Astoria

For this weekend's adventure we drove up to the Evergreen State and hit Astoria & Seaside in Oregon.  The coast has been socked in with a nasty marine layer all week so I was shocked when we got to Seaside to blue skies and pretty warm temperatures.  We first went to the Astoria Column.  It was dedicated in 1926 and is basically a really tall column that you can climb 196 stairs to the top and have a neat view of Astoria, Columbia River, Oregon, Washington, Astoria-Megler Bridge, and the ocean.  The side of the column has different frames of Astorian history and is pretty cool.  You can buy little wooden planes in the gift shop and people will through them from the top of the column and watch them circle down (with kids anxiously waiting to catch them), they had a burial canoe, and that is about it.  It is kind of a random landmark, but it is worth going to, especially on a sunny day.  We then drove up to Washington and explored Cape Disappointment which has two lighthouses and a Lewis and Clark exhibit.  On our way home we stopped in Seaside to eat our fancy peanut butter sandwiches.  Before leaving we stopped in the candy shop, The Seaside Candyman, mainly because it was playing the Candyman song from Willy Wonka and how can you resist that?  It was FULL of salt water taffy.  When we have more time I definitely want to see what some of the 170 taffy flavors are someday.  It was a really fun day, I just wish we could spend time together like that more than once every 2 weeks.  The next activities should be interesting, we are going into territory where I have never been: Mt Hood & Sauvie Island.