Oregon and Washington- Tuesday, July 11, 2017

     Julie and Anna were both up before breakfast in order to go back out onto the beach.  The bundled up because the temperature was in the 50s, but they were back out on the sand before 7:00.  They collected up sand dollars, and when they got back, they brought breakfast with them.

     Scott still wanted to see the nearby Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, so our first stop was there.  It includes a replica of Fort Clatsop, which was their winter encampment for the winter of 1805-1806.  When we last visited with Lewis and Clark, they were in Fort Mandan, ND, for the previous winter.  Since then the Corps of Discovery had pushed on, ultimately following the same Columbia River that we had yesterday, though we were in a car and they were in canoes, and they followed it to the Pacific, in the area where we now were.  There is a small but nice visitor center at this site, and we looked quickly through its displays,  but much of their story was already known to us.  We did not stay to watch the films here, mostly because the girls did not want to stay long, but we didn't feel cheated.  (Scott already has the Ken Burns DVDs about Lewis and Clark which he bought in North Dakota, and will watch this section tonight at the hotel.)  We went out to the fort, which felt very much like Fort Mandan, though it differed in some of the details.  The biggest difference is the setting because here we were among the tall forests of the Pacific Northwest, surrounded by towering spruce and fir trees, with huckleberries and ferns on the forest floor.  It is ironic that we are exploring the meaning of this expedition in the places where it stayed put for long periods of time, when its real importance came from how much it moved.

     We were among the first into the site when it opened this morning.  We went to the Fort Clatsop recreation and peaked in each of their rooms.  There was a ranger there, and she was ready to interpret and answer questions, but we were allowed to explore on our own and at our own pace-- another welcome difference from Fort Mandan.  We stayed for the flag raising at 9:30, when the ranger explained the significance and history of the 15 star/ 15 stripe flag and the role it played in the corps's contacts with the Native Americans.  We went through the woods, down to the canoe landing, and then back to the Visitor Center, and we were then back on the road.

     Heading back towards Washington, we made a stop at a place labelled "Twilight Eagle Sanctuary."  It had a small walkway that overlooked the estuary of the Columbia River where a pair of bald eagles are known to live and hunt.  We didn't see any in the few minutes that we were there, though.  We passed back over the Columbia River on the Lewis and Clark bridge, and marveled at the huge piles of timber waiting in the yards by the river, waiting to be shipped.  We found lunch at a nearby Pizza Hut and had the buffet.

     Our next stop was at the Mount Saint Helens Interpretive Center in Silver Lake, Washington.  We could see a view of the mountain itself, framed through a cut in the trees, but it was the east face of it.  The eruption and explosion on May 18, 1980, did the most damage to the west face of it.  We watched a movie in the interpretive center about the earthquakes and other seismic activities that led up to that disastrous eruption, the damage itself, and the period of recovery that followed.  We explored the exhibits in the visitors center that told much of the same story. There was a timeline of the events of the spring and summer of 1980, a model of the volcano that allows visitors to walk down into it to see beneath it, and a map dramatically shows how thick the ash fell in places as far away as Montana.  There are lots other places to view the mountain, but some of them had closed due to a recent collapse of a road.  We got instructions of other places to go, but we didn't want to add driving time onto the day.  We wanted to get back onto the road and up to Seattle.   We did stop at a gift shop nearby which sells even more Big Foot materials than Mount Saint Helens stuff.

     We got to our hotel near the Seattle-Tacoma Airport just a few moments after Julie's parents did.  We saw them leaving the front desk just as we arrived.   We greeted them, checked into our hotel, and settled in because we will be here for the next three nights now.   Julie and Scott went out to get the oil changed in the car.  While they were waiting at the Jiffy Lube, they spoiled their dinner a little by going to Taco Time, a Washington based taco restaurant.  After getting the car washed and gassed up for her parents, we went back to the hotel.  We had dinner with her parents at the hotel in the restaurant, a place called "O'Beers."  We then went back to our hotel to rest up again for tomorrow.