked for a long while longer, before turning back. We went a little farther out in the waves than usual as I was soaked already. Luna does not like going to past her belly in water and in the ocean with the waves coming at her, she is even more conservative, however I experimented with running partway in and walking in to a deeper area of the ocean that was slightly above her belly and she gamely joined in, then trotted quickly back to shore as soon as I turned around. Sometimes if I have waded deeper in to the ocean than she feels comfortable, she will wade out to me, look at me with concern, then turn around and trot back to shore and repeat, as if asking me to follow her back to where it is safe, I always give in fairly quickly.

We left Beachside State Park a little after 12:00 pm, continuing North up the coast. We stopped a couple times along the way. Our first stop was to check out Devil’s Punchbowl (there seems to be a lot of places named this in North America), then our next stop was to check out a beautiful overlook that I was hoping would lead to the gorgeous beach (waterfalls et al) just North of it. At this stop, before I even got out of my vehicle, I saw two or three sea lions and a bald eagle as well as the frequent sea gulls. As soon as I had gotten out of my car I saw a whale. We went and sat on the thick bed of grass overlooking the ocean and Luna immediately began rolling in it ecstatically as if she’d missed grass desperately! She has not been around thick grass for awhile, but has certainly been around more grass than most Albertan dogs during the winter! We had a few more whale and sea lion sightings, which I greatly enjoyed. We did go for a little walk to look for an entrance to the beach that I had seen, but no luck there and seeing as no one was on the beach, I am quite certain that there is not an entrance anywhere for it, or only private entrances.

Traffic was actually quite bad, to my surprise, it was as if the entire afternoon was some kind of Oregon Coast rush hour, with tons of slow drivers keeping long lines of traffic back, finally when we got to a turn off that led to Portland, the road was quite clear. I got some groceries at Safeway in Tillamook, where I had planned on spending the night, thinking that my destinations were closer to it than they are, realizing they were a ways away, I headed on. My previous days in Oregon have been filled with constant camp sites and state parks, but today was void of them in comparison. As I passed a state campsite a little after 6:00 pm, I saw a sign for Cannon Beach, which I thought was past the other places I wanted to visit, nope, it was 20 minutes away, so I turned around and found the campground. Having been driving 55 mph all day on the winding coastal highway, I was driving too fast as I entered the campground, perhaps almost 15 mph when I should have been at 5 mph, I had just realized that and was braking when a heavyset woman in a baggie pink shirt and white shorts, her blonde hair pulled up in a ponytail, her face contorted with rage yelled at me with as much anger as a person could muster “Hey! Slow down!”. I knew I was in the wrong to have been going too fast and I truly had not meant to be speeding at all, but I did not feel like I deserved to be yelled at that harshly for it. I immediately wanted to leave the campground and not have to walk past her to pay the fee, particularly as the place was unpleasantly packed with people and RVs, but I was unable to locate anymore state parks en-route to Cannon Beach on a quick online search, so I just hoped she would not recognize me and had all manner of retorts, both horribly mean and very positive going through my mind, fortunately, as I walked by with Luna as my emotional support, she did not appear to recognize me. My good mood was out the window for the rest of the evening as I tried to reason with myself that it really didn’t matter in the grand scheme of anything whatsoever. It’s just that, like anyone and particularly as the perfectionist I am, I despise being wrong, I loathe messing up and I hate making such a ‘big’ mistake that I get yelled at viciously. It has helped significantly to type this down and really see that tomorrow is a new day, that should be entirely free of that woman once I am out of this campsite.

Around 6:45 pm I headed out for a walk on the beach to watch the sunset. There were a couple other off-leash dogs on the beach, which is always nice, it’s good for Luna to have the socialization and it makes me feel better about letting her off-leash, which I do at almost every beach, the exceptions being if they are highly populated, if they are, I don’t stay long anyway and there has only been one of those in Oregon that I’ve visited briefly. I did speak with one woman with a black and white Border Collie/Heeler/Hound mix, they were from Portland, having some time away from what has become a very busy and much less friendly city apparently. As the sun disappeared behind the ocean, Luna and I made our way back, I was uncertain where we had entered exactly as all the grassy dunes along the beach are identical. I found one dune with a sign on it and went through there, only to find that it led to the day use area and I was not sure if I had gone too far or not far enough. Deciding that I had not gone far enough, I headed back down the road as the light faded, finally finding a path back in to the horse camping area (unfortunately there were no horses there this evening) and back to my campsite.