After dinner on Friday, Will and I headed out to the coast, this time to explore Manzanita!

Saturday morning I intended to rent a boat from the Wheeler Marina and tool around on the Nehalem River.  Will was thrilled with the idea, but unfortunately they had a couple boats out of commission, so we ended up having to wait for several hours.

So we walked around and explored the extra charming town of Wheeler and waited and waited.

We’re on a boat!  This, admittedly, was terrifying for me to be completely in charge of a motorized boat on an unknown river, but I did it!

I even put Will in charge of the camera.

The following are his images:

While we were waiting, we learned that Wheeler was going to be holding a 100 years celebration on the waterfront so we decided to check it out.

For dinner we attacked some fresh crabs.  Will was hesitant at first, but then realized how fun and delicious tearing into a crab can be.  We sat there for an hour getting messy and chatting about girlfriends, school, and the complications of his tribe of boys in class.

We purchased a kite and he tried so very hard to get it to fly, but it was just so windy.  He still had a great time!

After we checked out on Sunday, we headed south to eventually meet Ben & Lucy at the beach house.  We made a few stops on the way.   First up was a very short hike to Munson Falls:

Then I surprised Will with a detour to Sand Lake, where we sat on the fence and watched all the dune buggies, ATVs, and dirt bikes race around for an hour:

Our last stop of the day was up a muddy, twisty road to the seasonal top access trail of Cascade Head:

We had to document how much we put the car through during our weekend:

Overall we had a very successful Mother/Son weekend.  So many adventures!