Pacific Northwest Road Trip - Day 4

Today Harry and I were going from Hood River (OR) to Aberdeen (WA). We got on the road around 9:30. It was only going to be a 200 mile drive so the night before I told Harry I wanted to see Astoria, OR. This is where they shot Goonies and I'm a huge Goonies fan so I thought it would be fun to see the place.

So we took I-84 west and on the outskirts of Portland we merged onto the 205 North. It's rather odd as the GPS made us go up north into Washington and than back south into Oregon. So we passed the outskirts of Vancouver (WA) and then took highway 197 west and were supposed to go via the Lewis and Clark Bridge over the Columbia River back into Oregon. But somehow our GPS got at little confused and told us to go right and that way we ended up in a lumber yard. So we turned the car around and took the Lewis and Clark Bridge into Oregon.

This is a big and architecturally very impressive bridge. From the Oregon side you have a absolutely stunning view of the bridge. We then followed the historic US Route 30 west. It's a 2-lane highway and you get some interesting views. What you see most of the time is lots and lots of forest. So made it to Astoria and stopped at the entrance to take a picture with the city sign and than drove into town.

While we were driving through town in search of a fast food place we found a much better 'Welcome to Downtown Astoria Sign' so we stopped and took a picture in front of that sign and then we hit the road again. We didn't find any fast food place that would have agreed with our stomach, so we opted to drive over the 4.3 mile long Astoria Bridge into Washington. This bridge is absolutely amazing... not only because of it's length, but also because of it's architecture. I was terrified driving over it.. but manage to get across with no issue. We stopped at the next turn out on the Washington side and took quite a number of pix and videos and we also took picture right in front of the Washington State Sign.

We merged onto the 101 and followed it north. Again we came across some quite interesting views, lots of forest but also lots of dead and fallen trees. We drove for about 1 1/2 hours and didn't come across any city. We finally reached the city of South Bend but didn't find any fast food place that would have agreed with us. So we continued on the 101 north and soon reached the city of Raymond where we had lunch at a Diary Queen.

After lunch we got back onto the 101 north. That's when a really odd thing happened with the GPS: We had about 30 miles to go and the GPS estimated that we would need another 2 hours. That struck us as rather odd. Turns out that the GPS was wrong, as about 40 minutes later we reached Aberdeen and checked into the Hotel. So far this hotel is the nicest on the entire trip but the internet is super slow and I'm not able to upload videos.

All in all another great day...