We’re on the road from the Oregon Coast to our home at the eastern end of the state, where the first order of business will be taking our laundry bag to the back porch and shaking the SAND out of everything before it goes into the laundry! We walked barefoot miles of sandy beach, and loaded down our pockets with liberally sand-coated beach rocks…

Our rented hillside beach-house had three bedrooms, so we got to choose the one with picture-windows overlooking the ocean, and wooden railing overlooking the kitchen, surrounded by windows looking into the woods.

We didn’t realize right away that there was no television. Even a Reader like me likes to put feet up and “veg out” with a good show on vacation—but luckily I’d brought my laptop (thinking I might blog… thinking even more strongly—and correctly—that I might be called on to “fix” some things work-wise)… And we figured out that nesting in the blankets, with the laptop on a pillow on our bellies, worked beautifully for watching “Reacher,” which is our current enjoyment.

The first day we walked seven miles of sandy beach, swaths of it cobbled with jellyfish and what we call “change for a dollar”—broken pieces of sand dollars all along the beach. The water was plenty cold when we put our feet in, but that didn’t stop a number of intrepid youngsters from running in and out of the waves trailing scream-giggles (which we dubbed “scriggles”) behind them.

In the evening we searched out a likely seafood place and settled on The Schooner for calamari, fried oysters, and fish & chips. Lousy service, but good food!

The second morning, fortified with coffee from the shop one street up from the beach, we took a walk on the rocky side of the beach, picking up green jasper and agates, before getting in the car and heading down the coast to our favorite lighthouse and our favorite clam chowder.

Yaquina Head is “my” lighthouse—the one I have tattooed on my arm with my daughter’s name—and we visit it and the adjacent tidepools whenever we’re close. We hit the wrong time, tide-wise, for tidepools this time—but we got treated to a bunch of seals on the tidepool-rocks instead. Fair trade! (What’s the collective name for a group of seals? I vote for a “sunning” of seals…)

The bread-bowl of clam chowder for which we drove an hour and a half is at Gracie’s Sea Hag in Depoe Bay. Jon has been going there for decades, and it is the standard by which we judge all other chowders. That is to say, it has been. This time, when I put a spoonful into my mouth, there wasn’t an angelic chorus bursting into song. (And was it… runnier? No, that had to be my imagination. They wouldn’t change the recipe after decades of perfection.) I’d try another bite. Wait, was that… celery… celery?! …that I just picked off my tongue?

To give a frame of reference to the magnitude of this disaster, I should back up and explain that celery is something I find SO abhorrent that the word “celery” has become our code-word for anything supremely yucky. (It doesn’t even have to be food. Pink is “celery.” Mean people are “celery.”) So finding celery in Gracie’s clam chowder… well, it straight up broke my heart.

We drove back to our home base and its deck overlooking the ocean and its steep hill down to the beach.

I have to add, here, that a few years ago we would have been driving down that hill to the beach. Before I lost sixty pounds and got back into shape, I would not have been game for the steep walk back UP to Home Base. This week we walked it several times a day and it didn’t even put me out of breath. (I had been fully cognizant before now of how much my shape has changed… But I don’t think I understood how much more IN-shape I’d become until we strode up that hill without puffing!)

The tide was coming in when we walked down in the evening, through a rock tunnel to the rocky side of the beach. We poked around looking for agates and jasper—darting, laughing, out of the way of waves when they chased us up the beach. (We may even have emitted some scriggles of our own.) We ultimately decided that jasper must be nocturnal—there were far more of them out-and-about when we’d been looking early in the morning! (Don’t tell me rocks can’t be nocturnal. Let me have my little fancy.) I ended up throwing my handful of Little Rocks back into the sea to grow into better specimens for tomorrow. (Don’t tell me rocks don’t grow from rock-seeds! Fake news!)

You can always count on being rained-on when you visit the Oregon Coast—it’s why we always pack a jigsaw puzzle, as a rainy-afternoon project. Remarkably, we never had to break out the puzzle this trip. It began to rain around dusk last night, and developed into a downpour overnight, but didn’t interfere at all with our beach-time.

Putting me at the edge of the ocean is very like putting a phone on its charger; Jon knows that the more beach-time we can log, the better I’m charged and equipped to deal with Real Life when we return to it.

So yesterday we spent pretty much the whole day at water’s edge… With the exception of an excursion to “The Fish Peddler” seafood market, to fill our cooler with crab and oysters. We’re taking home a taste of the sea—and Jon’s oyster stew will more than make up for the disappointment at Gracie’s.

Possibly the most astonishing thing about our location (more astounding, even, than lack of TV) was the fact that we had no cell service anywhere on the peninsula where Oceanside is situated. Oh, living in Idaho and eastern Oregon, we’re accustomed to large swaths of UNpopulated land where there’s no cell service—but we don’t expect dead zones somewhere as populous as the seaboard-side of the state. Of course, work still could (did) find us via the WiFi hotspot at our Home Base… But on the beach I was blessedly, blissfully impervious to interruption.

On the beach it was just how it should be: God… and Jon… and Me.

Tonight it’s God & Jon & Me and a big-ass crab dinner! (And some cats who missed us while we were away…)