That’s More Like It…

Before the crushing sadness of Monday night, Monday started out as a pretty good day (even featuring a morning rainbow on the horizon…).

We started at the Lincoln City Library, where there is free wi-fi and where there is also a book sale on Monday mornings. The books are both ex-library and donations, and they’re on sale for $1 each. For those of you who know me, you know that I can’t pass up such things… I ended up with about 12 books, but we also ended up spending a lot more time at the Library than we’d originally planned, so all this book-shopping threw a wrench in our lunch plans. (It was already 1pm, but we had two more stops to make before we headed back to enjoy the lunch waiting for us at the beach house…)

We decided that, since we need groceries anyway (don’t get me started on the fact that you can’t buy a papaya anywhere in this city…), we would get lunch at the McMenamins across the street from the big grocery store. This turned out to be a very good idea. McMenamins is a chain of brew pubs, but each pub has a slightly different menu than the others. Because I was still a little sad about our icky crab cakes at Georgie’s, we decided to do a Dungeness Crab Cake appetizer on the menu here along with a small order of fries.
These were seriously delicious crab cakes, with lots of sweet, fresh crab and was served with a really nice wasabi sauce. Just what we needed to banish memories of the bad crab cakes… The fries at this McMenamins were superior to the ones we had at Kennedy School, as well. Awesome. For lunch, I saw that the menu listed “blue cheese dressing” as an ingredient on the Captain Neon Burger (which is the traditional awesome version, not the lame “blue cheese” of Kennedy School that had disappointed me recently). Sure enough, my Captain Neon came with delicious creamy blue cheese, making it a bit messier to eat than the Kennedy School version (which just has lame crumbled blue cheese), but also infinitely more delicious… Good stuff.
After lunch we stopped at the outlet mall to do a bit of Christmas shopping, then finally drove back home. As we were coming around a sharp curve in the road near the beach house, we encountered a mail truck driving towards us entirely in our lane. My dad slammed on the brakes and we came to a stop less than a foot away from a collision. Whew. I was very happy not to die on the way home to watch what I (wrongly) thought would be a great football game (sigh). Good to know the brakes in my car are functioning so well.

Below are some more beach pictures (sunset last night before my heart was broken above, sunrise this morning below), which I don’t seem to be getting tired of taking.