Astoria, Oregon: First U.S. Settlement on the Pacific, plus The Goonies!

Jill's Journal: Now a small town of less than 10,000, Astoria has a fascinating history. It’s located at the mouth of the massive Columbia River where the great river meets the Pacific Ocean. Lewis and Clark spent a winter here first, but it’s named after John Jacob Astor, America’s first millionaire whose American Fur Company founded the town site in 1811 (making 2011 Astoria’s bicentennial year). Astoria was actually the first permanent U.S. settlement on the Pacific Coast, which also makes it the oldest U.S. settlement west of the Rocky Mountains. However, two years after Astor established fur trade at the site, he sold it to the British. A few years later, the Treaty of 1818 gave joint U.S.-British occupancy of the territory west of the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean. It was in the 1840s that American pioneers poured into the area.

Astoria began to grow, in no small part because the Port of Astoria is a deep-water port. This provided easy access to the interior of Oregon Territory. The first U.S. post office west of the Rocky Mountains was established in Astoria in 1847.

Oregon became a state in 1859. Eventually, Astoria became the second-largest city in Oregon and industry mostly consisted of fishing, canneries, and lumber. Bumblebee Seafood had its headquarters here until 1974. The now-small town clearly has seen better days, but it’s got a hard-knocking sort of charm and is working hard to reinvent itself as a major tourist destination. When we first arrived, we wondered what all the fuss was about as we’d heard so many great things about the town and it didn’t have immediate appeal. But by the time we left, I think the town had really grown on us.

Here’s a shot overlooking Astoria with the grand Astoria-Megler Bridge in the distance. The bridge connects Oregon to Washington and at 4.1 miles is the longest three-span truss bridge in the world. Completed in 1966, there apparently was a big brouhaha about the need to build such a bridge and it was quickly nicknamed the “Bridge to Nowhere.” The big joke we heard in Astoria is that since it goes to Washington, it really is a bridge to “nowhere,” because if you’re lucky enough to be in Oregon, why in the world would you want to go to Washington? Funny stuff.

If you look hard enough near the port (toward the right of the photo), you can see a cargo ship and a car carrier ship. If you have any idea how gargantuan those ships are, it will give you an idea of just how immense this river truly is.

One of the highlights of the riverfront is “Old 300,” a refurbished 1913 streetcar which serves as the “Riverfront Trolley.” Community volunteers serve as conductors and guides, pointing out the landmarks in town along the 2.6-mile route while adding a healthy dose of humor. In the top shot, the trolley is just underneath the beginning of the Astoria-Megler Bridge.

Standing on 600-foot Coxcomb Hill and rising an additional 125 feet is the Astoria Column. Completed in 1926, the monument was built by the Great Northern Railroad and Vincent Astor, great-grandson of John Jacob Astor. Inside are 164 spiral steps to the viewing platform at the top, where we got superb views of both Oregon and Washington.

The neatest thing about the Astoria Column is the “sgraffito” on its sides. Sgraffito is an old Italian Renaissance art form that combines plaster carving and painting into the structure. The Astoria Column is adorned with the story of Astoria from Lewis and Clark to the arrival of the train. If unwound, the length of the artwork would be over 500 feet.

This house is the main house used in The Goonies! Who didn’t love that movie in the 80s?

Beginning with Clark Gable, who performed at the Astoria Theatre at the very start of his career in 1922, big-name Hollywood has long been part of Astoria. Other than The Goonies, other movies extensively filmed here were Free Willy, The Black Stallion, Short Circuit, Into the Wild, and many, many more. This shot is of John Jacob Astor Elementary School, which served as the site for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Kindergarten Cop.

One of the girls’ favorite things in Astoria had to be Tapiola Park. This playground has many of the town’s landmarks in miniature. If you look to the right in the photo, you can see a child-sized replica of the bridge.

Tillamook Cheese Factory

Jill's Journal: Yesterday, after enjoying our morning in Portland, we headed to the coast with the Tillamook Cheese Factory as our destination. Wherever we are, we try to eat as “local” as possible, using local products when we can. While in Oregon, we have become absolutely smitten with the Tillamook dairy products: all sorts of cheese, plus yogurt, sour cream, and butter. (Madelyn even calls the Tillamook yogurt I use in our daily breakfast smoothies “the good yogurt that I like.”)

Dairying has a long history in Tillamook County. The first Northern European settlers settled in Tillamook in 1855 and brought dairying with them, a fortunate thing since, after clearing land for crops, they quickly learned the area is too cool and wet for traditional crops. However, all that rain and temperate climate meant the grass grew and kept growing all year long. Cows thrived on the lush pastures. Today, there are around 120 dairies in Tillamook, mostly second-generation. Several go back farther than that with a few of the same dairy families dating back to the 1850s in the same area, so the dairy tradition is especially strong here.

A bit of trivia: the first dairy cows to arrive in America were in 1611 at Jamestown, Virginia. The first dairy cow to make it to the Pacific Northwest was in 1838 in Oregon territory.

Massive vats turning milk into cheese...

Originally, butter was the main export from Tillamook Valley. But storage was challenging due to the amount of salt needed to preserve it and transport was difficult from this remote area. In 1893-94, everything changed. Two dairy entrepreneurs built a creamery and brought an experienced cheddar cheesemaker named Peter McIntosh to Tillamook. Cheese was far easier to store than butter and the dairy farmers quickly switched from butter-making to cheese-making. The recipe McIntosh created is still used today.

These freshly-made big blocks of cheese are ready to be aged. They're somewhere between 41 and 42 pounds, but called "forties."

In 1899, only five years after McIntosh arrived, a sign at the Tillamook Headlight proclaimed, “There is a richness and fine flavor about Tillamook cheese which is peculiar to itself…for this fine flavor cannot be found in cheese manufactured in other parts.”

By 1902, there were 40 small creameries in Tillamook, all making cheese. By 1904, cheese from Tillamook had won its first award, a first place, at the St. Louis World’s Fair. In 1909, 10 of the creameries banded together and the Tillamook County Creamery Association (TCCA) was formed. Over the years, more and more of the smaller, independent creameries joined the TCCA, with the final six merging in 1968.

Workers are cutting aged "forties" into more convenient sizes ready to be packaged. 

The TCCA was a success from the start. The railroad had eventually come to the small town, which quickly expanded Tillamook Cheese's marketplace far beyond Oregon. By 1917, nearly one-third of all cheese sold in Los Angeles was from Tillamook. Today, Tillamook is the #2 brand of natural chunk cheddar cheese in America. TCCA’s member dairy farms and the creamery make up around 25% of the local economy.

For all of its humble beginnings, Tillamook is not small potatoes anymore. Around 1.7 million pounds of milk arrive at the factory daily. It takes ten pounds of milk to make one pound of Tillamook cheese. Approximately 167,000 pounds of cheese are made here each day, with about one million pieces of cheese packaged here each week. Many of the cheeses need to be aged; Tillamook’s cold storage warehouse has a 35-million-pound capacity. This is not small craft cheese, but big, big business.

After a few cheese samples, we headed north on the Oregon coast. Oregon doesn’t have anything like California’s wonderful Pacific Coast Highway, so views of the ocean are fewer and more far between, but this is what those views look like when you do get them. Pretty spectacular.

We landed for the evening at the very “top” of the Oregon coast in the town of Astoria with an unusual (for us on this trip) stay in a hotel. It worked out better and more economically for us to leave the fifth wheel in Portland and just come for one night. More tomorrow, but the girls were completely overjoyed about the opportunity to spend the night in a hotel. They look ready for a pajama party, don’t they?

Portland is a Party!

Jill's Journal: Portland just feels like a fun town. This morning, we were out the door bright and early to experience the Portland Saturday Market. What a ball! (Also, I quite enjoyed it when Rob got the distinct joy of driving in downtown Portland for the first time; he quickly learned my complaints earlier in the week were not baseless! He very possibly dislikes it even more than I do.)

The Portland Saturday Market is essentially an outdoor handcrafted goods market. The majority of the 400+ vendors and artists are local. If you can imagine it, it’s probably here. But this isn’t anything like a flea market: all items sold are required to be handmade by the person selling them and their products are “vetted” by a membership committee for quality. In operation since 1974, this is the oldest continuously-operated arts and crafts market in the country. It generates over $8 million in sales annually.

We’re not gigantic shoppers, but the Portland Saturday Market is a great environment and an incredibly fun place to visit. There are all sorts of food vendors and street performers and it just feels like a party. This is the Skidmore Fountain, where the people-watching is particularly first-rate. It’s actually an 1888 landmark in Portland, modeled after Parisian fountains and intended as a spot for “horses, men, and dogs” to drink. When it was dedicated, the famous Portland beer brewer, Henry Weinhard (probably best known today for his company’s root beer and gourmet sodas), offered to pump his beer through the fountain. The city of Portland declined his kind offer.

This has to be the funnest street band ever, All the Apparatus (or ATA). We could hear them from a distance and were drawn in to the fun. This awesome Portland band, which has quite a local following, describes themselves as “avante-garde dirty gypsy klezmer jazz indie anti-folk rock.” They were just plain fun.

We all had smiles on our faces while we enjoyed them and even took home a CD. Madelyn couldn’t contain her feet and danced, danced, danced. Other people in the audience couldn’t help dancing either!

After all that fun, we simply had to go to St Honore Boulangerie for lunch. Every Portland “must-see” list I’d found mentioned this place. It’s a neighborhood French bakery and café, named for the patron saint of bakers.

From its cozy, old-world ambiance…

…to the luscious pastries and delectable smell of fresh bread emanating from the open-air kitchen…

…to the most perfect chocolate croissants outside of France, St Honore = C’est Magnifique.

Oh the Joy!

Jill's Journal: If this picture looks blurry, your eyes are not deceiving you. It’s blurry because three little girls could not sit still long enough in their excitement to welcome their Daddy back home from his week in Vegas! He wasn’t due to return until almost midnight, but he was able to catch an earlier flight instead. These were some happy, happy little girls. (And I am a happy big girl because three littles are now tucked into their beds and Rob is out getting the grown-ups a yummy dinner).

Rob’s return wasn’t without drama. In the 30 seconds before we left to pick him up at the airport, Erika decided to pull a tooth out all on her own. Normally she’s content to let them fall out by themselves, so it was a big deal for her to get aggressive with it. It cracked me up: she shut herself in her room and asked for absolute silence and privacy while she did the deed. This is either lost tooth #12 or #13; I’ve admittedly lost count. She is growing up at a dizzying rate.

Perfect Strangers No More

Jill's Journal: It turns out some of the most interesting people in the world are campers and we have yet to tire of meeting them. And while all are from different backgrounds and locations, few are as radically different from us as Balki and Larry were from each other in the 80s (or was it 90s?).

Our neighbors in this spot alone have included a California couple who spends their time traveling to different wine regions as they pursue their wine collecting passion. An Anchorage couple who has been full-timing for 10 years and shows their Basset Hound all over the country. A family who lives only six miles away, but keeps their RV hooked up here and treats it as their vacation home. And a man whose wife is in the advanced stages of dementia; he’s her sole caretaker and he brings her along. While she doesn’t want to leave their trailer, it gives him a much-needed change of scenery.

Because of the size of our rig, we’re almost always near other larger rigs, so it seems we rarely meet tent campers or the younger crowd except at the pool or playground. In our 13 months of traveling, I can only think of one couple next door who has been younger than us.

Full-timing, like we are, is not an unusual thing. It seems to be our age, the little kids in tow, and the working for a living that makes us a little different. The older guys are generally retired or have a business that runs like a well-oiled machine without them. Their kids are long since grown. But without a doubt, I can’t think of a single one of them who hasn’t told us they wished they’d taken on this lifestyle when they had young kids. They all regale us with stories about trips they did take with their kids and how it made memories that still last decades later. It’s a nice little affirmation that we’re doing the right thing for us, for our little family.

Wordless Wednesday

Portland, Oregon

Jill's Journal: We’ve learned a little about Portland during our 10 days here so far and there’s a lot to like, a lot of character to this city. There’s also a lot of water: the Willamette River runs smack dab through the center of the city before veering northwest to meet the Columbia River at the top of the city. The word “Willamette,” by the way, (which we’ve heard constantly since Eugene) is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable. Someone told me the only way they can remember how to pronounce it is to make it rhyme with “dammit,” and now unfortunately that seems to be how I remember it too!

Portland is actually named after Portland, Maine, the area we loved so much last fall. Two land partners shared the claim for this land back in 1845 and each wished to name the area after his respective home town. The partner from Maine won two out of three coin tosses to beat out the prospective name of Boston, Oregon. The “Portland Penny,” the actual coin used for the fateful 1845 toss, is on display at the Oregon Historical Society.

Portland is frequently called “Beervana” or “Brewtopia.” Nearly 40 microbreweries hone their craft here, more than in any other city of the world.

A more seedy distinction here in Portland is the prevalence of strip clubs. It seems like there’s one on every corner downtown. Sure enough, there’s more strip clubs in Portland per capita than in any other city in the U.S.

Portland is on the same longitude as Montreal, which means it’s light outside until nearly 10pm and light again by about 5am. No, it’s not quite Alaska, but that’s a lot of daylight in the summer!

Driving in Portland is rotten. I’ve found driving in places like Boston, San Francisco, and even the whole state of New Jersey easier than in Portland. It’s a battle here. The freeways are always packed and my GPS must be outdated for this city, because Garmin is constantly trying to send me the wrong way down one-way streets. It gives me an instant headache to drive downtown. Portland is a very bicycle-friendly city…maybe this is why?

All that being said, Portland has a really great vibe. Old Town Portland and the Pearl District are especially eclectic and wonderful. It is regularly awarded the “Greenest City in America” and has also been titled the “second-greenest” city in the world. People who live here are fiercely proud of it and rightly so. I’m so glad we’ll be here another week and a half; we easily have another 20 or more things to see before we leave.

Happy 4th!

It’s a Girls’ Week

Jill's Journal: The girls and I brought Rob to the airport bright and early this morning. He’s off to Vegas with a buddy from Lexington who is playing in a World Series of Poker event. If his early reports on Facebook are any indication, he’s already having a great time.

Meanwhile, the girls and I are holding down the fort here in Portland. We’ve decided to take it easy ourselves this week. We’re going to forego major sightseeing for a few days and instead spend lots of time at the pool, read a few books, and maybe even watch cartoons! The girls are beyond excited to have a whole week of this ahead, but they miss their Daddy already. Madelyn even started writing him a letter. This is what she wants the finished product to say:

“Dear Daddy,
I would like to visit you in Las Vegas, but Mommy says we’re not going to the airport so I can’t get on an airplane.
Love, Madelyn”

Apparently it’s my fault we can’t see him for a few days. That child cracks me up.

Columbia Gorge and Multnomah Falls

Jill's Journal: “This road, following the beautiful Columbia River, is one of the scenic roads of the world, a road that will stand for all time a monument to the enterprise of Oregon.” –George S. Clason, 1920

The journey to Multnomah Falls through Columbia Gorge is described as “ultra-scenic.” They weren’t kidding. It is breathtaking, awe-inspiring, and an absolute feast for the eyes and soul.

The historic Columbia River Highway was the first in our nation to be named a National Historical Landmark. This European-style byway, built from 1913 to 1922, features Florentine viaducts crafted by Italian stonecutters. The breathtaking views from the drive alone include Mount Hood and several of the 77 spectacular waterfalls (yes, that 77 is not a typo!) in the immediate area. The frequent turnouts and hikes available get you up close and personal with many more.

Passing through the darling town of Troutdale to get to the scenic road gives just a hint of what is to come.

A road like this awaits.

Here the girls are getting their first view of the magnificent Columbia River.

The Vista House, a rest stop built at Crown Point (considered the western gateway to the Gorge) in 1916-17. It features an exquisite marble interior and stained-glass windows…let’s just say rest stops aren’t what they used to be!

“It is to be simply a great rest-house for the sightseers traveling over the wonderful road and also a place from which can be had the most beautiful view on that great scenic highway.” –Addison Bennett, 1916

The view from atop the Vista House. Across the river is the state of Washington! The Columbia River serves as the border between most of Oregon and Washington.

All eight classified types of waterfalls found in the world – plunge, horsetail, fan, tier, cascade, block, segmented, and punchbowl – are found among the 77 waterfalls in the Gorge.

Here’s my loved ones making the short hike to Latourell Falls. Notice even from a distance that my camera lens has mist on it from the falls!

The base of the lovely Latourell Falls.

This one is Horsetail Falls.

Without a doubt, the crown jewel of the Columbia Gorge is Multnomah Falls, Oregon’s tallest waterfall and America’s second highest year-round waterfall. By contrast, New York’s American Falls and Canada’s Horseshoe Falls (both part of Niagara Falls) may also flow year-round, but their drop is less than a third of Multnomah’s. Yosemite Falls in California is the highest year-round waterfall in the U.S. (and is more than double the height of Multnomah Falls).

The Upper Falls of Multnomah plummet 542 feet…

…and the Lower Falls plunge an additional 69 feet.

The base of Upper Falls.

One more of Lower Multnomah Falls. Multnomah, by the way, comes from the name of a tribe of Chinook Indians who lived in the area up until the early 1800s.

And the whole scene from a stream in the distance. Over two million people a year visit Multnomah Falls and the Columbia Gorge. We’re so happy to have been five of them.