Oregon coast

Chester this photo's for you!

Last week (Tuesday I think, or maybe it was Wednesday) we headed over to the Oregon Coast  (we were 25 or 30 miles west of Portland so the ride to the coast was 60'ish miles).  I believe the original plan was to go to Tillamook but we never did get there!

We stopped in Astoria (at the mouth of the Columbia River) - a very pretty little town that we both felt we'd like to spend some time exploring.  Beautiful photo ops of the boats on the river with the  mountains in the background.

Then we proceeded south down 101, still thinking we'd continue on to Tillamook, until we came upon a sign that indicated it was another 60+ miles.  Cancel that plan!  We had wanted to get Sir to the Pacific so he could have that swimming option so we continued 15 miles or so to Seaside - oh how this reminded us of Nantasket Beach in MA or Hampton Beach in NH.

Alas, we arrived at the Pacific - it was so windy, such rough surf, so much fog rolling in ...

And Sir got to swim, in the cold cold waters of the Pacific.

That night we went into Wednesday night movies at the Lodge and the bartender told us about the Spruce Goose being about 70 miles from there (silly us, we thought it was still in Long Beach, CA).  Well as you may remember King Richard is such a fan of aircraft that I really thought we couldn't miss this opportunity!  So off we went the next day.

The photo above is of the goose .... huge isn't it!  Below is inside the "belly" of the plane.

Below are beach balls that Howard Hughes insisted be placed in the plane for flotation if the plane should go down.

various planes dwarfed by the huge goose ...

What looks like staging is the stairway and doors into the belly.  For an additional $50. one can tour the flight deck which is entered from the belly!  Hmmm notice there are no photos of the flight deck?  I think that Rick could have spent an entire day at this museum and the outstanding grounds, however Sir and I were there as well (well Sir and I went to the downtown area and out to lunch) I think it would have made much more sense for Rick to have gone alone, but again we thought we'd get to Tillamook!

Today we arrived in Caldwell, ID (about 15 or 20 miles west of Boise).  I have some great photos pending of our last two travel days - yup, I'll get on the ball at some point.