My boyfriend, Andrew, and I went on a West Coast road trip over the last 10 days. We flew into Portland and went down the coast to Big Sur. Here's some photos from it. From the airport we headed straight to Astoria, Oregon to see The Goonies house. This is the Astoria-Megler bridge. We didn't cross over it because we wanted to keep moving but it's a super cool bridge!
We headed to Cannon Beach and caught the sunset at Haystack Rock.
We stayed in Rockaway Beach the first night and as we were leaving the next morning we found out "The Original Pronto Pup" started there when we passed this Pronto Pup restaurant. They weren't open yet otherwise I would have definitely got one!
We did a hike called "God's Thumb" in Lincoln City, Oregon. Where you see those little ants (people) at the top of that grassy area is what we hiked to. It was our favorite hike of the trip but the stretch from where I took this picture to "god's thumb" was pretty scary.
I planned the majority of this trip but Andrew found a place to rent ATV's and ride around the Oregon sand dunes and it ended up being one of our favorite parts of the trip!
There are SO many beaches along the coastline of Oregon. Maybe this is common knowledge but I didn't know this. One of my favorite "not planned" things we did was stop at random pull off areas and walk around empty beaches. I randomly snapped this pic of Andrew and love how it turned out!
This is one of our favorite things we saw in Oregon. It's called Natural Bridges near Brookings. It had the bluest water along the coast that we saw. We hiked down to the area to the left on this picture that looks like a bridge. I'm adventurous but I don't like heights and when we sat down on the "bridge" I started getting vertigo and honestly questioned if I'd be able to stand back up and hike out of there. My advice if you don't like heights and go here, just admire it from the viewpoint where this photo was taken.
I've never seen sea creatures attached to rocks like this before. There were so many like this and I loved looking at them.
Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park was gorgeous. The Smith River is practically crystal clear. We found this swimming hole in the middle of it. Look at that blue water!
We stayed in AirBnb's every night except one. This was one of my favorites in Eureka, California. Andrew and I like to cook and after 4 days of eating out, it was nice to have a full kitchen to make a home-cooked meal.
The Avenue of the Giants is cool but a bit overrated if you ask me. We did one of the hikes and don't get me wrong the trees are huge and pictures will never do them justice, but it just wasn't as exciting as we thought it would be. But if you went camping in the forest, it probably would be a lot more fun!
One of our Airbnb's basically forced me to cancel because of the fires (which were not close by at all) so we ended up having to spend a little more for a last minute hotel in Point Arena, California. It ended up being my favorite place we stayed because we had this view of the ocean and the hotel was like a little village of different cottages. It was called Wharf's Master Inn.
A few things we planned were ruined by the fires. We weren't able to make it to Point Reyes lighthouse or the Cypress Tree Tunnel but we did get to see the Point Reyes shipwreck!
Once we got to San Francisco we did more of the touristy things. Lover's Lane, Baker Beach by the Golden Gate, Mission Dolores Park, etc.
We headed down to Monterey next and stopped in Santa Cruz and Capitola. These colorful houses are at Capitola Beach!
When we got to Monterey it was the beginning of Labor Day weekend and they decided to shut down all the beaches. So, it turned into way too many people in all the touristy areas and basically it was impossible to do anything because everything was booked. We were supposed to explore Big Sur during this time too but the beaches and state parks were also shut down and part of the highway was closed because of fires. So we made it down to see the Bixby Creek Bridge (yes the bridge from Big Little Lies) and that was all we really got to do.
We had paid to stay in an Airbnb in Monterey the last 3 nights but ended up booking another Airbnb in San Francisco for the last night since there was nothing for us to do in Monterey/Big Sur. We saw a lot of sunsets on this trip but this was the best one on our last night!
This was a really unique and fun trip for me! I've done one 6 day trip to Mexico or else I've only done some 4 day weekend trips so 10 days was crazy but we planned very well and planned far enough ahead of time to make it very reasonably priced. My main piece of advice if you decide to do a similar trip, plan more time in Oregon! We could have done the whole 10 days in Oregon!
I have about 400 pictures on my phone and we did a lot more than what is in this blog, but didn't want to make this too long. On the next episode of Too Lame for Radio I'll talk more about everything! And have a handful of funny stories to share :)