Summer Road Trip: Part II

 After walking around downtown Portland we headed over to Forest Park.

This park is amazing!  It's over 5,000 acres with over 80 miles of trails throughout the park.  We basically saw just a snippet of what this park has to offer.

We decided to hike to the Witches Castle/Stone House.

 This building was actually once a bathroom in the 1930's, and today locals say it's haunted....ooooh, scary!

It's a pretty cool building with plants and moss growing all over it...and unfortunately quite a bit of graffiti as well...sad face.

 And of course our day would not be complete without a picnic somewhere!

After our hike we strolled over to the Audubon Society (also in Forest Park) right near the trail head.

They have a facility that houses several types of birds of prey that have been rescued but cannot be released back into the wild because they have become too dependent on humans.  At the time of our visit they brought out a Horned Owl, Vulture and a Raven.  And of course more hiking trails!  So many trails everywhere!  Gotta love it...I wish we had more time to explore, but we had to head to our campsite and set up before it got too late.

We camped at L.L. "Stub" Stewart State Park about 30 miles west of Portland.  This is a fairly new park and it is HUGE!  It would be a mountain biker haven as there are trails throughout this park to ride.

  When we made reservations for this campground the only sites they had left were "hike-in".  We went ahead and booked it because at $11 dollars a night we figured if it was super terrible we'd just go somewhere else and know that we weren't losing too much money.  But we were pleasantly surprised!!  It turned out to be an absolutely beautiful place to camp!  We did have to hike in, about a half a mile, but they supplied carts for us to haul our gear and with everyone chipping in it wasn't bad at all.

The only con I would say about this park were the mosquitoes.  

Luckily, I had some bug spray packed!

We heated up some potato soup for dinner, took an evening walk through the park and then off to bed.

I slept terrible in case anyone was wondering.

Tent camping is hard on me!

The next morning we headed out right after breakfast for Cannon Beach.  It took us about an hour to get there from our campground...not too bad.

We arrived right at low tide so the woman at the visitor center said to go straight to Haystack Rock first to see the tide pools.  So that's what we did!

With the tide so low the beach was enormous!

The girls found tons of sand dollars!  Unfortunately, we weren't able to find a whole one that wasn't broken though.  They also had a ball digging up the little sand crabs which were also everywhere!

Except for Rory...she was NOT a fan of the little sand crabs!

I can see why this is a popular destination, it's so pretty!

Where ever there is water, my girls will be in it...no matter the temperature!

Cannon Beach is such a charming beach community.

Everyone, I repeat EVERYONE grows hydrangeas there, it's like it's a town law or something.  And every hydrangea bush is massive and so beautiful!  For whatever reason I always think of my grandma when I see those types of flowers...I'm not sure if they were her favorite but I do know she had them growing in her front yard.  After seeing them all over at Cannon Beach hydrangeas have quickly become my favorite flower at the moment.

And weird...I didn't get a picture of any of them!!

We took the long way home and drove down the coast.
We heard good things about the Tillamook factory and decided to check it out.

The views from the lookout points were amazing!

Unfortunately the Tillamook Factory was under construction so they only had a temporary visitor center set up.  So it lacked quite a bit.  But we did get some ice cream!

We got back to camp in time to heat up some veggie soup and then roasted s'mores in the communal fire pit.

A perfect end to the day.