Sometimes life is WILD.
From 2001-2003 I lived in Davis, California, attending the university there. My close friend, roommate, and co-worker was a gal we’ll call Jennifer. We graduated, she moved to Portland, Oregon, and I moved down to Los Angeles. Eventually, I got a career that wasn’t waiting tables and I moved to Washington state.
In 2004, Jennifer was getting married. We’d kept in touch and I was honored to be in her wedding, which would take place on the Oregon Coast at her fiancée’s uncle’s house.
So I packed my bag, printed out my MapQuest directions to the address she’d sent me, and headed to Oregon. They got married in a simple ceremony overlooking the beach and I got some beautiful photos of the happy couple and the scenic coastline.
For several years, this was the screensaver on my computer:
In fact, I’ve even shared it before as one of the iconic photos of my early-aughts nomadic lifestyle.
This photo has lived in my head for many years as the Cannon Beach Haystack Rock. I think because this was an era before smartphone pictures and geo-tags and facebook posts. All I had to mark the location was some printed mapquest directions (long since thrown away) and a paper invitation (which also met the same fate). So, in my mind, I simply tagged this photo with the Oregon haystack rock that everyone knows.
(Side note: It was only this year that I learned that Oregon actually has multiple haystack rocks).
Fast forward, now to 2023. Almost 20 years later and my girlfriends and I are planning our annual girl’s trip. We’d decided on the Oregon Coast, but Cannon Beach was out of our desired price range, so we scoured vacation rentals up and down the coast.
We found one, in Pacific City, that was in our price range and directly on the beach. Booked and done.
The rental was every bit as beautiful as the online photos.
And the view! It was amazing.
We proceeded to bask in perfect weather while enjoying a spa day and a Tillamook cheese tour and wine tasting and shopping at Cannon Beach. We saw an elk and went on two waterfall hikes and always drove the scenic route and ate good food and laughed until we cried.
One morning I got up before the others and took a little hillside hike, to enjoy the view looking south down the coast. Remember this picture, because it will become relevant later:
Alas, as all things must, our girls’ trip came to an end. We packed up our bags and flew back to our respective homes and life went on.
That haystack rock though, it nagged at me. I mean, I don’t have enough experience with haystack rocks to know if they all look pretty much alike, but this one seemed SO FAMILIAR.
I went back and dug up some old photos from the wedding, and that’s when I saw it.
Holy sh*t you guys, IT IS THE SAME PLACE.
I just revisited a place that I’d been to almost twenty years prior and I had absolutely no idea.
Look at this photo I found from 2004:
Wait a minute – *checks notes* – that looks like Cape Kiwanda. Let’s pull up a photo from last month’s trip:
HOLY BALLS BATMAN. IT IS.
Verify with another angle. Checks out:
Okay, for fun let’s do another view from 2004:
And from 2023:
So then, if that’s not crazy enough, I decide to figure out if I can tell where the wedding might have taken place all those years ago. I have this photo to go off of:
Based on the height of the bluff, the position of the haystack rock, and the presence of lots more sea grasses on the sand dune, I assume the house is slightly south of our rental.
Here’s a satellite view, with some location info I’ve added:
We were staying in the Kiwanda Shores community, and you can see where I’ve marked out the hike I took to the lookout spot. Okay, cool. Based off this, it looks like the house could have been one of those located along Sunset drive. There’s one labelled “Ocean’s Reach” that’s on Booking dot com, let’s click the link and see if the view looks about right…
Scrolling through pictures… more pictures, yep this looks about right… wait a minute.
It’s not just “like” the wedding house. It’s THE HOUSE. THE EXACT SAME HOUSE THE WEDDING WAS HELD AT.
I had stayed LESS THAN A MILE AWAY from that place I visited, oh-so-many years ago.
In fact, that sand dune hike? The picture I said would be interesting later? If I’d have panned that picture just a little to the left, you could probably even see this house from there.
I’m not really sure what this means. Or if it means anything. Sometimes things just happen for no reason. Or sometimes they happen because time passes and our memories smooth out and the next thing you know we’re exploring a “new” place that we’ve visited before, albeit for one day almost 20 years prior.
But sometimes, regardless of how it happens, it’s still pretty flippin neat.
