Road trip - Day 12

Bellingham, WA to Astoria, OR

Wednesday came up faster than I expected and it was time to hit the road and head home. Our destination was Astoria, someplace I've wanted to go ever since I saw The Goonies as a kid. We lucked out with a totally uneventful drive.

We stopped for lunch in Olympia. The AAA guidebook pointed us to an excellent Indian buffet. Yum. We decided to go see the state capitol. Oh boy does Olympia have some messed up traffic flow! Seriously, what the heck is up with that town? Not only could we not find anyplace to park near the capitol, but once we got in to the streets that lead to the parking, we could not get out. All of them were one-way leading back to the center. I think it took us 15 minutes to get out of that block. Then we tried to drive to the AAA office to get a guidebook for N. Cal and came across a roundabout. Why do they do this? Hasn't anyone learned American drivers cannot handle these things? After looping twice ("look kids, Big Ben, Parliment") we ended up on a street with some kind of median slalom going on. We finally get to the street we need, but no left turns. Argh!! So we had to turn right and Tom was so frustrated by this point, he just made a U-Turn right there (even though it looked like you were not supposed to). Oh yea, and my two picts of the Washington capitol building did not come out so great... probably because I jumped out of the car, snapped them, and got back in.

The rest of the drive was much nicer. We crossed the Columbia in Longview, WA and took Hwy 30 along the river to Astoria. Astoria was just as I thought it would be. If you are an architecture junkie, especially old houses, you'd love it. I could have walked the neighborhoods all day.

Astoria was founded on fur trading but it was built up around fishing and canning. By the 1970s, all the canneries were moving. Bumblebee finally closed its last cannery. We talked to a couple of locals who said the town in the 80s was a sad place. In the mid-90s, Burlington Northern stopped freight rail service as well. Almost all the old canneries are now gone.



After getting a place to stay, we took a walk along the riverfront next to the train tracks.



We passed the old Astoria station.



Like so many buildings in Astoria, the station was beautiful, but sitting, rotting, in need of someone to notice it again. As we were walking, we kept spotting a strange sight.





A sign along the riverfront finally shed some light on these. The entire downtown of Astoria had once been built out over the river on docks and piers. In 1922, a fire destroyed nearly all of downtown. All that is left are these clusters of piles. The Maritime Museum has pictures of the old downtown and it was really an amazing sight.

The whole town was so different from home. At home, we ooh and ahh at the handful of streets near the old town centers where the older houses can be found. Most are beautifully restored, all are prohibitively expensive. In Los Osos, it is nearly impossible to find a home more than 35 years old. In Astoria, it was almost impossible to find anything built in the last 80 years. Most of the buildings were in states of arrested decay or active decay.



It would be sad but the town is clearly on a upswing. I am certain its biggest saving grace is being located on the coast. Slowly, people seem to be fixing up the beautiful old buildings.



Bob Vila could do a whole season of This Old House here. I was imagining buying up a bunch of them and fixing them up.