Oregon has drive-on beaches? Hell yeah, they do!  A bunch of ’em.  I’m absolutely driving on the beach first thing.  Of course, it’s raining and windy as hell – like it is here – but that doesn’t kill all the fun.  It does make me wish I’d held out longer for a 4 wheel drive version of the truck, and that we had some aggressive off-road tires so we could really dig it up some.  As it was it took almost 4 months to find a 2 wheel drive version that was in great shape, in the right price range, low miles and not too old.  I can’t even imaging how long it might have taken to wait for a similar 4WD, and I really can’t fault the choice.  7 plus years later and it’s still running like a top.  Water pump, camshaft and crankshaft sensors, oil changes, transmission services, brakes on both axles (once) and that’s the extent of the maintenance costs in that time.   Hard to argue with that.  (knock on wood)

Well, 2wd or 4wd, we’re on the sand now. A long, deep, seaweed and debris littered expanse of driveable sand.  I wasn’t kidding about the rain, wind and cold, and it really is way too cold to do much but drive around, inconvenience the large quantity of birds and scout around for anything that might catch my eye photographically.  So, pretty much the usual stuff.   Of course, Kathy spends a decent amount of our beach time trying to feed and adopt a pet seagull.  They were not having that.  Food; yes, adoption; not so much.

After tooling around the beach and sand for a couple hours we head over to Ocean City, the little beach town where the roads going west end on sand.  It’s offseason, but it’s still a beach town.  The local McDonald’s has a skateboard rack in addition to a bike rack and there’s a shark store.  No, not a store that sells sharks.  A store that is a shark.   How in the world do you pass that up?  You don’t, that’s how.  Since there was literally no name on the building it was a guessing game as to what they might sell there.  Seafood?  Shark and fish themed souvenirs?  Black market ground-up shark fin ED pills?  Turns out… candy and trinkets.  Half the town is closed, so this whole thing is definitely a place to revisit in the summer.

We’ll be back, drive-on beaches!