Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Droeges!
For Christmas, we decided to go to the beach. We drove down to Seaside, Oregon. It rained, snowed and the sun shone during the drive. When we arrived, we found a beautiful, clean and sandy beach.
For Christmas, we decided to go to the beach. We drove down to Seaside, Oregon. It rained, snowed and the sun shone during the drive. When we arrived, we found a beautiful, clean and sandy beach.
We didn't get snow for Christmas, but we had snow the week before Christmas. The trees around our community are quite tall and beautiful when they catch the snow.
We haven't unpacked everything, but we found the Christmas stuff and decorated our new home for the holidays.
The week before Christmas, we went over to Seattle and visited the Gingerbread displays. The theme this year was "Harry Potter". This is a fund-raiser for childhood diabetes.
On our first beach walk in Seaside, we were greeted with a lovely rainbow as the weather changed from rain to sun. It's a good thing the sun came out, because it was so cold that the sand was frozen all the way out to the ocean. Our hotel was only two blocks from the beach.
This is what the beach looks like from Seaside Cove on the south end. There were surfers out in the cove! We saw surfers at Christmas in the Atlantic Ocean near Lisbon, Portugal, but it wasn't this cold.
In Seaside we found the Lewis & Clark Salt Works exhibit. This is where they made salt for about five weeks over 200 years ago. They built a stone oven, cut a LOT of firewood and put buckets of sea-water on it and boiled out the water. On our way home, we also stopped and visited Fort Clatsop near Warrenton, Oregon. This is where the expedition spent the winter before starting back to Missouri.
Christmas Eve we went and visited the tourist gift shops that were open. This is the carousel in the Seaside Carousel Mall downtown. The building used to be a dance hall.
On Christmas Day we went bird-watching around Seaside. We visited Mill Pond, Seaside Cove, Neawanna Creek and the Necanicum Estuary.
In the evening on our way to dinner, we took this picture of the decorations. We used to do this every year in Europe.
We left the big Christmas tree at the house and took this little one along. We won it at a pot luck at the SEA Discovery Center in Poulsbo, WA, where Alonda volunteers.
We hope you all have a great holiday season and a wonderful 2017!
