Our first morning (Thursday, 11 Sept) at Cape Disappointment State Park promised to be yet another warm, sunny, and pleasant day.

Hopefully, we were all able to take a moment to remember the victims from the cowardly terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

We took a leisurely morning stroll on the beach at our new campsite.  Here is the path to the beach – the Urban Escape Vehicle is behind the clearing you can see at the end of the path.

View towards the beach crossing the dunes.

Low tide.

Stilla with morning coffee in hand.

Stilla poses on the beach 😉

We jumped in the Silverado a little before noon with the intent to do some more exploring today.  And exploring we did!  We started out by visiting the Waikiki Beach area of the park and the long jetty which protects the Northern end of the Columbia River outlet.  The beach was very similar to the one by our site except it seemed to be littered with a lot more giant drift-wood logs.  It was the “day-use” beach for the park and had a giant parking lot for visitors.  We just viewed it from the road, having just been on our beach earlier in the morning.  This super-long jetty was built in the early 1900’s and is called the North Jetty.   You can read more about Cape Disappointment by clicking this Wikipedia link…  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Disappointment_State_Park

We gave up trying to walk all the way to the end of the jetty.  It got way too rocky towards the end and we had to carry Coach over the larger rocks.

There were many people fishing from the rocks on the jetty.  This must be a  popular spot, they were lined up all along the shore.  While there, we watched at least two people haul in what looked like large salmon.  Man, I wished I could go get my little trout fishing pole that I still have bungee-corded to the truck cargo rack 🙂

This view from the jetty shows “our” beach near the campground.  The North Head Lighthouse that we visited yesterday is on the cliffs overlooking the ocean to the left.

Large waves broke on the rocks next to us.  It can get pretty loud.

Our next stop at the top of the hill from the jetty was Fort Canby and the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center which are combined at one location.

Fort Canby was established in 1852, the state park came about in the 1950’s.  We toured inside the bunker type buildings (it was free) which housed a display of the stored ammunition for the giant guns that once were emplaced here.

Amazing what the salty sea air can do to metal over time.  This giant metal door, or what’s left of it, is on one side of the bunker entranceways.  I thought it made for a good picture.

This is where one of the guns used to be emplaced.  They were originally rigged on pulley and counterweight systems so they could peek out over the ridge and duck back down again for protection.

This is the Cape Disappointment Lighthouse.  It is 1.2 miles from the parking lot of Fort Canby and the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center and lookout.  We weren’t up for another hike so soon after walking the beach and the jetty, so we settled on just taking this picture from the neighboring lookout.

Here’s that long jetty we walked earlier as seen from above.

The Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center had an entrance fee of $5 and no dogs allowed.  So, Stilla hung around outside with Coach while I breezed through and took lots of pictures… but don’t worry, I only posted a few here 😉

This is the old North Head Lighthouse light.  These are actually stacked glass prisms that bend light into a concentrated beam so it could be seen for 20 miles offshore.  It was invented by a French guy named Fresnel and it was in service from 1856 to 1898.  These type of lenses were used in more than 250 American lighthouses back in the day.

After finishing up at the Interpretive Center, we jumped back in the SIlverado and headed back into Long Beach.

We had seen some advertisements for a Cranberry Farm / Museum tour and thought we could maybe pick some cranberries.  It wasn’t all that great… unless you really like cranberries.  And who knew that cranberries grew real low to the ground in a muddy bog?  Needless to say, we didn’t do any picking, but we did buy some Cranberry Wine and Cranberry Jam for my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

We ended up eating a late lunch at the same place as the day before.  Mainly because it was convenient and dog-friendly.

We then stopped at the World Kite Museum.  Why you ask?  Well, it’s just what us retired folks do 😉  It turned out to be pretty lame… it’s hard for me to get excited about kites.  Maybe we should have spent more time there and took them up on their free kite building session.  Anyway, I took lots of pictures again, but won’t post them here.  I did learn that kites played a large part during WWII for training the troops on aircraft identification.

We then drove around on the beach because we could.  Here’s a couple pics:

Here’s a couple complementary pics of a horse we saw on Long Beach while we were driving around trying not to get stuck.  I put these in the blog for Cheryl Mikel, because she’s nuts about horses…

Since we still had lots of nice sunny day left, we decided to head on into Astoria again.  It was only about 30 minutes away from Long Beach.  We visited Astoria back on the 24th of August when we were first on our way up North.  We did a couple day-trips while staying at the Elks Lodge in Longview-Kelso.  That’s the same place we were at when we visited Mt St Helens.  This was all before I started this blog and haven’t found the time yet to go back and post anything on those trips… maybe soon.  Anyway, we didn’t have the chance when we were there earlier to go over the giant bridge and we also missed a couple sights there in Astoria, so off we went.

The bridge is called the Astoria-Megler Bridge.  According to my friend Wikipedia, It is a steel cantilever through truss bridge that spans the Columbia River between Astoria, Oregon and Point Ellice near Megler, Washington. It is 4.1 miles long and was the last completed segment of U.S. Route 101 between Olympia, Washington and Los Angeles, California.  It is the longest continuous truss bridge in North America.

Once across the bride, we went to the Oregon Film Museum to see more about movies that were filmed in the area, such as; “The Goonies” and “Kindergarten Cop”.  Unfortunately, we got there at 5 PM just as they were closing.

They did have a replica of the SUV from “The Goonies” parked out front.  This is the car that the bad folks “The Fratellis” ran away from the cops in… complete with bullet holes.

Here’s a mansion across the street from the Film Museum.  For the lovers of Queen Anne architecture, this is the Captain George Flavel House Museum.  For more information, you can link here…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_George_Flavel_House_Museum

We then did an internet search on our iPhones and found the location of “The Goonies” house.  We didn’t get a good picture because it’s a private residence and there are signs posted all around about not stopping… so we did a U-turn on the dead-end street as Stilla tried to get a picture.   Funny what people make a destination of just because of a movie… oh well, I guess we did too.

Then we did a drive-by of the “Kindergarten Cop” school that Arnold Schwarzenegger had a scene in front of.

Finally, we stopped in the Maritime Museum parking lot to let Coach do his business.  We visited this museum the last time we were here, but this time they had a paddlewheel boat anchored.  So, I had to get a picture.

The Astoria trolley rolled by just as I was taking pictures.

We then headed back over the Astoria-Megler bridge and this time we stopped at Middle Village which Lewis and Clark named Station Camp. It’s just a small turn-out on the highway after you get off the bridge.   For more information you can link to this website here:  http://www.nps.gov/lewi/planyourvisit/stationcamp.htm

Interesting place, but it was starting to get late so I didn’t take the time to do the complete tour of the Chinook Village.  I only remember reading the the Lewis & Clark expedition arrived at this place in November 1805, calling it the end of their voyage by water, and spent 10 days or so here while searching out a better place to “Winter Quarter” which ended up being on the other side of the Columbia River.

There was one more state park that we had bypassed earlier, so we took the time to do a quick drive-thru at the Fort Columbia State Park since it was on our route back to Cape Disappointment.  We also still had our “Discovery Pass” we purchased as part of our campsite, so we figured we might as well make use of it.  This old fort has renovated the old officer’s quarters and turned them into vacation rentals.  Sorry, no additional pics… I know you were expecting them right?  If you really want more information, here’s a link:  http://www.parks.wa.gov/506/Fort-Columbia

We closed out the evening with a nice campfire and the Cranberry Wine we bought at the farm earlier.  Sorry, no pictures again.   At least, we were finally able to use some of the firewood we’ve been carrying around in the back of the pickup since Lake Tahoe.  The firewood was courtesy of cousin’s Phil and Beth, thanks guys!  There was a lot of wood left over after our week long stay with their group at Tahoe back in July.

OK, that wraps up this post… stay tuned for our Moving Day to Tillamook, OR post.  I’m almost caught up now 🙂