Road trip - Day 13

Astoria, OR to Roseburg, OR

We decided to make it a short driving day and spend our time in Astoria and at Lewis and Clark National Park. All we wanted to do was get close enough to the border to make Sacramento within striking distance.

I woke up early so I could go out and take pictures of the neighborhood near the hotel without a baby bouncing up and down on my back or anyone whining at me about being bored. I think my favorite house was this one:


It is not the prettiest but I just thought it had so much character. If you cannot tell, it is an old church that they added a house to the back of. Here is the front:



The picture of the house side really does not do it justice. The whole thing is just so funky.

Most of the houses were cute and simple.



At least half were in need of a fair to significant amount of restoration. I noticed the houses in the best condition were always the biggest ones, and all but one was a business of some kind.

Here is the very colorful Astoria Inn:



This house I really loved. This is the one that was not a business:



It was in just the wrong place and orientation on the lot for me to be able to get a picture of the whole house. I finally got to the point where I was going to have to walk pretty far away from the hotel to take any more pictures and I did not want to get a phone call that the baby was crying to be fed and have to walk 20 minutes to get to her, so I went back.

We went to the Maritime Museum first. It was really nice. I wish the kids had let me read even half of the displays. After that we walked to the Flavel House Museum. It is this huge Queen Anne home built by a prominent family that has been restored and furnished as it would have looked when it was built. The girls really liked it. We had lunch at a great brew pub called Fort George Brewery. We loved that the waiter had a Goonies t-shirt on.

On our evening walk the night before, we spotted a winery, Shallon Winery. I had been looking for something unique to take my friend who was taking care of our cat for us. After lunch we went there. It was a riot. The owner was something like the soup nazi from Seinfeld. I do not mean it in a bad way. I found him totally hilarious. I am certain our kids were making his day even more cranky. Laura spotted his zen sand garden and thought it was a sandbox, and messed it all up. Mae was just cranky by then and kept fussing through his spiel. BUT... his wine was excellent! We bought several bottles. You have to go there if you are in the area. Oh, and he ships most of them so you could take my word for it and just take a gamble.

After the winery we drove up to the Astoria Column. It was built in the 1920s by the Astor family. It is 500 ft tall and sits on a hill above town.



Masculine, isn't it? It makes me wonder about those poor Astor men and needing to compensate for something.

The only way up to the top is a spiral staircase that seems to go on forever. We did all make it to the top. I got up there to realize that I seem to have developed something like Vertigo. It was pretty disturbing. I just felt sick and did not want to be up there and certainly not look down. I did manage to snap a couple of pictures, one of the view south, and one of the view northwest.





I got off the top of the tower as fast as I could. After such a long hike up the stairs, I was pretty disappointed to have spent such a short time up there. The day was moving on faster than it felt and it was time to say goodbye to Astoria and head south. We agreed we want to go back, hopefully without kids next time, and spend more time there.

Just a few miles from Astoria is Lewis and Clark National Park. The pair ended their journey at Fort Clatsop. It has been reconstructed on the original site.



We only had time to walk through the visitor's center and take a ranger guided walk around the fort. We drove down the coast for a while after that and then made our way back to I-5.