Oregon- Monday, July 10, 2017

      In some ways, this has been our last big day of driving.  True, we’ve still got a little way to go to get to Seattle, but it won’t be as long.  It seems appropriate then, that our historical trails all came together today, and we ended at the Pacific Ocean.

     We started out from our “chalet” and looked for breakfast in the town of Joseph.  We found a great place where the locals seem to eat called the Cheyenne Café.  As we noted yesterday, Joseph is really a cute little town with a lot of shops and cafes.  The town’s main industry is bronze foundries, and there are many bronze statues on the street corners as a result.  One prominent one is of the Nez Perce chief Joseph.  He is buried in the cemetery we passed.  We admired many of scenes that we passed last night, and we stopped at a place along the Wallowah River to see if the three girls could rent a raft for an hour or so.  It turned out that they weren’t available that way, but it would have been a great day and a great place for it if it had worked.   This whole valley is very lovely.

     We got back to the main roads, went over the Blue Mountains into the very dry, flat land beyond, but it also eventually took us along the Columbia River.  This was where our historical trails all came together because the Oregon Trail was overlapping with Lewis and Clark’s route here, and many signs for both marked the way.  The Columbia River valley is very picturesque and was quite amazing to drive through.  Much of the Columbia River is part of the Columbia Gorge National Scenic  Area, and both the river and the gorge walls made it a fun part of the drive.  At one point, a large bird flew across the road in front of our car, and Julie and Scott are both convinced that it was a bald eagle, based on its size as well as the flashes of white we saw from its head and tail.  (Julie thinks she also saw a second one later on.)  An impressively large, lonely mountain was in view in front of us for much of the way, and we assume it was either Mount Hood or the mountain from The Hobbit.  The weather was nice but the winds whipping up the canyon shook the car at times.  We had a late lunch for at a McDonald’s but kept driving because we had about 6 hours total to make today.

     The original plan was supposed to be to go to Mount St. Helens today, but we weren’t going to make it before the visitor center closed, so we changed our plans.  We decided to head towards Astoria, Oregon, and the Pacific Ocean.   This route still took us into the state of Washington for a short time before we turned back into Oregon’s little “bump” on its northwest corner.  Washington didn’t seem very welcoming.  There wasn’t a “Welcome to Washington” sign on the road or at the first rest stop.  We took a family selfie, but it might be the worst of the ones we’ve taken.  It was kind of a sketchy rest stop anyway.  Oregon’s sings had said “Thank you, Come back soon,” and welcomed us back again a few miles later. 

     Our first real stop was in the port town of Astoria.  Scott had read about the Astoria Column, and we found our way up steep roads and twisting streets to get to where it is perched high above the town on a very scenic overlook.  The column stands 125 feet high, and the outside of it is decorated with murals about important scenes from the history of the area, including the life of the Chinook and Clatsop peoples who lived there before the whites came, the discovery of the Columbia River by the ship Columbia in 1792, the arrival of Lewis and Clark in 1805, and the founding of Astoria as a fur trading outpost in 1811.  Astoria claims it is the first European settlement west of the Mississippi, but that seems unlikely, given that the French had a few settlements in the Louisiana Territory and the Spanish had missions and pueblos in California.  Still, it does seem like it can claim the title, “The cradle of America’s claim to the Pacific Coast.  Unfortunately, our trip to the column was quick.  There was a politician giving a speech of some kind in front of the column, and the parking lot was quite full.  We spent a moment looking out from the overlook across the harbor and mouth of the Columbia and all the way to the Pacific Ocean.  

     Scott made the mistake of suggesting another Lewis and Clark related stop, but all three of the girls quickly shut that idea down.  They wanted to see the Pacific up close, at a beach.  We set the GPS for the town of Seaside, Oregon, which seemed like a likely place to find one.   In fact, when we eventually got to Seaside we found an enormously broad beach.  It was certainly low tide and the ocean was a long way out, but even so, it was a long walk through the sands to get to put our toes in it.  A statue of Lewis and Clark called, “The End of the Trail” stood up by the hotels along the roadside.  They seemed to be saying, “Yeah, we just crossed the continent, but we don’t want to walk that long way across the beach.”  Yet, we hadn’t come this far to not go all the way.   Anna and Emma were the first to the water’s edge, of course, and were smiling the whole time.  The water was cold and the air itself was pretty chilly now.  We challenged the girls to go in up to their knees.  They both managed to get their butts wet.

     Broadway is the name of the main east/west road in town of Seaside, that ends with the statue of Lewis and Clark nicely silhouetted against the Western sky.  Along it are many shops and cafes.  We found one that we all liked and had dinner there.  It was after 6:00 when we got to the Astoria column, and after 7:00 when we got to the Seaside Beach.  An hour-long ride back to where our reservations were didn’t sound appealing to any of us.  We used a website and Julie’s phone to make new reservations here in Seaside.  We may have to pay for two rooms, as a result, but the prospects of spending more time here tomorrow and less time in the car today seemed to more than make up for that loss.