Day 5: Cannon Beach

On the morning of August 1st, we packed up our hotel room and headed just a little further down the Oregon Coast to Cannon Beach. They have a Mo's there. If you haven't heard of Mo's, well, neither had I until our family was randomly told about it one vacation on the Oregon Coast. It's a chain of seafood restaurants that are only on the Oregon Coast and they are famous for their clam chowder. I don't like seafood. Like, at all. And I could eat and eat their chowder. It's more like old fashioned potato chowder with great flavor that happens to have tiny pieces of clam in it. Ellie thought it was pretty great too.
Thanks to Grandma Kerry we had this FABULOUS toddler bib handy for her to eat in. She also loved Steve's halibut and cod. So far she doesn't much care for tomatoes or cucumbers either... she really is Steve's daughter in that way.

Part of what was great about heading down to Mo's was that Mo's is off at the very end of the city, not in the tourist trap. As a result, you go there and have beautiful beaches that aren't overrun with tourists like you do in the main town. So after lunch, we hit the beach.
We found a spot that was pretty abandoned and parked to let Ellie play.
She loved the sane again, especially where it was warm and dry here, but unlike our experience at Kalaloch, after playing for a few minutes she suddenly made a heading straight for the water.And then sat. As you can imagine, this meant she got swamped again.
Once again she took it like a champ, and once again she cried when the water left and she was there waterless and cold. But, as soon as we put her in the warm sand, she perked right up. She thought dry sand was much funnier than wet sand, even if it didn't toss as well.
After a while we decided it was time to clean her up as we still needed to hit Portland on our way home. This is what happens with a child gets swamped by the ocean and then sits in dry sand. Those pants were HEAVY.
Once I stripped her down, and before we could do much else, Ellie just crawled away to play in the sand. So I, naturally, grabbed the camera.
Steve wasn't a big fan of his daughter being naked in public, so he went and washed her off in the ocean, and we got her dressed and back in the car. She had a lot of fun. You can tell because she passed out within about 5 minutes of being back in the car.
After that, we headed to Portland where we grabbed a couple of new fish for our tank at home as well as some more cichlids for Steve's classroom tank. We arrived later the evening of the 1st to find all well at home. And even better, while I was getting Ellie unpacked - after eating fish, being in a fish store for hours in Portland, and then coming home to stare at her fish tank, Ellie said "fish"! Consistently! Making fish her first real word for us even though she said don't once and hi occasionally (we think). Later that night, she also added "shoes" to her repertoire. It was such a fantastic end to our very fun family vacation!