Road trip to Astoria

The week before last I worked too many days in order to save up a few days off. We used those days off to go up to Astoria, Oregon, home of the Goonies. Those Goonies were amazing little kids if they rode their bikes all the way from Astoria to Cannon Beach on BMX bikes in one afternoon. That's got to be twenty-six miles! Anyway, Suzanne and I and the boys went to Astoria once before and we enjoyed our stay so much that this time we invited Grandma and Grandpa Carter. This is a picture of the Astoria Column, our first stop.It has 164 stairs and the view from the top is amazing! You can see for miles in all directions.Grandpa and Grandma Carter and McKay and Carter at the top of the Astoria Column. The boys always look like that on sunny days.There's a gift shop at the bottom of the column that sells balsa wood gliders for 75 cents each. We bought one for each of us. You throw it from the top, then someone at the bottom picks it up and claims it as their own. One old lady was yelling at some boys at the bottom, "That's my airplane! Don't touch it! I saw that!" If you try, your glider can stay aloft for 10 seconds or more. The boys tried to throw their gliders straight down. Here's McKay watching his nose-dive into the side of the Column.Another attraction in Astoria is an old town trolley that goes along the waterfront giving a little tour. The boys played musical chairs during the hour-long ride.We got off the trolley at the Maritime Museum, but we didn't go in. On our last trip to Astoria we had trouble controlling Carter and McKay inside the museum. We wanted to look and read and they wanted to run and climb. This trip we decided to skip the aggravation. Instead we hung out in the courtyard for 20 minutes. There was a huge bell that the boys got to ring - it was so loud it made my teeth hurt. They should put a warning on that thing. Around the flagpole there was a giant compass rose, but any circles on the ground are just race tracks to Carter and McKay.McKay sitting on another giant anchor. It looks just like the one in Florence, only bigger. He wanted me to pick the anchor up with him on it. He laughed when I couldn't, so I told him it was because he was sitting on it. If he hadn't been sitting on it, I could have done it easy. Right.The wreck of the Peter Iredale, which shipwrecked in 1906 on the beach outside of Warrenton (east across the bay from Astoria). The sailors were unharmed and were pickep up by a rescue ship. They later found they could have walked to shore. The wreckage was an instant tourist attraction, still is after 103 years, and will be until it rusts away completely.Carter and McKay ignored the history lesson though. They were too busy with the tide-puddle. Here's the newest money-wasting extreme sport I'd like to try: Kite-surfing. You should have seen these guys - there must have been 20 or more kite surfers. That beach is great for it because it's 10 miles long with steady wind from the North. They were going so fast they could have been water-skiing. Every so often they'd jump a wave and just keep going up - 10, 15, 20 feet into the air sometimes! Watch some YouTube videos if you don't believe me. They were all getting out of the water where we were, I guess because the shipwreck is such a good landmark. The boys were all wet and sandy, and the ground was sandier, so this is where they stood to get changed.On the way there we made a stop and the boys requested a rerun: the Tillamook Cheese Factory. So on the way back we stopped there again. I know it doesn't sound fun, but the place has lines like Disneyland.

On the upper floor they have an observation deck where you can watch the cheese being cut from 40 lb blocks to manageable sizes, then shrink-wrapped and sent to shipping (I guess). The boys would have stayed there all day.

It really was interesting - you wouldn't expect to see robots and conveyor belts in a cheese factory, but that's how they get the job done.While the boys watched that, I stood in this line for ice cream. This is the shortest line in the factory to buy ice cream. The others are downstairs and are a lot longer.The ice cream there is wonderful - they have 38 flavors, but we only tried a few: orange sherbet, lemon blueberry pie, blueberry cheesecake, Sweet Centennial, Tillamook mudslide, Udderly chocolate, and white licorice. Yum. I think it's the reason the boys wanted a second visit.Carter enjoyed the road trip...... and McKay enjoyed the road trip. We all had fun, but we already miss Grandma and Grandpa Carter.On a completely unrelated note, our deck is finally going back up. Our friend Stu is helping us build it, and it's a good thing because I don't know anything.

I hope you all enjoyed the pictures. I know I enjoy it when my family updates their own blogs. (Guilt, guilt, guilt.)