I’ve been to Cannon Beach maybe a dozen times over the years — with my kids when they were small, with my wife for various occasions, once on a school trip I don’t need to go into. For most of those visits, it was summer, which means parking situations and shops full of people in matching fleeces buying taffy.

We went in October this year, on a Tuesday, and I’m not sure I can go back in summer now.

The drive up 26 from Portland takes about an hour and a half. On a Tuesday morning in October there was plenty of parking on Hemlock Street. We walked down to the beach and there were maybe twenty people in a quarter mile of shoreline. Haystack Rock was doing what it always does — sitting there looking improbable — but without anyone staging photos in front of it for once.

The water was cold. The sky was doing that layered gray thing the Oregon coast does in fall, where there are four different kinds of clouds at four different altitudes and the light keeps shifting. We walked south for about forty-five minutes and turned around. A brown pelican flew past at approximately eye level at one point, which still surprises me after all these years of living here.

We ate lunch at a place on Hemlock. We were the only customers. It was good.

A few practical notes:

• Some shops close or reduce hours after Labor Day. If there’s a specific place you want to eat or shop, call ahead before making the drive.
• The beach is windy in fall and winter in a way that’s different from summer wind. Fifty degrees with a twenty-mile-per-hour onshore breeze is not the same as fifty degrees in Portland. Dress for it.
• Ecola State Park, just north of town, is worth the extra few miles if you have time. There’s a viewpoint about a mile in that looks south down the coast. In October it was muddy in a couple of spots but nothing difficult.

We drove back in the late afternoon when the light was going flat and pink over the Coast Range. I’ve seen it probably a hundred times. I didn’t take a picture, which I sort of regret and sort of don’t.