Precious Memories: Eating Our Way Through Yachats and Cannon Beach

Road Trip to Seattle 2016

Yachats to Cannon Beach, Oregon--June 2, 2016

We woke up to a wet and cloudy morning. It was drizzling a little and hopefully the clouds will be gone later in the day. Deane's provided some donuts, fruits, coffee, hot chocolate, etc. in the lobby but they don't want to call it a 'breakfast' so people won't complain about it being so simple. That was what we needed to start our day and perfectly fine for us. After the simple breakfast, we took a walk down to the beach one last time before leaving the motel.

View from the window of our room.

The front of the motel on a wet morning.

Huge space out back, good for pets to run around.

Spectacular views of the ocean.

Holes on the sandy beach.

A display of sea shells on the table.

Motel right on Hwy 101, very convenient.

No Vacancy! This is a popular motel in the area.

Going over the Alsea River on the Alsea Bay Bridge in Waldport.

After crossing the Yaquina Bay Bridge in Newport, we got off the highway to look for the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse at the State Park.

Yaquina Bay Lighthouse, the only wooden lighthouse on the coast, right near the parking lot of the state park. It is a working lighthouse and the museum is open year-round.

This ship was making a lot of noise 'honking' as she sailed into the harbor on this misty morning.

Another shot of the bridge as we drove under it on Bay Boulevard to the Historical Newport Bayfront.

Newport Historic Bayfront

Bay Street on the Bayfront, much quieter than our last time here.

Bay Street Pier at the very beginning of the Bayfront.

Yaquina Bay

Seafood processing factory.

We wanted to see the sea lions at this pier.

Awww......

Shipping boxes of fish away.

Fishing boats in the bay.

Part of Bay Street. The blue buildings belong to the seafood plant.

There are some cute and interesting stores along Bay Street.

Time for lunch! We wanted to try Mo's and went inside this original restaurant.

Mo's original store. After we were seated, we found out that Mo's have menus that are slightly different for each of their restaurants. This one does not serve the items we wanted. The waiter did not have a problem when we decided to leave and go to their Annex across the street. Good thing we have checked their menu posted outside of the annex when we past through there earlier and kind of knew what we wanted.

Mo's Annex on the waterfront.

A table with a view, great!

Mo's famous clam chowder.

My order of Seafood Saute, good but the sauce was a little salty for my taste!

MOR's Seafood Cioppino with lots of seafood.

ChC had the clam chowder in the bread bowl. Everything was good and prices reasonable.

Then we saw someone had this big plate of baked oysters, we just had to get some to share. This was the best of all. 7 plump, huge Yaquina Bay oysters perfectly baked. If we ever come back this way, this is all that I will need, for myself!

Mo's Annex Menu

That was one satisfying lunch.

As we were eating, we watched the fishing boat that just came back in port. Seemed like they came back with some good catches.

Cleaning the catch.

After lunch, we watched a couple of guys crabbing from the pier. Wow! pretty good! Seemed so effortless as they kept pulling up one crab after another.

Mo's Annex from the pier.

Front of Mo's Annex.

After spending a couple of hours at the Historic Bayfront, we were ready to hit the road again. Originally, we wanted to check out Historic Nye Beach nearby, but after driving through, we decided to just keep going. Our next stop was the Yaquina Head Lighthouse in the northern part of town.

Yaquina Head Lighthouse

Visitor Center where we found out all the tours were full for that day. There is a nice museum inside with plenty of information including a wonderful video showing in the comfortable show room.

Lucky people getting ready to go on the tour of the lighthouse.

Base of the lighthouse

Yaquina Head Lighthouse--Oregon's tallest lighthouse standing at 93 feet tall.

Yaquina Head Natural Area

Whoa! Right off shore there is the largest common murre colonies on the Oregon coast.

Then we were at Depoe Bay one more time.

The Depoe Bay Bridge where there is a pedestrian underpass so people don't have to cross the busy Hwy 101 traffic.

Inside the Bay

West side of the bridge. Unfortunately, the Whale Watching Center was closed.

We did not stop at Lincoln City, where we spent a night at in 2013, and continued our drive passing this busy city. We did not make any stop until we reached Tillamook, where we went to get some ice cream at the creamery.

It was very busy at the Tillamook cheese factory that day.

We did not want to go up to the viewing area of the factory tour but just to the store. Here is the line for the cheese samples and the store.

Sampling of cheese

Bought our delicious ice cream. I believe I got the White Chocolate Raspberry Yum (front)and the Oregon Blueberry Patch (back).

Finally arrived at our overnight stay in Cannon Beach, Sea Breeze Court.

Lucky for us, we were told that because of the mixed up reservation by the hotel site, we were upgraded from a studio to a suite that night. It was a 1-bedroom apartment with a huge living room plus a balcony with the view of the Haystack Rock. Just a lovely place for us. I will post another entry of this place next.

View of the main street Cannon Beach (Hemlock Street) from the balcony. A market across the street but more like a convenient store with not much stocked. We decided that since we have such a nice place with the full kitchen, we might as well cook dinner there that evening. The problem was to find a market with things we needed. The couple of small 'markets' we went in did not provide much choices and prices were incredibly high. We then took a long walk to downtown and found the Mariner Market which is much bigger in size with everything stocked. We were totally shocked by the prices of things here but managed to get a few things we needed before walking back to the hotel for our dinner.

Walking along Hemlock Street.

Our home-made simple dinner for the evening.

After dinner, seeing that it was still light outside, ChC and I decided to walk down a block to the beach. At the end of the street towards the beach, we saw a stairway but it was totally dark down there with lots of vegetation. We were not sure if we should go down or not? Then we asked a woman who seemed to be a local and she said that's the right way, just go down and we would find the beach there. ChC took out his flash light and, for sure, after the dark 'jungle' we were at the beach.