That man can really play the guitar! You've really gotta watch it all the way through to fully appreciate his intensity. Can you imagine coming across him playing that on a street corner about 2 minutes into the song? WOW. Those fingernails really freak me out though, even if they are a guitar thing. Not having been able to stop there, of course, I found the song below, and am really diggin it too at the moment.
Now I've gotta go hunt down a CD, damn it!
Anyway, the ocean, um, yeah...
We headed south on Friday, leaving town HOURS late thanks to a little snafoo with the car rental place who forgot to pick B up. (How do you really spell snafoo anyway? Snafoo? Snafu? Ah choo? Oh wait, I know! e-n-t-e-r-p-r-i-s-e!) Traffic was bad, and the rain was coming down incredibly hard, even by northwest standards, so it was a looooooong trip to Eugene and a just slightly scary trip too. We all made it in one piece and dropped the girls off at Dan's mom's house. Thankfully our lack of planning (thanks to my funk last week) worked out ok, and Dan's uncle offered up keys to the family beach house while we were there. Wandering a coast town on a friday night (in the middle of the night, really) looking for a vacancy would have been a serious pain. As much as I really do prefer to just roll with the punches and let the pieces fall where they may, I really do need to plan better next time.
We finally made it to Newport at around 11pm, and once we found the place in the dark and decided we were pretty sure we were at the right house we were good. There were a few unnerving moments when I wasn't entirely sure I was sticking my borrowed key in the right house's lock, but it all worked out. We stayed up late talking and giggling and just generally having fun. We went wandering up and down the beach in the morning, and then shopping at the outlet Mall in Lincoln City, where I bought some kitchen gadgets and 6 (SIX!) pretty new tanktops. In the middle of November. At the coooooold Oregon coast. Whatever. :)
You know that commercial where the guy is standing on a jettee playing his guitar and rocking out and then a big wave hits the jettee and washes over him and everyone laughs? No? No one else knows what I'm talking about either, and I can't find it anywhere, but I know I've seen it. Anyway, that kind of happened to me on Friday night. Sort of. I haven't laughed that hard in a really long time, and certainly not while spitting out mouthfuls of saltwater. On our way back from Lincoln City to Newport on Saturday night, we stopped at this little row of giftshops along side 101. The shops are on one side of the street, and there is a single row of parking spaces on the other, directly along side the ocean. There was a narrow sidewalk between the front of the parking spaces, and a knee high rock wall hopefully keeping folks from falling over a 100 or so foot drop down to big rocks and bigger waves. B. was sitting in the car watching these huge waves roll in, and I got out to look over the edge with a group of people that had gathered to stare in awe. I'm not sure I've ever seen waves that big before, even having grown up by the water and having spent a lot of time at the ocean. I guess in hindsight I should have felt some alarm when a wave about twice as big as the others I was watching rolled towards the rocks, but it was just so cool to see that I really didn't think about it. It hit the rocks, and then the wall, and then sprayed so high in the air that it spread clear across the street. Needless to say it got me on it's way.
The car! The rental company may have been slow, but I'm thinking it was worth the wait...
The bridge in Newport
The house
