Life's A Beach

As many of you already know, David and I are packing up our life and heading West at the end of February. We are moving to the beautiful, scenic, windy Oregon coast. Seaside to be exact.

A few months ago (around the end of October) David and I were approached with the opportunity to help some good friends open a new location for their coffee shop in Cannon Beach. Knowing that I would be graduating culinary school for baking and pastry in January, they wanted to know if I would be willing to be their personal baker for the shop as well as sling some coffee. Our good friend Adam would be moving down and managing the shop as well. David and I had been dreaming of eventually moving somewhere for at least a year, finding jobs in our newly acquired culinary fields and making a life in a new place. This seemed like the perfect opportunity and we really didn’t have to spend too much time deciding whether or not we wanted to jump on board. We took a week or so to pray about it and ask the advice of some trusted mentors. After all, we wanted to make sure this was what God wanted, not just what we wanted. We felt that this was completely God ordained and the timing of everything was just too great not to have his hand in it so we took a leap of faith and committed the next year of our lives to the coffee shop and to the coast.

In the following months we scoured the internet for rentals in Cannon Beach. What we soon discovered is that long term rental properties aren’t easy to come by. Everyone seemed to be advertising short-term vacation rentals or selling and the few rentals we did find were too small for our needs. We had decided to go in on a rental with Adam since it made perfect sense to share the cost of living since we would all be re-locating anyways. Now the shop is located in Cannon Beach on 2nd and Larch (one block from the beach!). Cannon beach is a little bit isolated and I think that’s what makes it so great, but when it comes to commuting it’s a bit of a hassel. Ideally we wanted to be able to walk/bike to the shop. This meant having a commute that was relatively short and do-able in inclement weather (which if you’ve ever been to the Oregon Coast, you know it’s a regular occurrence). Now Seaside is roughly a fifteen minute drive along the highway. Not too far but not ideal walking/biking terrain. Manzanita is about twenty-five minutes South along a steep, winding, narrow highway. Not really something I want to bike, especially in the middle of torrential downpour and gale force winds. You can see why Cannon Beach was our ideal location for finding a house, but for months we had no such luck. Finally we decided to broaden our search into Seaside. We weren’t keen on the touristy feel of Seaside and frankly the feel of the town as a whole, but we were getting desperate as it was now the beginning of January.

It had been a few weeks since we had expanded our search, I was doing my routine prowl of Craigslist and I stumbled upon a house that seemed too good to be true. It was a new build, right in the heart of Seaside, a twelve minute drive from the shop, it backed a green space. It was perfect. David immediately sent an email to the owner about some basic questions and also about a possible time to come and see it. Within a week we were headed to take a tour and talk to the landlord. 

God had once again opened the door and we found out days later that all we had to do was sign the lease papers and it was ours. She told us that we could meet with her husband and sign the papers since he was already in Vancouver for work, knowing we lived there. To make it convenient for us, she arranged that we meet him at a local coffee shop called Thatcher’s, to which David and I laughed and thanked God for having such a great sense of humor (I currently work at Thatcher’s).

So we’re over the first hump of our adventure and we can rest easy knowing we have a place to live. We ended up having to pay rent for the month of February even though we won’t ourselves move in until about February twenty-fourth but it gives us time to slowly haul our stuff down there, which is nice. I am extremely excited for this new chapter in our lives and I can’t wait to see what God has in store!

Until next time, 

Jordyn