First Parks

  We left Salem on Saturday afternoon after dragging Sydney away from her friends there.  It was good to spend time with Heather, Jake and the kids.  We headed northwest to check out the Tillamook Cheese factory.  Squeaky cheese and ice cream were certainly the highlights there.  Sydney had the White Chocolate Raspberry and claimed it was excellent.

Sydney enjoying her Tillamook ice cream.

  The self guided tour was cool, except that the place was packed with people.  We were able to make it through the free sample line twice however.

Big cheese blocks.

Cheese in the making.

  From Tillamook we headed north along the coast to Fort Stevens State Park near Astoria, Oregon.  This was our first backing the trailer into a camp spot experience.  Of course it was a packed campground with very narrow spots.  

  We were able to walk to the beach to observe the remains of the ship wreck Peter Iredale a British sailing ship that ran aground there in 1906.  We also walked around the historic military site portion of the park.

The remains of the Peter Iredale.

  From Fort Stevens we went back in time a bit to the winter of 1805 -1806 to Fort Clatsop, the  Lewis and Clark Expedition's winter encampment. It isn't the actual fort, which having been constructed in only two weeks, is long gone.  It is an accurate replica on the actual location and pretty cool.  Sydney tried her hand at journal writing with a quill pen and we watched a flint-lock demonstration.

The gates of Fort Clatsop.

The room of Sacagawea

An original corps member with a flint-lock (so he said).

On Sunday we stayed at the Cape Disappointment State Park which is on the Washington side of the Columbia river.  The camp site was huge and no one was on either side of us, so backing in was a piece of cake.  Cape Disappointment is were the Lewis and Clark Expedition finally reached the Pacific Ocean.  They explored what is now the Long Beach Peninsula, so we were able to walk where they walked and see a replica of the tree that Clark carved his name on.

Sydney standing by Clark's tree on the end of the Discovery Trail.

This was what Clark wrote.

Sydney attempts to start a fire with two sticks at Camp D.

  The beach was nice and the weather was warm.  We stayed just one night and headed north the Elma,WA. to see family.  We are hanging out here until next week.