Oregon, Not-Coast to Coast

Rockaway Beach, originally uploaded by nateborr.

You may notice a difference in color palate between this photo from my weekend and Jack's pictures from his -- my weekend with Kyle at Rockaway Beach didn't have a lot of those leafy greens and sky blues, instead featuring cool temperatures, brisk winds, and a smattering of rain early on. But Oregon doesn't have the kind of coast where you want to get in the water under normal, non-workday-freakout circumstances anyway (it is among other things consistently called the "coast", not the "beach") and I like the scenery for all the reasons I like Rembrandt landscapes. One must get back to one's brooding Dutch roots now and then.

We did have a fantastic little trip out to Rockaway. We stayed in a beach house owned by my landlord for some 30 years that he built up from a shack into a cozy bungalow, charmingly decorated with pig-themed paraphernalia that his wife doesn't allow in their primary residence. Grilling was done -- on Friday night, despite misting rain and initially uncooperative charcoal briquets, beef tenderloin and asparagus; on Saturday night, veggie burgers with habit-forming cheese plus eggplant and fennel. Kyle's sister and her boyfriend came out on Saturday, which we all mostly spent eating an unholy amount of decent Mexican food in town and then, after walking back up the beach to the cabin, drinking wine and doing a puzzle of a sort of creepy-looking cat. After they left on Sunday Kyle and I cleaned up, walked the beach again (whence this photo, plus a couple others up on the Flickr account now), then drove a bit north to eat Dungeness crabs at a place alongside Nehalem Bay before looping south-east-north back to Dundee. Good times; I think it's hard to go to a beach house without trying to compute (1) exactly how much money you would need to have in order to do nothing more than live modestly at a beach house, and (2) the minimum time needed to make exactly that amount of money. Though I'll settle for a weekend jaunt now and again.