what about the plastic animals?

Breakfast on Pier 39

Legend has it that the tuna fish sandwich was invented, or at least popularized, in Astoria.  Perhaps the first sandwich was made here on Pier 39 where Bumble Bee once had a cannery.  Today the pier hosts a cannery museum, a Rogue Ale pub, offices and the Coffee Girl coffeehouse. 

They brew an excellent chai at the Coffee Girl, the toasted (shudder!) non-NYC bagel was piled high with lox, and the view from the end of the pier can't be beat.  Is it normal for tugboats to sit that low in the water?

Ha!  This isn't going to mean anything to anyone other than myself but that exclamation means I just found a bunch of photos that I was looking for a couple of days ago.  There's more to come from Astoria but I have to go out of sequence to hit an anniversary on Saturday.  Believe it or not but there sometimes is a plan to what gets posted here.

Oregon Film Museum

The most famous building in Astoria.

The Commodore Hotel

Someone in Astoria is confused!  The Commodore was Cornelius Vanderbilt, not John Jacob Astor.  The Commodore Hotel doesn't look like much from the outside but the interior is pretty hip.  I stayed in a small room with a shared bath down the hall.  There's a better photo on the bottom left of the hotel's website.  I'd definitely stay there again should I ever return to Astoria.

Astoria Column

Five years after the Lewis and Clark expedition spent a winter at the mouth of the Columbia River John Jacob Astor's fur company founded Fort Astoria, making Astoria the oldest American town on the West Coast.  The celebration of Astoria's bicentennial was just a couple weeks after I had visited.

The Astoria Column is on top of a steep hill on the south side of Astoria.  The column was the last in a series of monuments put up in the 1920s to honor explorers of the West.  The monuments were the idea of Ralph Budd, who wanted to drum up business for his Great Northern Railway.  Budd got Vincent Astor, great grandson of John Jacob to pay for the monument.

The local tradition in Astoria is to buy a balsa wood airplane at the little shop near the foot of the column and fly that plane from the observation deck on top.  But what do you do when you visit in the off-season and the little shop has closed for the day?  Why you rely on the generosity of three really drunk guys, who've gathered up many previously flown planes, to give you a plane or two to fly.  They actually insisted I fly the first one because I made the trek all the way to the top of the column.  They climbed the stairs too, so I'm not sure why that entered into the decision other than they were really drunk.

Starting Point and Destination

On May 14th 1804 the expedition led by Captain Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left the St. Louis area and headed up the Missouri River.  A year-and-a-half later, November 20th, 1805 they reached the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Columbia River. 

On April 19th, 2011 I saw the mouth of the Columbia from the Astor Tower high above Astoria, Oregon.  Fort Clatsop, where the Lewis and Clark expedition camped for the winter, is just off to the left.  A little more than two months later, on July 1st, I was sitting beneath the Gateway Arch, the monument to the westward expansion of the United States.

Frustratingly I did not have enough time to visit the Lewis and Clark sites near Astoria.  However, there was plenty of other things to see and do in Astoria.

Stuff and Things

Sellers of only the finest various and sundry items in Garibaldi, Oregon.

Home of the Cheesemakers

Driving into Tillamook I went by the high school, which has "Home of the Cheesemakers" proudly written over one of the entrances.  It struck me that I could use a t-shirt or a hat with "Tillamook Cheesemakers" on it.  I had to stop for gas anyway, so while I was downtown I went to every store that might sell school t-shirts. 

No luck.

I went into a consignment store, thinking it was a small town department store, and the very nice woman in there searched every rack of clothing for me -even the little kids racks and the very large adult racks.  She pointed me to the local screen printer but he was closed for the day or for a while, she wasn't sure because he doesn't keep regular hours.  I searched a couple of more stores on the edge of town but had no luck.

To assuage my disappointment I went to the Tillamook Cheese factory and went on their self-guided tour.  About 1.7 million pounds of milk enter the factory each day and 167,000 pounds of cheese leave.  At the end of the tour you can sample several varieties of cheese curds.  There is also a highly efficient ice cream bar, which further assuaged my disappointment.  Later I remembered that I had forgotten to go back to the high school to take a picture of the "Home of the Cheesemakers" entrance.

A Beach Somewhere on the Oregon Coast

I wasn't sure where this was when I wrote the title but now I see these are from Bob Straub State Park in Pacific City, Oregon.  That's Haystack Rock in the top photo.  It was a nice beach.  I had it almost all to myself, probably because it was 50 degrees out and the wind was blowing a good 20 mph.

The "D" River

That's the D River in Lincoln City, Oregon.  All of it.  The good people of Oregon claim that the D is the shortest river in the world.  The bridge I was standing on is over the edge of Devil's Lake.   From lake to ocean the river is 120 feet long at high tide.  The tree stumps in the river mark the high tide line.  Lincoln City hosts huge kite festivals twice a year at the D River beach.

Visiting the D didn't take too long.  It was after noon and I was hungry so it was off to lunch in Lincoln City.  Since I had a long way to go I wanted a quick lunch.  Urbanspoon told me a pizza place and a sandwich shop that I would drive be on the way out of town would be my best bets.  I pulled up to the pizza place and saw that it had no customers.  Not a good sign at lunch time.  The sandwich place was likewise deserted.  A Thai restaurant that wasn't listed in Urbanspoon had several customers. 

That was a good sign! 

That was a misleading sign!  It was easily the worst meal on the trip.  Tom Yum soup is supposed to look like this.  Note the shrimp!  Note the absence of broccoli!  Note the absence of grayish-brownish-greenish broccoli!  The soup was horrible and the chicken curry wasn't much better.  It was time to get back in the car, head up the coast, and find a beach to explore. 

Abe Lincoln on a Horse

 

In planning my trip I saw had to visit Lincoln City because they've got an Abe Lincoln on a Horse statue.  We've got one of those on campus!  I took a picture today so you could see him hidden away in the apple orchard.  There's also this post from 2006 that sort of explains the origin of the sculpture.

Lincoln City is on the Pacific and was incorporated on my fourth birthday when three neighboring cities and two unincorporated towns were consolidated.  The statue was given to the city in the same year so I'm guessing that it was a gift to honor the newly named city. 

Abe and his horse aren't any more visible in Lincoln City than they are on the Lamont campus.  Instead of getting pride of place on the Pacific Coast Highway, Abe sits in the back corner of the Elks Lodge parking lot two blocks away from the PCH.  There are at least two other copies of the sculpture.  One is at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse (to which the sculptress and her husband also donated 15,000 acres in the Adirondacks) and the other in front of the Bethel, Connecticut Public Library.

I arrived in Lincoln City about noon.  It was a bright, sunny day which meant I had to photograph the sculpture looking directly into the sun.  But for the magic of image editing software the top two photos would be silhouettes of Lincoln and his horse.