Drove west out of Portland on Hwy 26. It's a pretty, 2-hour drive to the coast. Katie is sleeping on the couch. Passed a sign for "David Douglas Park" (my brother's name), passed the largest Sitka spruce tree in the world, and finally checked in a Bud's Campground and Bait Shack. Mark says it's not a pit (there are no drunks singing karaoke), but it ain't great. There's no way to know when you choose places from a book like we do, but the name should've told me not to call...

Drove into Astoria and went to a Wonderful museum there, the Maritime Museum. It's amazing. They have a movie telling how dangerous the bar is where the Columbia River meets the Pacific (thousands of wrecks have happened here), and how much traffic goes through there, and how there are special captains just to help the tugs down the river ("river captains"). They interview a river captain taking over a Japanese boat. He says "yeah, this boat is so loaded it sits 36 feet into the water, and the water is only 40 feet deep." So he has to know every foot of the riverbed by heart just to be a certified River Captain. Then he hands the boat over to a special "Bar Captain" when they enter the bar, where the 4-mile-wide Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean join, because it is so hairy there. Bar Captains are specialists at dealing with the strange weather and very strong currents there. Took a lot of pictures, and Katie enjoyed pressing buttons and turning knobs in a mock tugboat.

Drove up to the Astoria Column, past dozens of beautiful, big antique homes on nice-sized lots. The column has 500 feet of pictures painted around it, and was built in the 1920s to tell the long history of this town (some European guy "found" it in the 1700s--of course the Native Americans knew about it long before that). Katie walked up the 95 steps, but this time Mark and I were both too scared to let her walk down. The openings in the railing were huge and the steps both steep and wide. The space between the steps and the outer wall was also wide, so she could have slipped down the whole way, it seemed.

Here are pictures from Astoria, Oregon

The wonderful Maritime Museum

Katie loved pushing buttons and stuff...

Katie watching the barges on the Columbia

The remains of an old cannery--once there were more than a dozen salmon canneries, before they killed off all the salmon.

that's a real coast guard boat

the Astoria column, with pictures of the town's history

looking down--it's a long fall