Saturday, August 3, 2014
It had been a long day already. We had seen some amazing waterfalls, some incredible vistas, and some enormous crowds along the Columbia Gorge. It was time to move on. I didn’t want a repeat of Friday’s scramble to find a place to stay in Portland, so Laura dove into the task of finding us a place for tonight. Our only requirement was that it needed to get us further on our way, preferably somewhere on the Washington State coastline, but not too far of a drive. Laura was successful, but I didn’t know anything about the town or location. Regardless, I set the GPS and we set off.
I-84 took us through downtown Portland and over the Willamette River on another spectacular bridge. We didn’t linger for sightseeing, or even for a photo of the bridge and skyline, but kept going. We left the interstate for the coastal highway, which mimicked our Friday trip over from the coast. We passed through rural lands, then ascended over the coastal range, dropping back down at the appropriately named community of Seaside.
We began seeing signs pointing to historical locations for Lewis and Clark. Seemed fitting. Our last two week road trip was ten years ago, when we followed the Lewis and Clark route across country in another convertible.
The highway followed only a short span of the Oregon Coast before turning back eastward. Most of this was through developed seaside communities. Soon, though, we were crossing the Young’s Bay Bridge toward Astoria. We didn’t linger, though, because we immediately drove onto the Astoria Bridge across the Columbia River.
