Yesterday was a beautiful day for touring - bright and sunny and beautiful countryside.  We traveled along the WA coast, sometimes through the forests, sometimes with views of the beaches, sometimes along areas where the rivers met the ocean.

Mud flats along the coast.

Saw this wonderful sculpture in a little town along our way.  What is it about people looking up in the sky?  You can't not look up to see what they are looking at!  I knew this was just a piece of metal, but I had to check out what he was looking at.  Just the sky!  For a moment, I felt like an idiot for looking, then decided that was the beauty of the sculpture, it just sucked you in to the curiosity of the moment.  That is great art!

We stopped for breakfast and I ordered one pancake.  Take a gander at what showed up!

Never, never have I seen a pancake this size!  Some one told me that they cook for loggers.  That must be the truth.  Needless to say, I didn't finish it even though it was one of the best pancakes I have ever tried to eat.  We got in the car ready to leave and I put on my seatbelt.  The only problem was that the seatbelt would only fasten in the last hole when it usually closed about 4 holes from the end.  Surely that pancake didn't make that much difference that fast!  Joe was laughing at me because I had fastened one side of my seatbelt to one side of his seatbelt, stretching across his seat.  No wonder I could only fasten it in the last hole.  I felt like an idiot, but boy, was I glad to find out the pancake was not the problem!

There was a motorcycle rally somewhere up the coast, near Pacific Beach, I believe, and we passed hundreds of cycles headed north.

  

Just a few of the hundreds we saw  on their way north.  The forests in this region are so dense that there could have been all kinds of wildlife 2 feet into the vegetation and you would never have seen them.

Driving along these 2-lane roads, we did out best to pull over to let cars pass or ride the shoulder if that was an option.  We pulled over to ride the shoulder at one point and it was like we were driving with square wheels - it was bump, thump, hop, bump, thump, hop.  Don't know what the problem was with the shoulder, but it sure gave us a thrill!
  
We spent the night in Astoria, OR and will spend tonight in Pacific City and tomorrow night in Florence, OR.