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.
When we last heard about our daring trio, they were on their way to the mythical land of Astoria...
Day five continued, still day one in Oregon After several more hours of driving though the never-ending greenery, we finally arrived in Astoria, Oregon - our northernmost destination. We had originally planned to go as far as Vancouver, but couldn't get passports in time so we scuttled the Washington/Canada part of the adventure.
We checked into our motel, The Atomic motel, and after chit chatting with the owners for a while, we went out to a restaurant they recommended. The food was okay (the fish was tasty, but deep-friend and too greasy for my empty stomach), but the floor of the restaurant was the real attraction. The restaurant is on piles over the water and had a small glass floor section with a viewing area of the water below. And lying on some boards above the water was a couple of Sea Lions. There was also a Sea Lion under the bridge we walked across to get into the restaurant, which was pretty cool.
I think the Atomic Motel deserves a brief description before I continue. Although it wasn't really comparable to the Best Western in Garberville, it was definitely the most unique place we stayed on our adventure. The whole place, from the lobby to the rooms, was decked out in a 1950's motif. The lobby has old TV shows playing on its big definitely-not-a-50s LCD TV. There are cut-outs of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra standing in the corner of the lobby. The furniture and colors are possibly more 60s than 50s, but definitely a page out of history. And there was a guitar on a stand in the lobby, which Emeli admired as we were checking in. The Managers/owners, Barb and Dan, encouraged Emeli to play a song when they saw her admiring it, so she spent quite a bit of time in the lobby entertaining everyone with the songs she knew by heart (or almost knew by heart - Blackbird was their favorite).
Emeli was enjoying our stay so much that when we returned to our room the first night, she asked if we could stay a second night. This is the only place we stayed for more than a single day and it's a good thing we did, because Astoria had a lot of cool stuff to explore that we would have missed if we had just been there a single day. We didn't even see it all with two days to explore. Barb gave us a map the night we arrived and highlighted (literally - she used a highlighter to note things on the map) all the most noteworthy things to see in and around town.
We didn't have time to see anything other than the Sea Lion restaurant (not its actual name) on the day we arrived in Astoria (it was later than it looks in the photos), so here are some photos of the things we saw on our drive along the Oregon coast to Astoria (and possibly a few from California - sometime it's hard to tell). We stopped and explored pretty much every beach we could find a pull-out for and also stopped several times in wooded areas just to snap pictures and marvel at nature.
I had really planned to finish blathering about our trip by now, but giving captions to all the photos, organizing the photos, remembering what we did, etc. is taking a lot of effort. I've never posted this much blather at one time other than maybe for ComicCon years ago (and that's a one or two day outing at most). So I'm going to stop with only one day chronicled. And pick up with day six later. There are a whole lotta photos of the many points of interest in and around Astoria, so that one's gonna be a bear to finish.
We (the lovely wife and the younger of the lovely daughters) took a road trip a couple of weeks ago from San Diego to Astoria, Oregon - and back, of course. I planned our route in advance to try to keep each day's drive-time relatively short so we would have plenty of time to stop and explore anything and everything that looked interesting along the way.
Day one: Pismo Beach, Ca I planned for the first stop of our adventure to be Pismo Beach because that's the location of my most memorable anniversary adventure1. We stopped a couple of times on the way there to explore unfamiliar beaches (one of which was accessible from an empty parking lot through a weird under-the-freeway tunnel). It was dark by the time we arrived in Pismo Beach, so we didn't spend much time on the beach or looking around town on day one. We basically just checked into our low-budget motel and then went out hunting for someplace to eat (Five Guys was the winner). We later sought out a Target to obtain the items the girls forgot to bring. It's hard to imagine trying to make this drive without the internet on my phone2.
Day two: Pismo Beach/Half Moon Bay, Ca The next morning before heading out, we decided to explore Pismo Beach's boardwalk, beach, etc. We wandered around, looking at the many beach-type shops you find on the strip at every beach. We ate breakfast at a delicious French-themed restaurant, the Mon Ami Creperie Cafe. The food was delicious and the ambiance was very French (from the perspective of someone who has never been to France). I recommend The Bako crepe for breakfast if you want real food. They can also make all their stuff gluten-free, which was a big selling point for Emeli. Julie had a Belgian waffle and really liked it a lot. After eating and spending a couple of hours of exploring shops and the beach, we packed up the car and headed to Half Moon Bay, CA, arriving a few hours later. Again, it was getting later in the afternoon, so we checked in to our slightly-less-awful motel and then sought out a place to eat. We found a place called Spicoli Pizza online and headed over3. The restaurant was in a cool inside-out shopping center that was pretty much closed by the time we got there. The pizza took a while to make an appearance (probably because we got a gluten-free pizza for Emeli), but we were fine waiting and watched America's Funniest Home Videos on the restaurant's TV while we waited. It was a tasty pizza (for gluten-free food), so I guess the wait was justified. Emeli said it was the best gluten-free pizza she'd ever had. I found the crust unimpressive, but the toppings were very generous and tasty, so I guess that made up for it. And that's pretty much all that happened on day two, other than seeing some really interesting trees on our drive in the middle of otherwise empty fields of grass. It was interesting to watch the landscape and vegetation shift as we drove from climate zone to climate zone.
On the way to Half Moon Bay, we also stopped to look around a lighthouse: the Pigeon Point Lighthouse in Pescadero, CA. Sadly, it's now a decrepit old thing that is barely standing. But it's still worth a quick look on your way up the PCH. Interestingly, there's also a hostel there for vagabonds who shun hotels and privacy.
Day three: San Francisco We didn't spend a second on the beach in Half Moon Bay, so I don't know if we missed an amazing beach or anything else spectacular in this town. We headed right to San Fransisco the next morning and found parking near Fisherman's Wharf. We parked in an internet-suggested parking lot that cost way more ($45) than we could have paid had we looked a little harder - so lesson learned. We drove and later walked up and down several super-steep streets, explored shops and neighborhoods in the area, marveled at the cool architecture everywhere, had some delicious desserts in the Ghirardelli Ice Cream and Chocolate Shop in Ghirardelli Square. We also drove over to Union Square so I could show the girls the sweet mall I'd discovered the month before on my OSI adventure, where we ate lunch (Emeli had a weird vegan fake-chicken thing and I got a pretty-good Philly cheese-steak - opposites!). We really didn't take the time to explore this very impressive mall at all because Emeli wasn't feeling very well (that's what she gets for eating vegan), so we headed back to the (much more affordable) Union Square parking lot and made our very circuitous way toward the Golden Gate Bridge, poorer, sunburned and ready to hit the open road.
Our next stop up the road: Garberville, Ca. We arrived at our hotel, the Best Western Plus Humboldt House Inn just as it was getting dark. This hotel was a million times better in every way than every other place we stayed on our adventure. To be fair, I was targeting more affordable accommodations.
Day four: Redwood adventure day We explored Garberville the next morning, primarily in pursuit of a pair of socks for me because I hadn't brought any that were adventure appropriate, and made some fun local discoveries. We found a used bookstore that had a lot of books for the girls to look through (I didn't find any that I found interesting that I didn't already own). Emeli found a book worth reading and spent a good part of the trip reading it. We also found another notable Garberville shop - The Stonery, a really cool gem and jewelry store. Surprisingly, I got out of there without having to buy any expensive gifts for either of the girls. Emeli was going to buy some little stone-carved animals, but the owner of the shop, who was full of information about things to see on our trip through the redwoods, gave her a couple of things free (she was planning to buy one of them, but he just gave it to her), which made her morning. With a new map from the shop owner and a whole bunch of information, we left the shop for our last stop - a sporting goods store that had the socks I needed.
We drove north from our hotel to The Avenue of Giants, stopping on the first of many a pull-outs very soon after exiting Highway 101 onto the Avenue. The lush, foliage of the trees, the ferns growing everywhere, and the gigantic trunks of the ancient trees all around us were breathtaking. It felt like a Velociraptor could come tearing out of the primordial forest and eat us up at any moment. After we parked the car, we wandered deeper into the undergrowth, awestruck by the ancient-feeling foliage. We crossed small streams atop mossy redwoods that had fallen across the gaps. Looking up and downstream, we saw many other trees had fallen the same way, which made me wonder if the logs had been dragged here and dropped intentionally to form bridges or if it really was just random chance that these trees had formed perfect bridges across the streams. There was no obvious reason anyone would take the time and effort to create bridges with these huge trees in this given area, so I'm sticking with random chance theory.
After taking a million photos and wandering in every direction as far as we dared, we made our way back to the car and drove until we spotted something else we wanted to explore. We found too many amazing things to mention them all. Among these were a giant hollowed out Redwood I could walk through upright, many Redwoods that were at least partially hollowed out and could be stood within (most showing evidence of past fire damage), lots of streams to explore, thick, green ferns everywhere...and just so much nature.
As with the failure to show just how steep the super-steep streets of San Francisco were, these photos fail to show how amazingly ginormous the redwoods are.
We also stopped at a tourist-y thing along the Avenue (there are a few of these and small towns right inside the forest) and paid to drive the car through the long-dead and barely-standing Shrine redwood (I recall driving through a larger redwood years ago, but that was probably the tree that feel over from the heavy rainfall earlier this year). There were also treehouses made from hollowed out Redwoods that were fun to check out. And there were also a couple of other things to see a little further north along the Avenue of Giants.
It took us a few hours to traverse the 30 or so miles of The Avenue of Giants, and then we continued on to our second stop of the day: Ferndale.
Ferndale is pretty much just a tiny farming community northwest of the north of The Avenue of Giants. It's not on the coast, it's not very near any redwoods, but it is picturesque. The main street is filled with a lot of Victorian-style architecture. There are even buildings off the main street that were very impressive - one of these was the Gingerbread Mansion Inn. We really wanted to stay there, but couldn't work into the drive timeline. One of the most impressive shops on Main street was actually vacant, (at least the bottom floor was - the top floor was occupied with residents). We ate lunch at The Ferndale Pie Company which wasn't one of the super-cool Victorian buildings, but was a very quaint small-town cafe that had the best chicken pot pie I've ever had. It must have risen a half-inch above the lip of the pie tin and was filled with every vegetable imaginable. They also had a large assortment of homemade pies and other desserts - we shared a gigantic brownie and cinnamon roll. This was the kind of food you seem to only find in small towns - freshly made with real ingredients and delicious. Sadly, we were so overwhelmed by the sights (that's my excuse, anyway) that didn't take a single photo of anything in Ferndale. I recommend stopping by if you drive through The Avenue of Giants. I still wish we'd been able to stay at the Gingerbread Mansion Inn. The photos online make the interior look just as cool as the exterior.
I had planned to do more exploring / take some photos of Ferndale before we left, but Emeli's sensitive stomach drove the agenda and we were soon back on the road, headed north. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. From Ferndale, we drove straight up to Coos Bay, Oregon - arrive just as darkness was settling in.
Day five: Oregon Explorations, day 1 The motel room in Coos4 Bay was the low point of the trip (or at least of the trip's accommodations). It was smelly, dark, noisy (feet from a busy road used by huge logging trucks all day and night, apparently) and on the very cramped side. There was a waterfront museum across the street from the motel (within sight of our room - across a busy street), but the stay in this room had us so soured with Coos Bay, we opted to skip anything Coos Bay might have to offer and just get out of town as soon as we were all ready to go. But...on the way out of town, we did stop to eat in a quaint little restaurant, The Pancake Mill5 since we hadn't really had anything since the day before. I had a delicious full breakfast special with eggs, sausage, pancakes, and juice for less than I paid for the Philly cheese-steak I'd gotten in San Francisco. And the girls got delicious Belgian waffles that they really liked (Emeli's was gluten-free, but still delicious, which you'll realize is a major accomplishment if you've sampled gluten-free food).
The drive along the Oregon coast is one of the most scenic you could imaging. Tree-covered mountainsides on one side of the road and driftwood-covered beaches on the other. Streams and rivers fed cold spring water (not the toxic sludge that drains into the ocean in Southern California) to the Pacific Ocean at every beach we visited. There are small rocky islands just off the beach all over the place. And there are moss-covered trees everywhere. Everything was green and we drove over uncountable rivers, lakes, and lily pad-covered ponds. The beaches were chilly, but we stopped and explored several anyway. When I made this same drive years earlier, I remembered seeing Sea Lions sunning themselves on the remote beaches, but the only spot with Sea Lions on this drive was a tourist trap that had taken over a section of beach and charged a lot for access to the Sea Lions. And it charged a lot. So we didn't get to see the Sea Lions up close on the drive.
We did see another lighthouse on our way to Astoria: the Umpqua River Lighthouse. This one was actually a fully-functional lighthouse with a U.S. Coast Guard housing complex between the lighthouse and the lighthouse museum. We paid to take the full tour of the lighthouse. It was very cool. There was also a whale's jawbone display outside the lighthouse and some of those pay-to-view binoculars (there are apparently quite often whales off the coast here, but we didn't see any).
I had every intention of blathering on about the whole vacation at once, but after losing the second half of what I'd already written, I'm now going to just post this bad boy up in installments. (I was unaware of the size limitations of a MYSQL TEXT data field, which is 64KB for the record!)
Consider this the end of installment one - installment two coming soon...ish!6
1 I'm planning to add this to my bio page at some point, but there are a ton of gaps that need to be filled in there, so who knows when or if that will ever happen...
2 How did I survive these long drives before the Internet - or without phones with access to the Internet for that matter! It took a lot more planning and a lot more dependence on the good ol' Thomas Guide, that's fer sure.
3 See, another victory for the Internet. We not only needed food, we needed something that would cater to the gluten-sensitive.
4 What in the world is a "Coo"? Since there's no apostrophe, Coos must be the plural of Coo...but what does it all mean? Am I the only morally outraged grammarian?
5 Go Internet!
6 As if anyone has even read this far...
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