So here I am in Astoria Oregon, famous for the movie The Goonies being filmed here. It is a small port town with plenty of bars for libations. I went exploring, walking up and down the main streets for several hours just trying to get a feel for the town. It was disturbingly empty. It seems from what I have been told it is a tourist town that relies heavily on the cruise ship industry. The stores are definitely geared toward a tourist market most definitely. In order to get warmer clothes I had to wait for someone to rent a car and ride in with them across a bridge to a place called Fred Meyers or something similar, which is basically a Walmart with a different name. It seems in my attempt to pack a well rounded selection of clothing for this six month world tour that I neglected to pack enough warm things. Seeing as it was summer I was not assuming 50 degrees and rainy would be that common. Boy was I wrong. So after procuring some more hoodies the couple crew members and I ended up going to a state park nearby. This was awesome. I saw mountains right next to the beach. This has been a wholly unimaginable sight for someone who has spent the vast majority of her life on the east coast in southern states.
So there we were on a beach, yeah we spend all our time on the water and go to it as soon as we get off a boat, if you are drawn to this work it makes sense, but is still slightly comical. There were mountains all around us on, and an old shipwreck sitting on the beach that had all but rusted completely away. Ship wrecks are one of the few things that truly make me shudder when I see them. So I didn’t want to spend much time there. The second most remarkable thing was the sand was a mixture of dark and light sands so the beach took on this Tim Burtonesque type of feel, with the washed up trees from the local logging industry adding a spice of strange contours to the striped sands. People had actually built several small pseudo dwellings that could have been fairy forts or some such magical thing had this actually been a Tim Burton movie.
Then we drove around a bit and found another part of this park that was more wilderness. We started out climbing on old World War II bunkers that were built to help defend the west coast. Then we came to a trail that we decided to walk down. The beauty of this lush green landscape is not something I had seen in months, so it kind of seemed weird and out of place with what my present world is like. There was moss and ferns growing everywhere. The evergreen trees were giants among the leaf bearing trees. They had moss hanging down in large whimsical spirals and sheets that seemed to almost give the trees a monastic look as if these were ancient monks from some elder tribe of people. Then we started getting bit by the largest mosquitoes I have ever gotten bit by. Having been on a boat for several months I didn’t really think about this, plus being a spur of the moment adventure no one brought bug spray. So there we were traipsing through the forest of elder monks donating our blood to their mosquito protectors. I was bitten more than a hundred times easily in the course of our jaunt. The only respite from the plague of buzzing hypodermic terrors I could find was by lighting a cigarette. I had been told years ago by an uncle that smoking helped keep the bugs away, and it did indeed seem to help at least keep them away from my face and hands. The rest of my body did not fare so well.
So if you ever find yourself headed to Astoria might I suggest more warm things than you think you might need and plenty of bug spray if you are planning on enjoying any of the amazing wilderness trails that abound in this area of the world.