Astoria, Oregon

Roger here...  If you are my age, and have children, you may remember the movie, The Goonies.  This fantasy/adventure flick was very popular with the pre-teen set.  I saw it enough times with our daughters to remember the friendly monster who joined up with a group of middle school-aged kids.  The monster continually yelled, "Hey you Gu-u-u-u-ys!" every time the kids tried to ditch him.  Strange what the human mind recalls.  I also remember being fascinated by the tall-roofed Scandinavian and Victorian Houses perched on steeply slanted streets that were filled with kids on bicycles.  I thought, "What a cool looking town."  That movie was filmed in Astoria, Oregon, where we spent a full day.  The scenes from the movie did this town justice.  This is the oldest settlement on the Pacific coast.  What a cool place.

It was close to lunch time when we pulled into town, and as always we were hungry.  Jay had googled places for lunch and thought Bowpicker Fish and Chips sounded interesting.  We were expecting a sit-down restaurant on the fishing dock.  What we found was a rescued fishing boat on dry land, two picnic tables, and a line of people.  We waited quite a while in the line, as each serving of fish (albacore tuna) & chips was fried to order by the two cooks.  The menu was extensive ---- fish & chips, large or small.  We gobbled them down in Jay's rental car.  Delicious.  Dianne and I may go back again.

The Columbia River Maritime Museum was directly across the street from Bowpickers.  We had heard good things about it, so decided to check it out and were not disappointed.  

We learned several things that we did not previously know.  Evidently, the confluence of the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean is one of the most treacherous stretches of water in the world.  The meeting of the waves from the ocean and the current from the river create huge and dangerous waves.  Many lives have been lost here as well as many vessels.  The floor-to-ceiling sound videos of ships passing through the bar (as it is called) made me a little seasick.  It is also interesting that many of the explorers looking for a northwest passage sailed right by the entrance without seeing the Columbia River.

A shot of the Columbia, docked on the river, through the gigantic windows of the museum.

There were several animated visual displays on TV screens, as well as interactive displays, large vessels, and visual displays similar to the collection of canned fish labels in the photo.  This is one of those museums that is worth the price of admission.

The next activity was a trip up one of the steep hills to the Astoria Column.  

We have seen many monuments over the years.  This one is unique.  It was financed by the descendants of John Jacob Astor, who made his fortune trading furs in the area.   The tower itself is Italian in design, not what you would expect in a Scandinavian town in Oregon.

 The tower is covered with a spiraling mural that depicts the history of the westward expansion.  One could spend hours circling around with binoculars looking at the depictions and reading the captions.  Very well done.

Oh, and what fun!  We were able to climb to the top!   Three days later Dianne was still complaining about sore calves.  The views from the top?  OMG!

The bridge across the Columbia River, the town, and the bar in the distance.

Fort Stevens State Park, where we will soon spend a week.  The bar is at the extreme right of the photo.  I am looking forward to watching the turbulence on the point.

A nice view of the town with all those interesting houses hugging the Columbia River.

A freighter moving through the river.

Hey you g-u-u-u-ys!  It is time to look at the cool houses.  I don't have a picture of the teenage boy with the skateboard who we saw flirting with a girl on one of the angled streets, but it certainly fits with the atmosphere of this place.  

I love architecture.  If I could have chosen a second career, I would have been an architect.  I insisted that Jay drive through these streets over and over.

The picture below is Dianne's favorite because of the garden and because it shows so much of the detail in these beautiful homes.

Time to head south.  We stopped on the way out of town so that Nancy could buy some smoked salmon for us to enjoy before dinner.  We also paused to enjoy the view of the beach at Manzanita, below --- the beach where we walk every day.

The pet picture of the day exemplifies Tequila's tendency to take after our daughters during their teenage years.  Always the last to get up.  Can I have 15 more minutes?

Hatfield Marine Science Center, Oregon Coast Aquarium, and Dinner with Retama Friends

Hi all, Dianne here.  As we explained in our last blog, both of our Canon cameras went on the fritz (our fault), so all of these photos were taken with my iPhone.  Not bad, huh?   No color enhancing; the starfish and anemones were really that colorful!  

This was "aquarium day" for us.  After our beach time with Bandido and Tequila, we hopped in the car for the short 1.7 mile trip to the Oregon Coast Aquarium.  As we drove up we said "Uh-oh...  a whole line of school buses."  We managed to time our visit during the end-of-school-year field trips!  

Oh well, we enjoy watching kids having fun and learning new things, like these kids who jammed into the hurricane simulator to experience what it would be like to stand out in a hurricane.  

We jockeyed for position with dozens of little kids around the various tanks to get photos of the exhibits.

 This eel made it easy by giving me the "evil eye" while staying perfectly still.  He was a favorite with most of the little boys in the school group.

The walk-through tube was suspended eight feet above the water floor, enabling us to look at fish swimming above, beside, and below us.

One of the most interesting things I learned from this visit is illustrated in this photo:  

It may not look very interesting until you learn that these halibut spend their lives swimming sideways to the point where the eye on the bottom side migrates to the other side of its head!  

 This placard explains the phenomenon better than I could.  The fish in the photo is showing his "blind side" toward the bottom, so the eye is gone and the color has turned white.  Next time I eat halibut, I'll remember these sideways-swimming fish with two eyes on the same side of their head! 

Another good photo taken with the iPhone, this one of the jellyfish tank. 

This sea lion was entertaining all the school kids by swimming up next to the tank to let them "pet" him:

We walked outside through the outdoor exhibits, including more sea lions  and a nature trail.  

I have trouble walking past brightly-colored flowers without a photo, so here are some poppies....

We were searching for the Giant Pacific Octopus exhibit.  Finally, in a small alcove, we joined a small group to view the octopus's antics.

We timed our visit to the Oregon Coast Aquarium so that we could go directly from there to the nearby Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Science Center for the 1:00 feeding of their Giant Pacific Octopus.

We arrived a little early for the feeding, so we walked around and viewed the exhibits.

Once again, the place was teeming with school kids, but we enjoyed watching them get hands-on experience using the Tsunami simulators.  

Soon it was feeding time, so we took our places and waited for the show.  While waiting, I snapped a shot of this sunburst starfish, who shared the tank with the octopus.

They explained to us that octopuses have the intelligence of a house cat, so to make feeding time more fun and challenging, they put its food into a toy for it to play with and eat from.  

Food is in the pink plastic toy

They also only live a few years, so each octopus on display is held in captivity for only a short time before being switched for another, to give that octopus a chance to mate and produce young in the wild. 

Despite the noise and commotion of busloads of school kids sharing the experience with us, we enjoyed our visits to the aquarium and the marine center.  Roger had spent so much of his working life participating in groups like this, either as a chaperone, teacher, or principal that he left with a renewed appreciation of retirement!

Each summer when we leave our winter home at Retama Village in Texas, we manage to cross paths with friends and neighbors from there. 

 This year is no exception, and after exchanging a few e-mails we met up with our friends Walt and Mary, who retired from the Newport area a few years ago and are back visiting their children.  We met at one of their favorite restaurants 
 (Arr Place) for a delightful meal.  We were joined by Amanda and Ted (Amanda is Walt & Mary's daughter).  What an impressive young woman!   I can see why Walt and Mary are so proud of her.

There might be a pause in our updates here, for Sunday we will move north to Nehalem Bay State Park.  We will be joined for the first week by our dear friends Jay and Nancy, who will fly out from Indiana to spend a week exploring the area with us.  We'll update when time permits! 

We want to welcome Greg and Diana Jones to the ranks of full-timers.  I've added a link to their new blog Keeping Track of the Jones' at the sidebar.  It's always fun to keep track of folks just starting out and follow their adventures.  Greg and Diana both graduated from the same high school that Roger did, Pendleton High School in Pendleton, Indiana.  We crossed paths with them at the RV Dreams Rally in Kerrville, Texas last spring.  It was one of those "small world" moments -- Roger had not seen them since high school.   Welcome to the ranks!

The pet photo of the day is one that we took when we were in the RV park at Winchester Bay.  I call it "basketing in the sun."

Winchester Bay, Oregon + Umpqua Lighthouse

Hi all, Dianne here.  Above is a view of the waves crashing into the rock jetties that we are enjoying out our big front windows here at Winchester Bay RV Park.    The small opening in the upper right is where the waves are entering the inlet from the Pacific Ocean.  We never tire of the view, because it is different every day.  

Sometimes it's calm...

Sometimes there are boats, like this Coast Guard cutter...

Many times it's rainy, drizzly, cold, and windy and looks like this...

...but even then, since we're cozy and warm inside, with a view like this it's not so bad.

Sometimes we just enjoy looking at the trees and taking it all in...

We knew when we planned this trip that arriving in late May, chances are we'd still encounter the cold, drizzly weather that Oregon is famous for, and most days we have.  What we didn't expect was the bright, beautiful flowers in full bloom, like these rhododendrons...

These daisies...

And the ubiquitous Scotch broom bushes setting the hillsides ablaze with color... 

(Roger here...Notice the ATV on the left side of the photo above.  We are in the middle of the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area.  The ATVs are everywhere.  We have a great view of them across the bay from our motor home as they drive down the road on the way to the dunes.)

Our first day in town was bright and sunny, and so we took Bandido and Tequila on a brisk walk to check out the nearby Salmon Harbor area.

 The paved walkway from our RV site winds around and past  a marina.

                                

There's no doubt that this is a fishing community...

Finally we reached the small Salmon Harbor business district.  Our first stop was in the Sportsmen's Cannery, where we purchased some frozen halibut and scallops, and two fresh crabs for our supper that were cooked and ready to eat.  

While inside, Roger noticed most people buying fish in cans (I was outside holding the dogs.)  Turns out, my friend Linda (who spent several Septembers here) said it is delicious local canned tuna, so we'll have to go back and stock up!  

Next, we walked on into town to the Sourdough Bakery and Roger held the dogs while I bought some bread, some cheese, and a ready-to-bake pizza.  I didn't quite think through how I'd walk home with a dog in one hand, a bag of bread and cheese, and a large pizza on a wobbly paper tray in the other, but somehow we made it home.  (Roger couldn't help, because he had Bandido in one hand and a bag of fresh, fragrant crab in the other, so he had problems of his own!)

Those scallops are so huge that they look like biscuits, don't they?  I think we'll be eating well while we're here.  (To Bob and Linda, I picked the Tillamook garlic and pepper cheddar cheese after re-reading Bob's blog entries from 2006-2008 about your time here.  I had never seen this variety of Tillamook before.)

Here's our supper that night:  Fresh crab, fresh asparagus, and fresh sourdough bread.  Yum!

Still taking advantage of the pretty weather, we drove over to the nearby Umpqua Lighthouse to check it out.  We didn't take time for the tour that day, but went back on a rainy, drizzly day and took the tour.  Most of the outdoor photos were taken on that sunny first day.  

These photos will look very familiar to our friends Bob and Linda (Because We Can,) for they spent several autumns in a row manning the visitor center (Linda) and giving lighthouse tours (Bob).  I read about it back when we were still dreaming of this full-time RV lifestyle, and it's a place I've wanted to visit ever since.  I was not disappointed!

Our tour guide was a former pilot named Roger, and while there's no way he could have done the tour like I imagine Bob used to, he was still very good and we learned a lot.

 I found it interesting that a large part of the time was spent keeping the giant glass prism lens clean back when it was lit using kerosene, a never-ending task due to the smoke.

The keepers wore special smocks with no buttons or buckles so that they wouldn't inadvertently scratch the beautiful glass prisms.                      

 

Of course, the highlight of the tour was to climb the stairs up to view the rare red-and-clear glass Fresnel lens, which was imported from France when the current lighthouse was built in 1894.  Here are some photos of the rotating lens:

The above photo illustrates how this lighthouse's signature beam, two-white-lights-then-one-red, is achieved by the light shining through the rotating glass.  Being from the midwest, I didn't even know that each lighthouse even had an identifying beam pattern.   

Bob and Linda urged us to be sure to go back to the lighthouse after dark to see the "light show."  I would have waited for a clear night, but our tour guide said that actually misty nights were best to get a defined view of the light rays.  Well, it was certainly misty that same evening, so we drove the short one-mile drive back to the lighthouse to get a glimpse.  

No photo could do it justice, but above is my pathetic attempt.  The colored rays were really pronounced.  What I wish you could experience were the dancing lights as they rotated and looked like fairies dancing through the surrounding trees (that's what the colored light spots are in the photo.)  It truly was a light show!

 Here's a shot of the lens at night.

I'll close with a few more photos of this beautiful Winchester Bay area of the Oregon Coast:

And a zoomed-in shot of the lonely kayaker...

The pet picture of the day illustrates just what a dog-friendly area this is.  Two things I've noticed here:  Everybody seems to have a dog.  And, they're not tiny dogs, either, but regular dogs like ours.  This photo is of the man parked behind us Memorial Day Weekend with one of his two bulldogs, who obviously adored his master.  This is my kind of guy!!

Photo taken just after the bulldog gave his master a big, sloppy kiss!