Still in Long Beach . . .

Wednesday and Thursday Revisited

Cheryl: Forgot to tell you there is a hot rod convention in town for the weekend, so we’ve seen stunning color schemes on 40s, 50s, and 60s Fords, Chevys and others parked in town and going down the highway with us. The name of this group is the Rod Runners and there are welcome signs all over town.

Friday:
Frank: I'm sorry about how small yesterday's photos are. Don't forget that you can click on any image to make it larger. I hope today's photos are bigger.

Yesterday we drove the 16 miles over to Astoria to visit the Maritime Museum and the Astoria Column. The Maritime Museum is chock full of sailing history in general and also local Oregon sailing history. It is another of those “Let’s spend a couple of hours” that could turn into a full day museums. Perhaps we need another acronym, “ANM” for “Another Neat Museum.” The museum includes access to the Lightship Columbia so we got a two-fer for our admission cost. The duty on the lightship can only be described as horrible. The docent said it was six-weeks on, two weeks off, on a boat that was literally shaped like the bottom half of a football cut half-in-two lengthwise. It didn’t ride the waves as much as it bobbed and rolled around like a ping-pong ball. I can’t imagine being on it in one of the area’s many winter storms.

After the museum we drove up the hill to the Astoria Column. It was built in 1926 and has 164 (I counted them) steps to the top. The view is fantastic although I was gasping so hard it was hard to focus on anything farther away than the railing around the observation deck.

Those attractions pretty well took up the day so we drove back to the RV and rescued the puppies. By the way, Cheryl is right about the hot rods and street rods in town. The Rod Runners Rally doesn’t even start until Saturday and already there are dozens of beautiful rods all over the place. I expect it will be huge when they all arrive. We got the last space in this RV-Park when we checked in and the rest of the town is plastered with “no vacancy” signs. I’d love to stay a bit longer but also think it might be best to get out of here lest I go into Hot Rod overload.