And now...the long un-awaited conclusion to the tales of my vacation adventure!
After our film museum fun, we hit the road for Portland. The road to get back over to I-5 (no scenic route for the ride home) took us through the corner of Washington, so that was about as far into Washington as we got. We didn't spend much time in Portland, either. We did stop to eat at a Jersey Mikes, but the tent cities and homeless zombies wandering everywhere in Portland led us to change our plans of exploring Portland. We quickly jumped back on the road and drove south toward our last reservation in the thriving metropolis of Yreka, California (which, according to Google Maps, was a good five or six hour drive from Astoria).
As we drove, we realized that we were going to arrive in Yreka much earlier than we had planned and we didn't expect to find a single thing to do in Yreka, so we used the Internet to find anything to see on the way home. The wife found....a mall. Shocking.
We stopped at the Rogue Valley Mall in Medford, Oregon. It was, for the most part, as unexceptional a mall as you could imagine. But there's a reason I'm mentioning this mall - I acquired a memorable item here: a 45 record (single) from The Police with Wrapped Around Your Finger and a live version of Tea in the Sahara (both of which I already have on multiple CDs and even still have on cassette somewhere). What's funny is that I haven't had a record player in 30 years. It's going to go in a frame and hang on a wall...if I can find a wall to put it on. Realistically, it will probably go in a box in the garage with my framed Ghost in the Machine album.
We also had some Fro-Yo in the mall and the little woman bought some stuff at a department store. You know - all those things you can't do at home. We did manage to kill a couple of hours in the mall. Another nice plus to buying stuff in Oregon - there's no sales tax!
We arrived in Yreka as it was getting dark, which was what we'd planned. The town turned out to look a little more interesting as we made out way to the motel than we'd expected, so it might have actually been worth at least a little exploring, but we arrived too late and had a long drive the next day - so Yreka was nothing more than a sleep-over stop.
Our last day turned out to be a marathon drive from Yreka all the way home (initially, I'd planned to stop one more time and break the drive up into two five or six hour drives). We saw a few things that we would have definitely stopped for on the first leg of the trip, but didn't stop for any of them on the way home. The Mount Shasta area (mountain and town) and Lake Siskiyou were very scenic and well worth a stop...but we didn't.
The LA traffic was much less bad than we expected, so around 9 hours after we left, we arrived back home - ready to sleep in our own beds.
It feels like I left out about half of what I'd rambled on about the first time I wrote about the trips (before losing it due to not realizing TEXT data types in MySQL had surprising limited capacity). Maybe it will come to my damaged brain later...but probably not. I was going to share a whole bunch of bridge photos the wife took from within the car. Maybe I'll still do that one of these days. We'll see...
Speaking of record players
With my shiny new (very old, actually) record in hand, I was stoked when I saw a cool record player in an email from Costco. I did my due diligence and made sure it was really a good price (it was at least $50 cheaper than the next lowest price I could find anywhere online), checked reviews to make sure it was a decent-quality electronic device, and then ordered it.
It arrived last week and I quickly popped my new record on it. It included an adapter for 45 records, so that worked out. And I also re-discovered something I'd forgotten about records: there a WHOLE LOTTA noise when you play them. Hissing, popping...all kinds of wonderful distractions from the music. Some of that could be due to this record being over 20 years old. I'm planning to pick up a new record soon to see if that makes a difference.
In the meantime, the record player (also includes an AM/FM radio and USB port for USB input) is a lovely decoration in the living room. One drawback I've noticed - if you leave it plugged in, but essentially turned off, there's a constant hum/buzzing. I haven't done much troubleshooting to figure it out yet, so it might be an easy thing to fix. Who knows?
And now for something unrelated to the Vacation adventure...Emeli's new site!
I mentioned a few posts back that I was working on a web site to showcase my amazingly talented daughter's artistic abilities. The site is live, though still a little bit of a work-in-progress: EmmaMaridith.com.
And speaking of Emeli's creativity, here's the card Emeli made me for Father's Day. Emeli is so amazingly creative, thoughtful, and sweet. And best of all, she's a fan of Pirates (not just the movies, but in general).
Emeli's creativity blows my mind.
I've read a bunch of books I want to talk about and have some other non-book rants chambered and ready to go, but I think this is probably enough for today. Maybe I'll share the rest in a couple of days...
A noteworthy eBook before I return to my vacation ranting
No Direction Home
I mentioned a Mike Sheridan eBook I'd read and enjoyed last year, Winter's Edge. Winter's Edge is a post-apocalyptic novel set deep into the post-apocalypse. This week I finished reading another Mike Sheridan eBook, No Direction Home, and I'm happy to report that I enjoyed this story every bit as much as Winter's Edge, and probably even more because it wasn't set in a fictional, no matter how likely or real-feeling, future, but the scary-enough present.
The characters are fairly well-developed, the prose flows well, and the editor did a good job. There were a few clumsy passages here and there, but it is, overall, a well-written book - something that's pretty hit-and-miss with many eBooks I've read.
There's another semi-apocalyptic eBook story, Race Wars by DW Ulsterman that I mentioned a while back which is similar in many ways to No Direction Home, but the underlying premise for the horrific events in each story is completely different so don't be dissuaded from reading No Direction Home if you've read Race Wars (which is an on-going story that I've lost some interest in because of its odd a-few-chapters-at-a-time release schedule). Premise-wise, this story is also very similar to The Last ship TV series, though No Direction Home is told from the perspective of civilian survivors, not those in the military who are relatively safely isolated from the diseased population centers.
No Direction Home follows several groups of people (this is the primary similarity to Race Wars), ranging from wide-eyed and innocent to vicious and horrible, as they deal with an Ebola-on-steroids illness labelled "vPox" that wipes out most of the population of the United States. We're left unsure of just how badly the rest of the world has been affected by the quickly-spreading illness, though a few of the characters are European visitors to the U.S. (Jonah, probably my favorite character, seems a more authentic version of my mental image of Mad Sweeney than we're getting in the American Gods adaptations). Our protagonists are a handful of the tiny percentage of immune people in the population who are not affected by the illness. Similar to The Walking Dead and One Second After (mentioned briefly last year), the events in this story take place in the southern U.S./southeast U.S. states. No Direction Home is very much like the later seasons of The Walking Dead, where zombies have almost become an afterthought and it's just survivor on survivor crime in a world full of stuff, ripe for the taking (another common theme in The Walking Dead). We see the best and the worst in people who find themselves in a world without rules or any grown-ups who will tell them no.
Here's a passage with my favorite character not long after the world falls apart...
Jonah and Colleen walked north up Kirkman Road. They were on their way back to the Sun Ray after spending the past hour in the Publix supermarket. Each wheeled a large trolley in front of them, laden with the provisions they would need for their journey.
Many of the stores they passed had been looted, though most still looked to have plenty of stock left inside. It indicated to Jonah just how few survivors there must be. Earlier, he'd glimpsed a few of them scurrying across the deserted streets. Most appeared to be on their own, a few in pairs. Some wore surgical masks, who Colleen surmised mightn't be immune to the disease but rather had barricaded themselves in their homes to avoid it.
On the way to the supermarket, however, he'd spotted a group of four men that had turned down a side street and disappeared from view. Something about the way they'd strutted down the middle of the road made him wary. Jonah could recognize a skanger a mile away, and he was thankful that, with their backs to him and Colleen, they hadn't spotted the couple. Colleen was right. Tomorrow, their top priority would be to get to a gun shop and arm themselves. In the meantime, in his shopping cart was a baseball bat he'd grabbed from a sports store along the way. A Louisville Slugger, the label said. Sounded good to him.
"Another thing, love," he said, their trolleys rattling noisily down the street. "When we leave town, let's head north. I want to get someplace where I'm not sweating like a pig twenty-four hours a day. Agreed?"
Sadly, the story ends before much has happened beyond bringing all the divergent groups together into a common location in Tennessee. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, Eastwood (which we are treated to a brief taste of at the end of No Direction Home). There's also a excised chapter available for free from the author, which provides background on vPox - along with another post-apocalyptic novel, Outzone Raider - which I haven't read (the excised chapter or Outzone Raider).
Warning: There is a fair bit of profanity in this book - the thugs communicate as thugs do - and a light dusting of sexual content, though nothing graphic. This isn't really a book for children, though I'm sure teens with an interest in post-apocalyptic survival would enjoy it.
We started our first full day of exploring Astoria with a trip to the Flavel House museum (pronounced "Fluh-vell" if you want to avoid sounding like a knucklehead...as I did). From the exterior, it looks an awful lot like Disenyland's Haunted Mansion, minus all the graves and mausoleums on the grounds. On the inside, it also looks an awful lot like the Haunted Mansion - or at least what the Haunted Mansion would look like if it was a real place and you could get off the ride and wander around.
There's a video in the Flavel House Carriage house that gives you background7 on the Flavel family and especially George Flavel, the patriarch of the family. As for the house, the one part of the house that is off-limits is the tower that George used to climb up inside to spy on everything and everyone in town. It's still there, but it's roped off (so I guess you could get up there if you were rebellious enough). The museum house is a little pricey for what you actually get at $6 a head, but is still an interesting piece of history to explore. I'd recommend checking it out if you find yourself in Astoria.
Here are some photos of the exterior of the Flavel House museum. It's pretty spooky.
And here are a few photos of the interior of the Flavel House museum. It would be a spooky place to stay the night, but the craftsmanship of everything in this house is super-impressive. They certainly don't put anywhere near the same effort into building now that they did back in the late 1800s.
After the Flavel House, we headed over to the Bridgewater Bistro11 for some lunch. There aren't a ton of fast-food places in Astoria, so you'll probably be eating in a lot of real restaurants during your stay. The Bridgewater Bistro was a much more upscale restaurant then the previous night's venue. There is a ton of seating and pretty much all the seats have a great view of the water and the Astoria-Megler bridge that crosses the Columbia River (more about that in a minute). The food was delicious. I only had a cheeseburger and fries...but man, was that a cheeseburger! All the ingredients are locally sourced and you can really taste the difference. Emeli had a cheeseburger with a gluten-free bun and said she couldn't tell the difference from a normal bun. her bun did actually look like a normal bun, unlike most of the crumbly, dry, horrible gluten-free breads we've seen. Satiated, we continued our explorations.
Astoria actually has a couple of theaters. One, in the middle of downtown , apparently only has one screen and plays older movies. The other, on the eastern side of town, is newer and has multiple screens. This is the theater we set out for to see Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, a fine piece of cinematic fare. I'd blather on about the movie, but there's still too much trip-related blathering to be done...
After the movie, we set out to see a few more things before it got too dark to really appreciate them. First, we headed over to the Oregon Film Museum (yep, it's a real thing), which is pretty much just a Goonies museum with just a few non-Goonies points of interest. Unfortunately, it had already closed for the day, so we had to postpone that adventure for the following day. We decided to go check out the shops in Astoria's little downtown area and discovered that by this time (almost 5pm) pretty much every shop on the main street was closed. We found a music shop (instruments), a used book store, and an arcade/comic book store that looked like fun...alas, 'twas not to be. And on top of everything being closed, it was raining. So we were getting a little damp.
We did finally find a bookstore that was still open and popped in to see if there was anything of interest to be found. Man, I've never been anywhere that was more infested with the stench of hippies. From the incense (both in use and for sale) to the hippy posters stuck to the ceiling, it was thoroughly hippified. We looked around for a few minutes, but none of us really found anything worth picking up, so we headed back out into the now-non-rain on a quest to find some ice cream.
We'd parked near a shop with both "ice cream" and "chowder" painted on the columns beside the front door, so it wasn't a very auspicious beginning. Once we were inside the shop, we realized out initial instincts were correct - this place was even more hippy-stench-filled than the bookstore. We backed out slowly (never turn your back on a hippy, if you know what's good for you), and set out again.
We discovered Frites & Scoop just down the road. It was definitely a much cleaner and much-less hippy-infested ice cream shop. We were offered multiple samples of different flavors with fancy little metal spoons at the proprietor's insistence. And they were all amazing, but I settled on Hokey Pokey (the girls each had something different). I didn't try a frite, so I don't know how those were, but they were probably delicious.
Our next destination was the Astoria Column. So we drove up the crazy winding road through cool neighborhoods full of both interesting and haunted-looking houses. At the top of the hill, we could see in every direction for miles. the tower was another 125 feet above the level of the parking lot, but nobody seemed interested in climbing the 164 step spiral staircase to the top, so we didn't see anything from the tip-top of the column. On the way back down, we saw some wildlife.
I almost forgot about one of our movie-related stops. On our way up to ther Astoria Column, we drove past the elementary school used in Kindergarten Cop and took a few photos. It is, apparently, a real school that's full of real...well, kids.
We were trying to see everything else from our list of "Amazing things to see in Astoria" before it got dark, so we drove around looking for the Doughboy monument, but couldn't find it8. As we circled around looking for it, we decided to drive across the Astoria-Megler bridge into Washington. A word about the Astoria-Megler bridge - I don't usually get nervous driving over bridges, but this one had me feeling a little on edge. This sucker is tall. And narrow. And scary, at least until you get about halfway across the 4-mile bridge and it drops down to water level. Man, that would be a bad place to be when the tsunami hits9.
There wasn't a whole lot to see on the Washington side of the bridge. Mainly just trees and mossy dock piles (without the docks) and abandoned boats pulled up on the bank of the Columbia. But on the way back to the bridge (after driving down the road for a few miles with nothing new to see, we decided to turn back) we found the Dismal Nitch! And a couple of dismal hoboes sleeping against the wall of the Dismal Nitch restroom.
As far as the Dismal Nitch goes, it's basically a cove where Lewis & Clark were stuck for weeks because they couldn't get past it. It would have been pretty impassable back in the day with no roads, a lot more trees and the wrong weather, fer sure. Yeah history!
The boats on the Astoria side were in much better condition (which is an unfair comparison, since there's an actual town there).
We returned to our Motel and Emeli entertained everyone in the Atomic Motel lobby for an hour or so. I suspect these performances were probably her favorite part of the trip.
Day seven: Oregon Explorations, day 3
Our final goal for Astoria - despite the long list of forts, shops, and the other museum we hadn't made it to yet - was the Oregon Film Museum. We had purchased an "all-access" pass to the three Astoria museums when we visited the Flavel House museum because it cost the same as admission to two of them anyway, and we knew we wanted to go to the Film Museum...so why not10?
As I mentioned, the Oregon Film Museum is pretty much just a Goonies museum with a few non-Goonies-related items. The museum itself is an old jail that was used to film the opening scenes of The Goonies. It's divided into three main sections: the hot sets, the jail cells, and the gift shop.
The hot sets were probably the most fun. There are three film sets and you get to film five takes of yourself using any of the sets. You pick a scene from different Astoria-filmed movies to read on the teleprompter - we picked scenes from Kindergarten Cop, The Shining, Point Break, and The Goonies. I can believe I didn't take a single photo of the hot sets. We were just having too much fun. Sadly, some of the scenes we filmed didn't record because we didn't know what we were doing. And the ones we did film are going into the vault and will never to be shared with anyone because they are so ridiculous. You can sign up to get an email with a link to all the videos you created (MOV format).
Two of the three jail cells were filled with Goonies memorabilia, and the other one you can go look around. The other room was filed with Goonies character cutouts and a Goonies arcade game. The gift shop had a bunch of Goonies stuff and a little bit of stuff from the other Astoria movies.
I was almost done with this long, monotonous sorory about our adventure, but then I realized this post is already a million miles long, so I decided to save the rest for the next post. That will be the end, I promise. And maybe I'll even mention a thing or two other than details of my Excellent Adventures on the PCH.
7 Speaking of background of the Flavel family, I was provided with a few interesting stories from Barb, at the Atomic Motel, when she was giving me a gigantic list of things to see. First was a story about George being 30 years older than his bride, who was 14 when he married her. The video in the Flavel Carriage house does admit to him being 20 years older which is still weird, but only just a little less weird than 30 years would be. The other story was about the son of George Flavel being nuts. He apparently went after his mother with a butcher's knife and notched the banister of the stairway as he was threatening her (but not in the Flavel house - this was in some other house). And had a crazy temper, killing a local and then escaping conviction by hiding out in Europe for many years. There was no mention of either at the Flavel museum, so who knows if they were true. But I like to think they were...
8 We actually did find it, but since I didn't know what I was looking for, we kept looking for something completely unlike what I thought I was looking for.
9 You will see a ton of signs all long the 101 through Oregon that warn you about being in a tsunami danger zone.
10 It's a great idea! Unless, of course, you don't have plans to spend more than one whole day in Astoria and don't make it to the museum before it closes the full day you're there. If you're a miser like me, you will force yourself to go to the museum on a day that you had planned to spend doing nothing more than driving...
11There's a bar or restaurant somewhere in Astoria (maybe it was the Bridegwater Bistro - I'm not sure) that is rumored to still have a trapdoor in the floor that was used by press gangs to shanghai people into the local fleets' crews. Legend has it that the room beneath this establishment is haunted and the locals will not willingly go into this space alone. Or at all, if they can help it.
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