Saturday 4th September 2004

From Fort Stevens to Cape Disappointment State Park, Washington State. About 30 miles. We cycled back into Astoria, where Steve went round the maritime museum and was delighted witht he tales of daring on the high seas - the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean and creates a very turbulent sea. Excellent for sea rescues, wrecks, and tumbling waves, and Les Galloway's excellent book "Forty Fathoms Deep" was bought from the musueum shop. More books were bought at Lucy's Books, so the bikes have got even heavier. Food now has to be bungeed to the bike, since there's no room for anything more within the panniers. We ate lunch at the Pig 'N Pancake (specialists in pancakes - wonderful levels of carbohydrates!) before setting out over the Astoria Bridge - which is about 4 miles long and stretches out over the Columbia River - you can see the slender darkness of the bridge against the river surface in the photo. There's not much room for bikes up there, and the wind was blowing strongly. It's a wonderful bridge to ride across though - you feel suspended above the river on a little strip of metal and tarmac. I watched a fisherman hauling in a fish yards from my place on the tarmac.

Eventually we were in Washington State , and we headed along the coast road to Cape Disappointment, which we weren't. Just before the disappointment, there was the small town of Ilwaco, which has some good wall murals. I particularly like the one that combined historical and contemporary, as a boy carrying a skateboard walks into a scene from the 19th Century! (click on the photo for a bigger picture). The state parks in Washington are not as good as the state parks in Oregon - the facilities are more basic and seem a bit less clean and tidy. Due to the numbers of Racoons around the tent, we slept with our food all around us.