Before hitting the coast, we stopped in downtown Portland to pick-up a new camera. Sometime before we left for this trip our point-and-shoot decided that it would only take blurry pictures. Jennifer found a place that had the one we wanted in stock. Downtown Portland seems like an awesome city, and we decided to eat lunch there. After circling the blocks for a while, we finally realized that there was no parking to be found for something the size of old campervan. Jennifer ended up running into the store to get the camera while I continued dodging streetcars, taxis, lawyers, and other hazards as I circled until she came back out. We finally settled on a taco joint called Por Que No? that wasn’t in the madness of downtown. Good fresh food, but like most “must try” places, the hype was greater than the actual experience. With bellies full, we left the city behind us and drove through logging country as we made our way up to the mouth of the Columbia River at Fort Stevens State Park.
The kids were ecstatic to find that the campground had a playground, something that Cooper had been asking for at every place we stopped. Jennifer took the kids to get their fill of slides, tunnels, and monkey bars while I went to pay for our site.
The next day we set out to explore the 9 miles of paved bike paths in the park. First up were the Fort ruins, where the most exciting thing we found was a ton of wild blackberries. We picked and ate some on the spot before checking out the rest of the Fort.
We rode back to the campervan for lunch, and then got back on the bikes to go check out the wreckage of the Peter Iredale, a shipwreck from 1906. There isn’t much left of it really, just a few rusty ribs sticking out of the sand. We took obligatory pictures anyways, as it is one of the main attractions in the park.
We then rode over to see the ruins of another coastal defense battery before giving in to Cooper’s all-too-frequent request to go back to the playground. After that, it was a usual campground evening: dinner, fire, bed.
As much as we liked Fort Stevens State Park, we were excited to head south to see what coastal Oregon was all about. We stopped in a couple little towns along the way to see some of the local sites like Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach and the Tillamook Cheese factory in…Tillamook. The cheese factory sees over a million visitors per year; it was certainly busy when we were there. They have set up a self-guided tour to funnel the masses through. You get to see cheese being sliced to size and packaged from up above the production floor. After that you get a few self-serve samples of cheese before entering the gift shop. Since the campervan’s little fridge was already jam packed, we resisted the urge to buy tons of their cheeses. We did not, however, pass up the ice-cream shop. We shared a cup piled high with mint chocolate chip, caramel praline, and marionberry pie. It alone was worth the stop. When we were done playing tourist, we headed down to Cape Lookout State Park where we stayed for the night.
The next day, we drove up to Cape Meares to see the sites there: a lighthouse, the largest spruce in the state, and some mangled tree called the Octopus Tree. We then tried eat lunch at a little place that operates out of an oyster packing plant (the real draw to eat there), but realized that the long wait wasn’t going to work with two hungry munchkins. We opted instead for a parking lot lunch in the campervan, which was dwarfed by the massive piles of oyster shells. On our way back to Cape Lookout we stopped at the Blue Heron cheese company to sample their goods and let the kids run around. Then we returned to Cape Lookout for dinner, fire, bed.
