Friday, July 20, 2012

Water under the bridge...

7/19 Day 8 - Well I got my wish for a short day today! We took our time getting ready this morning, which was really nice. We did a load of laundry, had breakfast and got our phones all charged up. Having clean clothes is awesome so we decided to take advantage of the campground's washer and dryer - you never know when you'll get to do laundry again.

We left the campground around 10:30 headed for the border of Washington and Oregon. We were excited but also nervous because the only way across the border (which is the Columbia River) is over a 4 mile bridge. We knew about this bridge going into the trip and dreaded it the whole time. Every time we would tell someone where we were going they would say something about that bridge. It didn't help us be any less nervous. When we got close to the bridge we stopped at a pull off to take a look at what we were up against. The first 3/4 wasn't too bad it was a slight incline, a decline and then it was flat for a while. The last part however is a long, somewhat steep incline over the shipping lane. That's the part we were worried about. It was really hard to tell how steep/long the hill was. I usually take several breaks on hills but I was worried about stopping with all that traffic and the wind coming across the bridge. We had been told that there was construction on the bridge that would help slow down traffic.

We got up to the start of the bridge and there was a construction guy with a stop/slow sign. He told us he would let us go before the cars to give us a few minutes head start. We thought that was really nice if him. He also informed us that there was a pretty decent shoulder the whole way. As soon as the cars coming from the other way passed he told us to go. We got over the first hill pretty quickly then it was flat. The next hill was a doozy but we made it up fine. I only had to stop for a breather once and there were no cars. Woohoo! Once we got to the to top another construction worker had us wait til traffic cleared then told us to go for it. We sailed down the other side onto Oregon territory. Hooray!

We hung out in Astoria for a while (it's the oldest American settlement west of the Mississippi... Or something like that) because we only had like 10 more miles to go until our campground for the night. Ethan googled "things to do in Astoria" and found a small winery that was really close to where we were. We decided we'd check it out but we needed lunch. We spotted a McDonalds and decided it would have to do. We got our food and ate it on the pier while we watched some rather big boats go by.

We had to wait until 1 for the winery to open so we biked down to the Columbia Maritime Museum, but it was $12 so we didn't go in. So we sat by the museum for a while watching the boats and people. When it was finally 1 we headed to the winery. We went in and a super old guy greeted us. He explained that his winery is a one man operation and the tour would be very brief. He showed us his wine making room and his lab and explained a bunch of stuff that we didn't really understand (i think we would have understood what he was saying if he hadn't been mumbling so much).

What we did understand him saying was pretty funny though. He was so old. Anyway, we finally got to try his wines. He had 6 for us to try including a Chocolate Orange wine, a Cranberry Whey wine and peach wine. They were all delicious! I like Chardonnay and that's about it & Ethan isn't a huge fan of wine, but we both liked all of them. The Chocolate Orange one he served in mini ice cream cones. It was like drinking Hershey's syrup mixed with orange juice and red wine. Sounds super gross, but we loved it.

After the wine tour/tasting we headed toward Fort Stevens State Park. We stopped at a grocery store for dinner food and got to the park with lots of time to kill. We set up camp then took our bikes on the bike path down to the beach. It was beautiful, but cold. There was a really cool shipwreck right on the beach too. After chillin at the beach for a while we biked back and had dinner. We decided to go on a walk after dinner and then bike back to the beach to watch the sunset, which we kinda missed. After that we took a different route on the bike path back which took us through most of the campground ( which was enormous by the way... Probably the biggest one we've stayed at). When we got back it was bed time.

1 comment:

  1. the story of this old mans wine operation was really cute! Do you have any pics of him? Im picturing lemony snickett.

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