36 Oregon Counties in 2010: Clatsop County

The last time I was up here was in 1994 or 1995. This was before kids, gainful employment, or much of an internet(thanks again Al Gore!). We went to the coast as a romantic weekend, probably with an article from the Sunday Travel section of the Oregonian. We went to Astoria to stay at the Rose Briar Inn, which was a small hotel in an old Victorian house. There was a mix-up and our 2 night stay had a problem with the 2nd night. As a remedy, we could either move to an inferior room or stay in a sister hotel in Cannon Beach. We chose the latter, as we felt Astoria didn't have that much of interest.

About all we remember from that trip is me standing on a rock on the beach and a sneaker wave caused the ocean to rise up around the rock and I fell in fully clothed and got mostly wet just before checking into the Cannon Beach hotel.

Fast forward to 2010...We could not remember the names of either hotel or what we did on our last visit. We hit Fort Stevens to look at the wreck of the Peter Iredale (1906 shipwreck visible in low tide), Battery Russell (WWII era bunker ruin), and in Astoria visited the Astor Column (my 11 year old son kept calling it the Astro Tower). Seeing these sites began jogging memories of our past visits. We found the Astoria hotel, that is now some kind of home for women. Walking along the beach in Cannon Beach, we found the Cannon Beach Hotel that we stayed in long ago, still here as a hotel.

Fort Clatsop is a re-creation of where Lewis and Clark spent there winter at the mouth of the Columbia River before heading back east. It was a little stockaded area with small rooms that appeared to be a cold, dark, and wet area to spend a winter. Earlier this year we visited the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center that allowed me to visualize the hardships early pioneers dealt with coming east to settle in Oregon, and contrast that with Lewis and Clark (should be Clark and Lewis) and think about how they had very different challenges than the wagon trains that followed.

Returning to the this place brought back a number of memories that had been lost and made some new ones that I will probably forget before too long. Like telling my in-laws I was excusing myself to go to the Fortress of Solitude...