Florence and Newport

In retrospect, we should probably have stayed one night in Newport and one night in Florence. The two cities are an hour apart with a lot of features in between. However we chose to spend two nights in Florence and backtrack to Newport the following day.

Florence isn't nearly as pretty as its Italian namesake (which probably comes as no surprise), but the old part of town, near the Siuslaw river and bridge is lovely. We ate there our first night at an Italian called 1285 Restobar. There was no kid's menu, but my daughter and I shared a pizza (which would have comfortably served three of us... We boxed half of it) and my son had a half portion of spaghetti and garlic bread.

Norfolk has mermaid sculptures; Florence has sea lions.

As we were unlikely to see wild sea otters on this trip, I had decided to go to Newport's Oregon Coast Aquarium which had a sea otter exhibit. This made for a great morning. It wasn't too big, and it was easy to get from any one exhibit to the other in just a few minutes, which made attending feedings and shows very easy. We entered at 10am, caught the sea otter feeding at 10:30, the sea lion feeding at 11am and the pelican presentation at 11:30, by which time we had seen all of the aquarium in between scheduled events. (We could have taken more time over it, but we were on a time constraint.)

Sea Otter

The glass in the shark tunnel was being cleaned.

We had gone for the sea otters, but my daughter was delighted by the aviary where we could finally see tufted puffins and horned puffins up close. Even better was the seal who was pressing up against the glass window of her exhibit. Her keeper told us her name was Boots, and she was moulting which made her itchy. She was going to the glass to encourage people to scratch her, getting some kind of psychosomatic relief from the motion. Needless to say, the kids adored the interaction.

Tufted Puffin

Boots

Personally, I preferred the abalone in the touch tank. I had seen polished abalone shells before, but never a live one. I was squeamish up until the keeper told us that if you let them suck on your finger, it feels like a cat's tongue, at which point I had to try it. It does, and they get quite a grip with those 'kisses'. In a weird way, it was kind of adorable. Abalone are now my favourite shellfish.

Hot abalone action.

After this, we went to Nana's Irish Pub in the Nye Beach area of Newport (very pretty area... would have loved to spend more time exploring.) The pub did a great all day breakfast with proper sausages and bacon, but be warned, the beans are Bush so they're sweeter than the traditional Heinz. The kids' menu was good value and they had a box of books for kids to read while waiting.

On our way to the pub we passed Coast Park (next to Nye Beach Montessori School!) and were immediately taken by the playground. While my husband paid for lunch, the kids and I walked back up the hill to the playground so that we could take fifteen of our precious minutes for this slide:

All four of us went down at least once. Totally worth it.

Diversion done, we rushed back to the car and headed to Cape Perpetua to see Thor's Well. This is one of two places on this Buzzfeed list that we planned our trip around, and as it was best seen at high tide, we wanted to get there for high tide.

One problem, I had checked the tides for Florence, which had high tide at about 2:10pm. At the Cape Perpetua visitor centre, where the short trail to Thor's Well starts (follow the signs for Spouting Horn), high tide was 1:42pm. We ended up missing it by almost two hours.

So we screwed up, but it was a windy day and the well was still fascinating. We didn't get to see the effect of the ocean apparently draining into it, but we were able to get right up to the well and watch the water surge and ebb in relative safety.

Draining between waves

And full! We could see why this place was dangerous at high tide.

Starfish inside the well.

My camera ran out of battery, but that whole section of rocks is a lot of fun, there was a shelf of sand to play on and an entire fallen tree turned driftwood, which we climbed via its root system. On our way back, we took another exit off the trail onto a different rock shelf known for its tidepools and found thousands of tadpoles in one large pool and dozens of purple sea urchins in another. Great fun to scramble around--very reminiscent of my childhood Cornish beach visits but with Oregon's dramatic touch--but wear shoes with durable soles. The rocks are sharp and rough!

Anemones in a rock pool next to Thor's Well.

If money were no object, we would have liked to have done the Sea Lion Caves, but we had been able to watch sea lions in Astoria and as we had done the aquarium that day, the Sea Lion Caves seemed redundant considering the price of entry. They do come highly recommended though.

Instead we returned to Florence which marks a shift in the coastal geography from rocks to sand dunes. Towering sand dunes. We rented a sandboard and took ourselves to Honeyman State Park--this was our Father's Day activity.

Sandboarding proved a little easier than I expected, as in we were all able to get ourselves up and actually pick up some speed for maybe ten seconds before falling over. This was interspersed with descents where we start sliding and immediately fall on our backsides, but we were still getting a lot of fun out of it--not bad when boards can be rented for $10-$16! We rented a small board, and the kids did better than the adults--our five year old loved it!

This may be the closest I ever come to looking like an action hero.

We spent much longer than we intended sandboarding, but dinner for the kids was McDonalds and a Play Place while I did laundry at the hotel. My husband and I then shared the leftover Pizza while watching Game of Thrones (and praying the kids--sleeping in the same room--wouldn't wake up mid-gore.)