As previously mentioned, a friend of mine spotted a Cinny bottle at a local Starbucks and picked it up for me.. well here it is!

Yay!

We’ve been meeting fairly regularly for lunch anyway, but purrrrrfect excuse to do so again!

Of course I had to take a couple of snaps of Cinny and her merch, I mean hello?! This is me right?

Apart from a curious sniff she was less than impressed but posed gamely anyway.

I honestly wasn’t expecting to get a bottle (never mind the box THAT was a bonus surprise!) but putting the word out among friends and family on Facebook really did the trick!

She texted me this morning that she’s got one in hand for me, yay! So from now on it will just be fun to hear from friends and family where she may turn up, that is if anyone else happens to spot her.

I also received the carrier box that my other friend had found a few days ago so I’m all set! Cinnamon is quite enjoying her fame…

Okay she really just loves scratching her face on the box, but still….

Fun!

That all changed due to a recent cross-border shopping trip by a friend of ours from Ontario. She said she’d been discussing how funny it would be if they happen to find Cinny in a store down there and lo and behold she saw this…

The weird part was, despite being chosen for a Root Beer label, she was on the box of a Vanilla Bean sugar-free soda. Go figure!

Our friend (and her friend) then proceeded to check every single bottle on the shelf but nadda, no Cinny bottles to be found.  When she told me on Facebook what she’d found, then took this picture of it I was super excited, silly I know but it is still a thrill for me! The box is on the way to me now as a keepsake. The funny thing was her daughter and boyfriend were on a separate trip to the States and found the same box, buying it as a surprise for me at the very same time. Totally different State too!

We’re still holding out hope that a bottle with Cinny’s picture on it will surface somewhere!

Just about every trip we’ve taken in the last few years has been short escape from some sort of stress that was going on in our lives but this one came at a time when things were pretty much on an even keel. As a result the whole tone was different. I felt a bubble of excitement that had been lacking before, I suppose it is hard to completely embrace the joy of a trip when all you’re focused on is the thing you’re trying to escape from. I mean I always enjoyed myself when I was away and don’t want to sound ungrateful for being fortunate enough to be able to get away, but part of me never really left home. This time all of me was on that beach and I gave each and every day a HUGE bear hug.

Our trip down met with another unscheduled delay in the Seattle area, but unlike the last time this traffic incident didn’t involve our car. From what this report says rain and inappropriate speed led to this…

Yup, that is the underside of a semi and that poor car along with a few others were hit by it. Glad to hear nobody was killed though because it looked pretty bad. It was bad enough, and messy enough to close that part of the I-5 southbound and send people scrambling for alternatives. 45 minutes or so of crawling and we were back on our way again.

We arrived in our room just as the sun started to set and first order of business after dropping what we carried was to immediately hear OCEAN.

Tom went down to get our bags while I snapped a few pictures from the balcony.

Hello Haystack rock!

We hoped we’d have a chance of another sunset sometime during the week, though with the weatherman predicting rain the entire week it seemed unlikely. At any rate our STOMACHS were the priority and the siren-song of the Lumberyard Chili-mac was too hard to resist.

Seriously, that bowl is listed as an appetizer on the menu! After ordering a bowl to share before our entrees in the past (and barely touching our dinners) we now just order a bowl each for a meal. Totally satisfying and decadent!

Guess what? Each and every single night we had a sunset. How about that!? That has never happened to us before. Also? The forecast of rain each day, phsshh.. didn’t happen. Sure we had the odd sprinkle or overcast sky, but the day always cleared up and gave us sunshine. It was like Oregon was giving us a hug right back.

On the recommendation of a friend of mine we checked out Cape Kiwanda, home of another sea stack called Haystack Rock.

For the lazy there are beaches to walk, for the crazy there is a GIANT sand hill to climb, for the people in between there is a shorter sand hill to hike to get up to the cape itself. About halfway up I was starting to question why I even tried in the first place it was EXHAUSTING! The sand was so slippery it was like for every couple of steps you’d slide back one.

Once at the top I figured I might as well decided to go beyond the fence and go check out the edge…to be completely honest I had to LAY DOWN to get near the edge which covered me with a weird rust coloured dirt but there is no bloody way I would get near the edge to look over otherwise. Suddenly to my left I was surprised to see a hand pop up from the cliff-side….

Next thing I know there is a guy clambering up the rock-face. Ummm okay so maybe THIS is the hardest way up to the cape!

In flip-flops yet!

The views were pretty darn cool from up there though..

We also made a point to stop in Tillamook for some ice cream on the way back and I’d also had a look in a couple of antique stores on the way down. Sadly my fave was closed due to a flood (yikes all those poor antiques!) but I was lucky and found a few nice pieces in some of the other stores.

We visited our usual haunts in Ecola State park and we both agreed that the next time we’re there we will probably give them a pass and continue to check out places we HAVEN’T been to many times before.

This post could be filled with multiple sunset shots because honestly, each one is so unique. In fact moment to moment there are changes within any given sunset. But that would be boring no?

The same with Haystack rock, I mean it is the biggest and most photogenic thing in Cannon Beach, we have hundreds of shots of that same rock over and over again but I can’t post every one…

So instead here are a handful of shots from the trip that I particularly love….

Jump!

Bruce’s Candy Kitchen

Sigh… we had the best time.

Sadly, even a week isn’t long enough and before long it was time to head home. I had fallen in love with a Victorian house in Astoria over the internet and as we would be passing through down on the way home we made a quick detour into the hills and tracked it down in person.

Here is the listing

Sigh and drool…. LOVE the character in Victorian era homes.

While in the neighbourhood I snapped a few others… man they were GORGEOUS! They were taken quickly, I didn’t want anyone to see me and think I was casing the joints or some kind of creeper. Ha!

Ohhhh okay I couldn’t resist.. just one more…

Goodbye Cannon Beach, until next time!

This means I spend a lot of nights up late and a lot of mornings clinging to my bed sheets whimpering when I have to get up. This also means that unlike my husband who can awaken via gentle notes from a musical alarm I need a sledgehammer to smack me, HARD. Pity poor Tom on the mornings he can sleep in and I have to get up. He has to endure the sound of MY alarm clock screeching with increasing volume as I bury my head deeper under the duvet and he has no way to get to it easily to shut it off.

When we both need to get up around the same time he will set his alarm and then gently coo me awake trilling higher, then lower. It’s siiiiiixxxxx o’clooooooock…it’s siiiiiiix oooo’cloooock…

Saturday morning was one of those days I had to get up early (for school) and Tom didn’t (day off) this time however there was no trilling me awake, I awoke to find the light on and Tom standing beside the bed. Confused at first I thought it was time to get up but no…it was 4:30 am. Alarmed that something was wrong I shook myself awake and sat up to ask what was going on.

Tom tells me that the cat (who likes to sleep under the covers) had thrown up IN the bed, even worse he had been laying on it for who knows how long and worse still, he had discovered it after he had come back to bed from going to the bathroom, feeling along to make sure he wasn’t about to lay down on a cat.

So UP we got to change the sheets and under pad (hey we have cats that puke an under-pad is necessary!) and Tom changed his Pjs  This whole time I’m leaning up against the wall half-asleep, I hadn’t been asleep very long but long enough to have finally sunk into dream state and was starting to return there while vertical.  Once everything was back together we both flopped back into bed.

Then the whole thing hit my funny bone. I started to giggle uncontrollably replaying the despair in Tom’s voice when he told me what had happened….

“The cat puked in the bed…. and it’s FLAAAAAAT…. I’ve been laying in it for hooooourrrrrrrssssss”

“I dipped my HAND in it”

Hahaha even now I’m laughing. I shouldn’t I know because I’ve had my own traumatic cat excretory encounters and Karma is a bitch but I can’t help it, I’m a little twisted that way.