As some of you may remember, Animated Meat first came to life in 2008 as a way to document some sights that managed to slip through the cracks of most popular travel websites. You may also remember that the original website was built on Apple's now defunct iWeb. From there, it migrated over to WordPress where it met an untimely demise at the hands of Russian hackers. Many of those old, pre-2012 entries have found a new home here in the Before the Now section. I would consider these posts as my starting place as a writer, probably comparable to a musician's first demo tapes. They are very rough, but I took them all seriously and wrote each one with passion. While I would like to believe that I have matured in my abilities as a writer, it is my hope that I carry this same blind passion into all of my new efforts.
To be honest, we had no plans to stop at Cannon Beach. Here’s what happened. We were making the drive down the 101 and suddenly, there was a beak in the cloud cover. Dominating the coastal landscape was something they call the Haystack, a huge monolith that made me feel small. The cliché “breathtaking” is not strong enough for what I felt when we stopped and walked down by the water.
