Off to a Great Start…

After my grandma’s birthday dinner, we got back on the road to drive down to Lincoln City, where we would be staying at a beach house owned by friends of the family. They rent the house out to their friends for a nominal fee, and it was always one of my favorite places at the beach when I was growing up. Since then my parents have acquired a fancy time-share down at Depot Bay (about 20 minutes south of Lincoln City), but it’s still cool to have a bit more of a quiet, rustic experience here…

Things were going pretty well on the drive (view out the front window of the car shown above), and we were in fairly high spirits (after working through the entire collection of “oldies” on my iPod) when we pulled into the driveway of the beach house at 10pm only to find… there was a car already there. After noting the lights on inside (thus determining that this wasn’t just a neighbor’s car, we called the owner to ask what was going on. He was sure these people were supposed to have checked out earlier in the day, but when we spoke to them (to determine when they would be leaving) they were convinced it wasn’t their fault. I’m pretty sure they’re the ones to blame, but maybe I’m still just bitter because they made it impossible for me to get settled in at the beach house that night and wake up there in the morning.

Since we weren’t going to drag a couple 80-year-olds out of the beach house at 10pm, we went off to find a hotel for the night. We found a pretty cheap place, and you could tell it was classy because the microwave in the room had a marble finish:
(The view from the room the next morning wasn’t that bad, actually, but it’s still not as good as being at the beach house…)
The old people weren’t planning to be out of our way until noon, so we decided to drive in to Newport for a little brekky. There’s a restaurant there called Georgie’s where my parents had had great experiences previously. It’s a nice-looking place, with great ocean views from the tables:
I’d heard stories of the amazing Crab Cake Benedict, which consists of a couple perfectly poached eggs served atop crab cakes and topped with a Creole Hollandaise sauce. The dish looked gorgeous…
…and tasted… pretty crappy, actually. I wasn’t a big fan of the Hollandaise (that’s a lot of parsley for a kid like me), but the real issue was with the crab cake. Last time they were here, my parents had big lumps of gorgeous crab meat in this dish, but on this trip it was just a ground mush that tasted sort of like old canned crab with onions and bread crumbs mixed in. We asked if the crab was fresh and the waitress told us they “don’t do it one by one” and that they “have a mix”… Not sure what that means, but the result is the worst crab cake I’ve ever had. Sigh… Before this meal I never knew crab cakes could actually taste bad (rather than just not great)…

Thus, our vacation was off to a fantastic start… After lunch we drove back to the beach house and found the driveway nice and empty. We got unpacked and settled in to relax and watch the storms out on the ocean. It felt extra-awesome to be here after the way our first 18 hours of vacation had gone.
For dinner that night we fired up the grill and made some seriously delicious Southeast-Asian Turkey Burgers, which are one of my very favorite meals. I really love bright fresh herbs with grilled meat that’s been marinated in lemongrass and shallots… So tasty…
Sunday was a football-watching day, where we made some awesome homemade Bloody Mary’s with our leftover fresh horseradish and watched the Giants get beat up by the Eagles. I have this dream of the Giants dropping 3 of their last 4 to give the Bucs home field throughout the playoffs (including the Super Bowl). Now that they’ve lost the first and will be up against Dallas and Carolina next, I don’t think that’s too far-fetched. My parents also got the pleasure of hearing me yell at the TV when the announcers kept saying that the NFC South is up for grabs, when clearly the Bucs have things under control. I guess they’ll see that on Monday night…
After the Seahawks showed some serious pride against the Pats my parents were working a puzzle and I was playing one of the versions of the totally-awesome Diner Dash video games, when my dad looked out the window and drew our attention to this awesome sunset... After a rocky start, things are definitely looking up...