Oregon- Astoria and Cape Disappointment

The next day we went north.  Astoria has some amazing views!  But the town is again ghetto.  Gosh I sound like a snob.  It's fine, just older an run down in a lot of places.  One of the highlights of Astoria is there was a naval station there and the parking lot had cars from all over.  Let me explain, in preparation for the road trip, Dylan had printed out a license-plate bingo sheet and we had been checking out all the license plates we could find.  We even parked next to a van with a Hawaii license plate at our resort.  We were sure that was one he would never see.  So after he found that, he was even more determined to find all 50 states.  We found an Alaska at the naval site and a handful of others we didn't have yet.

I had read there was a dock the sea lions had taken over that was similar to the one we saw last year, but we never did find it.  We thought we heard barking when we were up at the tower but the directions online from whatever random website I found did not lead us anywhere with sea lions.  Oh well.  Again, we had already seen that last year but it was so entertaining we wanted to see it again.

We head for the tower, the main landmark of Astoria.  It is up on a hill and it has spectacular views.  unfortunately, the tower itself was closed and we couldn't climb up to the top.  Stupid Rona!  The views were still great, but I was disappointed.  We were interested how they made the tower with all the pictures.  It was pretty impressive.

We were at the tower for awhile because Ryan was doing some work, so the kids were looking around the gift shop and stuff.  We wanted to get some souvenirs but we decided to get sweatshirts and stuffed animals (see later post).  When we finally left the hill, we needed food.  Here we go again.  We had heard Pigs and Pancakes was good, though I was skeptical.  We pulled in and it was packed, smelled like smoke, and overall reminded me of Denny's.  I didn't want to wait for a table, and I also can't eat eggs and I don't want pure carbs and sugar like pancakes for lunch.  So I convinced everyone to find a different place.  The new place we went to was really nice, not crowded and noisy, didn't smell like smoke, and had fish tacos.  And was probably a lot more money than the other place would've been but you know.  It also had this view...

We decided to cross the bridge into Washington and check out a state park over there.

Cape Disappointment was aptly named, lol.  Okay, so it was named because the English Captain (John Meares) that named it was trying to find the entrance to the river but couldn't find it.  But we felt it was named appropriately after our adventures there.

To start off, I had found a hike that seemed like it would be good for our family.  We entered the park, paid the fee to get in, and found the parking lot.  Then we headed up the trail that led off from the parking lot.  It was pretty steep for about 1/4 mile and then we came to this interesting little bomb shelter thing.  And that was the end.  Turns out the trailhead for the hike I had looked at was across the street from the parking lot. Lame.  But we had a good time exploring this creepy old building!  There were no signs explaining what this was.  But we did some research on google later and found out it was from world war 2 and it was a gun battery used to defend the Columbia river.  There were these round things in the ground on both sides of it that must've been the huge guns.  And the building was used to store the ammo and control mechanisms, and a telephone I guess.  Pretty interesting stuff.  The kids liked it.

Up to this point, the kids had been happy about the hike.  We ran back down the hill and started on the actual hike.  And about halfway through that we had a couple whiny kids.  Ryan was in flip flops, which I guess he just figured any hike that the 5-year-old could handle would be easy enough for him to do in flip flops.  It wasn't a difficult hike, but there were a lot of ups and downs and tree roots and such.  There were also a lot of snakes, lol.  Kylee thought that was cool.  Dylan was a little more hesitant.  But they didn't bother us.  Ryan convinced Sadie and Kaden to be happy by telling them he would give them a skittle for every hill they climbed.  It was up and down the whole time so Kaden was just running counting every hill.  He also said he would take away Skittles for any whining.  Kaden did great but Sadie got super cranky.  I thoroughly enjoyed the trail and the forest.

We started seeing the ocean in the distance through trees here and there.  And we finally came up out of the trail... into a parking lot.  Huh?  The kids were like, "we could have drove here?!"  Okay, I did not know that.  BUT the point was to hike so I would've wanted to hike anyway.  It is a little disappointing to hike for an hour and then come to a parking lot with all these other people.  One benefit of hiking is going to remote areas.  Sadie was pretty ticked.  She was not wanting to be in a picture so I just had her take the picture for us.  

 I offered to run the trail back and get the car and drive up to get everyone.  Ryan said that would probably be best because of Sadie and Kaden.  I asked Dylan if he wanted to run with me and he said sure.  So I got the keys from Ryan and we headed back.  It was really fun actually.  Dylan was a crack up though.  He kept saying I was slow and he was like, "do you run this slow with your friends all the time?"  I tried to explain that I don't sprint up the hills.  He was nervous that the rest of the family was going to be waiting on us for a long time and they would be mad.  Because I'm sure Dylan would be super impatient if it was him waiting.  He kept up a pretty good pace.  He often said he was waiting on me but conveniently getting a break at the same time.  By the end it was more flat and he was getting really tired.  But he stayed with me.  I was impressed!  Then I asked him for the keys and said, "didn't Dad give them to you."  I had him going for a minute.  And then I laughed and laughed.  We made good time, but we were trying to hurry.  We jumped in the car and I started driving from memory of what I had seen on the map when I looked at it.  But we had a problem because I couldn't get any service to load the map.  I went the way I thought I was supposed to go, but it looked like I left the park boundaries.  And there were no signs saying the lighthouse was anywhere close.  I got nervous and tried to call but Ryan didn't answer.  Eventually we came to a sign and I had been going the right way.  We pulled in and the rest of them were nowhere in sight.  I guess they weren't dying after all.  When they showed up they said we were pretty quick.  We got a little turned around trying to head back to Oregon too.  As best I can tell, we could've driven to that lighthouse without ever entering the park.  There was another lighthouse and small trail in the park that was more popular but part of it was closed due to Covid so that's why I didn't bother trying that one.  We made our way back to Seaside and had some chill time.