Day 1 - Aug 31, 2007 Last updated: 9/9/07 2:00pm PT
“California Or Bust”. That was the theme when I first started planning this trip. The original plan was to have no plan. Hop in the car, get to highway 101 and see how far we could get before we would have to turn around and head back home. Well, that isn’t how it happened. I printed out 30 maps. Sightseeing opportunities were chosen. Potential lunch and dinner places marked. Hotels were reserved. A four page spread sheet with our itinerary was created. I just can’t wing it. My argument this time was that it was Labor Day weekend and it might be hard to pull into a hotel without a reservation and get a room (which was true at least in one of our hotels when I was rejected asking to switch rooms because the people next door were noisy).
The very first thing that initiated this trip was the glass blowing studio in Lincoln City, Oregon that lets the average Joe create their own glass art. We have watched glass blowing in the past, and it is fun to watch. So a trip was planned, growing from Lincoln City to the entire 101 in Oregon, to seeing redwood trees in California. We would drive down the Oregon coast along Hwy 101 into California, then head east to I-5 for a quick ride home. Well, if we were going to go up I-5, through Portland, we’d have to stop at Powell’s to browse the books. And I’ve been seeing the Spruce Goose on a few TV shows lately, so we ought to include a stop at the aviation museum in McMinnville. Give me any number of days and I’ll fill them with activities. I think we drove about 1100-1200 miles.
We left on Friday night after work so we could start first thing on Saturday near the Oregon coast. Unfortunately, everyone else in Seattle was escaping for the weekend too, so traffic was pretty nasty. Driving Hwy 30 at night was also a challenge. Really Oregon, can’t you afford to spill a little white paint to show where the road is?
We spent the night in Astoria, OR. Stayed at a very nice Holiday Inn Express right on the Columbia River. Here are a couple of pictures from the hotel room.
Out the back of the hotel is the Columbia River and the Astoria-Megler Bridge to Washington, the longest continuous truss bridge in North America. In the third picture, we drove up the hill so we could get the whole bridge into the picture. Our hotel is the tan color building you see through the trees, just below the near side of the bridge.
