Heading South - A long overdue post

Edit: Updated to add pictures. Enjoy!

Hello everyone! Sorry about the delay on this, a few things just kept getting in the way of getting this post out. I don't have a lot of time now either, so I'm going to do the best I can to get this written as fast as possible. Please forgive any spelling errors, and the fact that I'm leaving out all of the pictures this time. (That part of the process really takes a fair amount of time to do. I'll see if I can't add them back in later today)

I spent the first day in Astoria exploring and resting up; at least once a week you should take the day off to give your legs some time to heal. Despite the weather report all week it didn't rain that day. I've really lucked out this trip so far, as aside from that first bad experience its been sunny and mostly cloudy every day. Anyway, with this great weather I just wandered around the town, going wherever I thought would be interesting.

The first place I went was the Astoria column. Its a pillar, placed at the highest point of the city, with murals depicting the history of the area covering it. Unfortunately it was currently undergoing renovations, so I wasn't able to actually walk up it, but it was still pretty interesting to look at! Apparently this is the second restoration that has been done on the column, and since they recently found the template the original artist used it should be better than the first restoration!

Also, I was able to get some good pictures of the area around Astoria - even with the column being off limits it was still the highest point in the town - and I was able to get a really good look at that "terrible" 4.1 mile bridge.

After that I wandered down the "Cathedral Tree" hiking trail back towards the town. It is (obviously) named after a tree that has an opening that sorta looks like a cathedral. I was underwhelmed by it, but I snapped a picture anyway.

A little while after that I found this bed of sea lions on the eastern pier of the town. They literally were covering every available surface, and making an enormous amount of noise. I wish I could have caught a video of it, but when I first went over and was staring at a few of the closest sea lions I apparently wigged a few out and caused a massive abandon ship at the end closest to me. It was pretty funny.

After that I finished the day by going to the seafood restaurant all the locals were recommending I go to. One of them in particular talked up the calamari and scallops, and said this would be the place to try them since I haven't had it yet. Both tasted OK, but since this was a fish and chips restaurant and they were deep fried I'm not convinced I've had the full experience. (You could deep fry grass and it would probably taste good).

I stayed on in Astoria the next day as well, since a tour guide I happened to meet told me that the annual "Brew Cup" was taking place starting Friday evening. (He had me at Brew). I started the day off with a light bicycle ride, and since I was staying in a hotel I was able to leave my gear back in the room!

The first place I headed was the Fort Clatsop state park. Basically this is where Lewis and Clark stopped for the winter to prepare for the trek home once they reached the pacific. It was a nice distraction, as they have reproduced the "fort" based on Lewis or Clarks notes and specifications, and it probably looked very close if not identical to the reproduction, and would have been located within meters of it.

After that I headed northward to see the shipwreck of the Peter Eredale, an English shipping vessel that washed aground in the area and was abandoned. As with the Cathedral Tree, I was a little underwhelmed, but that may have just been because I had higher expectations after having to carry my bicycle on my back over the sand to see it.

I finished off my exploration by traveling to Fort Stephens, the site of the only attack on a US military sight since the war of 1812. (I'm not going to belabor this, but this is a prime example of why I always roll my eyes a bit when people talk about the US going to "war") I snapped some pictures of the bunkers that were manned against the Japanese submarine attacking the fort, but what I thought was really interesting was the peace memorial. There's a memorial near one of the defensive gun sites that is dedicated not only to the US soldiers who defended the fort but also the Japanese soldiers who were attacking it, along with the message that "May the peace between our nations be everlasting."

After that I headed straight over to the Brew Cup! One quick thing I have to note about this before I start; at this point in the day I have eaten literally two things, a cliff bar and a small bag of peanuts.

This event was basically for showcasing the products from the local microbrewss, and I think amounts to a scaled down version of the Fremont Oktoberfest celebration I had to miss when I went on this tour. They sell you a cup for 9 dollars, and 4 ounce tasters for one dollar each, which comes to 20 dollars for a cup and 11 tasters. I went through these tasters rather fast, keeping one as a memento, which means that I consumed 40 ounces of alcohol (varying from 4 to 8 abv) with almost no food in my stomach. I'm not going to lie, I was...a bit unsteady on my feet as I left for dinner, and was in no state to make my planned blog post. I did find about 5 new beers I like in the process though!

Side note. Why are there so many IPAs up here in the west coast? I've found a few I like on this trip, but probably because everyone else's tongues have become jaded by the constant hops most feel like a sledgehammer of bitterness into the mouth. In fact at the brew cup sixteen out of the forty beers were either pale ales, IPAs or IRAs!

I got an extremely late start the next day due to me having to do my laundry, get breakfast, and finally find myself an Oregon map. When all was said and done I think I left at 3 or so, which is terribly late to start riding. (Ideally you should be leaving at 10 at the latest) This made the ride rather hard, as I didn't have a lot of time to rest up after a few hours of riding, and there were some rather severe hills on the route too. But I did eventually make it to the state park and put myself up for the night. I did catch a few nice pictures, but other than that there isn't much to say about Saturday.

Addendum : I also got to experience my first ride up one of the infamous Oregon tunnels.

And...I had a similar start on Sunday. This time it was because it was so damned cold in the morning that I just didn't want to get out of my covers, and when I did finally leave them I spent a good few hours trying to determine how on earth I was going to get myself back to Seattle and figure out how to use my camp stove without burning my hand off. (I think I can make it to Eugene, OR which has an Amtrak, but that's the furthest I can go).

This time I opted to stop in the town of Tillamook after a short ~30 mile ride. Part of this was because it gets cold after dark, and I'm just not about that life. Part of this was because I didn't want to go over the hills that follow Tillamook. Part of this was because I need to offload some things and send them back home via a local post office. And part of it was because I wanted to use a hotel wifi to write this. Everything worked out well except for the hotel wifi, which is nonfunctional. As a result I thought I'd have no option but to put the blog post off for another day until I realized that I can turn on my phone's local hotspot to at least get this much out. And now we are here.

In any event, I really need to head out right now so I can make up some of the ground I should have put down yesterday.

Thanks for reading!