Does anyone else have 16,000 pictures stuck in their phone? Lately, I’ve given up on bringing any real camera anywhere and I’ve been IPhone only for most of 2016. It’s freeing because I haven’t had to worry about carting so much gear around and I like that my photos have been a little more spontaneous and I can be more in the moment than when I’ve been behind my real camera lens. So with all these photos I’ve been uploading my pics to Amazon Photo to keep them safe and accessible, but it’s still been SO hard to force myself to delete photos off my phone-especially my pictures from Cannon Beach. I think it was one of our favorite trips from 2016. (And 2015 and years before. There are few places in the world as perfectly spectacular as Cannon Beach and we’ve had a lot of fun in this area over the years .)
We have driven the Seattle to Cannon Beach route many times. It’s a beautiful drive from Seattle and it isn’t horribly long. Usually we can get there in about four hours. With electric charging, it takes a little longer but it’s nice to be able to do the trip without using any gas and the charging stops between Seattle and Cannon Beach have bathrooms, shopping and places nearby for snacks. A weekend in Cannon Beach can feel like we’ve been away for a week somewhere magically relaxing because of it’s beautiful beach location so it’s the perfect Seattle roadtrip too.
Our Tesla can go around 200 miles without stopping to charge. We usually play it pretty safe and make sure we always have more charge than we need. We had one close call on a trip from Vancouver BC to the Mount Vernon charger in a wind storm that drained our battery a lot faster than usual and not repeating the stress from that trip makes taking the extra time worth it.
The first charging station we stopped at between Seattle and Cannon Beach is in Centralia near the Centralia Outlets. We’ve been here before and there are 10 Superchargers available and lots of fast food restaurants and a Starbucks nearby. We needed to check out the Nike outlet and use the bathroom so that pretty much took up our charging time and the kids appreciated getting in some time to stretch their legs.
We used the Seaside, Oregon Supercharger for the first time on this trip. It’s in a small outlet mall that has a toy store so the kids were pretty happy. I haven’t seen this Supercharger set up before either-usually we see a bunch of chargers all in a row but here they were in sets of two. I like Seaside-we’ve stayed there in the summer and it’s a fun place to visit.
Another great thing about the Seaside outlets is that there is a Bruce’s Candy Kitchen here that is related to the one in Cannon Beach so it’s a unique place to stop for yummy candy souvenirs if you need to pick something up and of course there are bathrooms here too. (With kids we also always keep a football in the car for when we supercharge and we’ve had so many spontaneous family games because of these stops.)
I was checking out the Surfsand Resort for Trekaroo on our last visit to the coast so our stay was sponsored and it was such a lovely family-friendly resort with an incredible view of Haystack Rock. But for us it was even more fantastic to find out that the Surfsand Resort also has electric vehicle charging for their guests. This made us less reliant on the Supercharger spots and gave us a lot of piece of mind for traveling around the area. The spots are designated with a bright cone and they were nice spacious spots too!
Because road trips and coffee go hand and hand, our favorite coffee stops in Cannon Beach are Sleepy Monk Coffee Roasters, Insomnia Coffee and Sea Level Bakery. Usually when we visit Cannon Beach we side-trip to other places like the Tillamook Cheese Factory but this visit we had such a great time at the resort and the weather was spectacular so we just hung out and relaxed on the beach and then went back to Seattle via the same Supercharger spots and came back ‘recharged’ and ready for the week ahead.
If you’re looking for ideas for your Cannon Beach trip with kids, here’s an article I wrote for Trekaroo too!
And I’d love to hear about your favorite roadtrip spots in the comments below. If you’re taking more phone photos lately or if you can’t live without your camera-I’d love to hear your thoughts about this. We have some upcoming trips where I’m wondering if I’ll be sad if I don’t have a REAL camera to shoot with.
Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys. She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live. She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)
I don’t like lugging my DSLR around either so I rarely carry it. I definitely regret it when I want to print a photo (say larger than 3 x 3!) because the quality just isn’t there. Oh well! It’s a trade off :).
You are totally right about quality. I just can’t tell if I’m ever going to actually print my photos or if they just like to live in my phone;)
I use my phone for pictures so much I get frustrated when my phone has the never to tell me it doesn’t have any space left, lol.