I crossed the river back into Washington, then headed southwest.
There were three people out on the bridge fishing. One had a luggage cart with a cooler on it, and he was sitting on it. Another had an adult tricycle with a basket full of stuff. I guess it's a long way out onto the bridge so they brought supplies.
It was still mostly overcast, but the view was terrific. The road was just windy enough to make it interesting but not enough to slow me down much, and traffic wasn't bad for the first half.
I saw some barges on the river. There were only two being pushed by this boat, compared to the eight in most Mississippi barge clusters, but the barges looked much bigger. It's hard to tell without frame of reference.
The train tracks beside the road occasionally ran on earth causeways over inlets. I guess it makes sense to keep them straighter. The road, however, turned a lot and climbed up the side of the mountains when necessary, often losing sight of the river (and the tracks).
I found the series of tunnels I'd seen from the other side. There were five or six of them in a row, and they were numbered. The entrances to the adjacent train tunnels looked older.
A few times there were carved rock faces right beside the road covered with black netting. I guess that's one way to avoid falling rock.
I passed but did not cross the Bridge of the Gods. I did a little research on the bridge after reading the historical marker and being told about it by Mary Esther. The legends of the different Indian tribes vary, but they generally agree that there was once a stone arch bridge across the river at this point. Something happened and the bridge collapsed, leaving the river full of stones, which created the Columbia Cascades.
The legends had something to do with Mount St. Helens to the north, which the legends remember erupting, and Mount Hood to the south. (One of the legends has St. Helens erupting and knocking the head off Rainier, but that's another story.)
The Cascades are gone now, covered by the backwater of a dam.
This manmade bridge was named after the mythical bridge.
I started overtaking a train. I would go off into the hills and occasionally get glimpses of the train below, then drop back down and be beside it again.
Then I hit a couple of nasty spots of road construction, where sections of the road were down to one lane. Not only did the train get ahead; I also got stuck behind some slow traffic.
Eventually I got past the traffic and caught up with the train again. Then I was in the far suburban Vancouver, so I never got to pass it.
One would think that Vancouver, Washington, would be at the top of the state near Vancouver, British Columbia, but it isn't. It's down at the bottom, across the Columbia from Portland.
Instead of driving into Vancouver I took I-205 to I-5 north. The Columbia River makes a northern turn here, so I didn't get too far from it.
I got off the expressway at Longview and headed toward the river. I passed huge log yards and lumberyards and, based on the smell, paper mills.
I stopped to buy gas. I commented to the girl behind the counter about the large collection of meat sticks available. She said she used to work at a factory where those were made and she never got tired of them. Her job was cutting the long smoked ropes into smaller sticks. They got to keep the ends.
I crossed the river back into Oregon on the Lewis and Clark Bridge, then took U.S. 30 toward Astoria.
I stopped at a couple of Mt. St. Helens viewing points. I think I probably saw it, but the sky was so overcast and cloudy that I'm not sure. It was just a shadow between two closer mountains.
I probably should have continued down the river on the Washington side. This side was sparsely populated, but I was out of view of the river most of the time. I did pass the High Climber Room restaurant in a small town, "Home of the Loggerburger".
I finally did see the river again, but I couldn't see the far side due to the rain and haze. It was like a huge lake.
On three different radio stations I heard people say "Astoria", so I am fairly confident that the town is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable and the remaining emphasis distributed evenly among the remaining syllables.
I think they have frozen custard in this part of the country, although they call it "custard ice cream".
The bridge across the mouth of the Columbia (or close to it) is huge. At over four miles, it isn't as long as the Mackinac Bridge that connects the two halves of Michigan, and it really isn't as pretty, but it is still impressive.
At the Astoria end is a huge arching metal bridge to allow ships to pass under. Then there is a very long raised roadway with a smaller metal arching bridge at the Washington end to allow, I guess, smaller ships to pass through. The far bridge isn't very visible from Astoria.
To get on the bridge I passed under it, then turned toward the river and looped back and up away from it.
Back in Washington I passed a Lewis and Clark campsite, but it was crawling with RVs and I didn't see a place to park. I was also driving a bit too fast to turn. I saw two oversized wooden statues of, I assume, the explorers.
In the water here I saw an array of dark wooden poles sticking up out of the water. They looked like the supports for a long-vanished pier. I saw several more of these collections, and, in Chinook, I saw them going very far out into the river. Sometimes they were in ordered rows, but sometimes the placement seemed almost random.
I stopped by a port office in Chinook to ask, but no one was there except a cocker spaniel that didn't seem very happy to see me.
I have no idea what these were. Were they decaying piers, missing the boards across the top? Were they markers for something underwater? Were they dead trees that just seemed to be in rows? Were they functional mooring posts? I have no idea.
I saw a big ship a long way off in the river that looked like a floating basketball arena.
I drove through Ilwaco, "where the might Columbia meets the great Pacific Ocean".
I passed a big purple shop called the Cranberry Castle. "This shop is every husband's nightmare".
I saw a "Tsunami Evacuation Route" sign. It was blue and white with a picture of waves on it.
Long Beach, Washington, is toward the southern end of a little isthmus that sticks up off the bottom of the state like a hook. It's a beach resort town. I saw go cart tracks and miniature golf and antique stores and T-shirt shops and confectioneries and dozens of motels and moped rentals and horse rides.
Long Beach is also some kind of kiting Mecca. There are kite shops and kite postcards everywhere, and I think they have some annual kite competition. There is also a kite museum, but I didn't go.
It's also a friendly, personal town, if the business names are any indication. I saw these:
Marsh's Free Museum was my destination, that and the World's Largest Frying Pan across the street.
The women at the register in Marsh's told me that wasn't the real frying pan. The real frying pan was being refurbished. I said, "so that one isn't the world's largest?" They said it was, but it wasn't the right one. I didn't understand them, either.
The frying pan was divided into three sections. I don't remember it looking that way in the pictures I've seen.
Marsh's Free Museum is a souvenir shop with cool stuff around the edges, like antique amusement machines and coin-operated peep shows, just like the ones at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Michigan (in fact, I recognized some of the machines). It's also got American Indian artifacts and art and the like.
The main attraction of Marsh's Free Museum is, of course, Jake the Alligator Man. Jake is a mummy, his top half a man, his bottom half an alligator. He's in a glass case, which reflects the bright interior lighting badly and makes him very difficult to photograph.
They've got that covered by the postcards and T-shirts for sale. I got a few postcards and a Jake Wear T-shirt.
Long Beach is, oddly enough, home to the "World's Longest Beach". It's also supposedly the world's longest driveable beach. It was raining, so I didn't test this. Based on the reports of both Roadside America and a friend, this sounds like a reasonable decision.
I drove the length of the town, then started back south, since there's no way off the isthmus to the north.
I stopped at Milton York for lunch. This is a candy store, ice cream shop, and restaurant that has been open since 1882 (although it was in a tent then).
There is a candy/ice cream counter taking up the middle of the room, with tables around the edges. I stood at the "Please Wait To Be Seated" sign for a couple of minutes. (Have you ever noticed that these signs are almost always identical? They are cream print on a brown background and in the same typeface no matter where you see them.)
A girl in a white smock and a chef's hat was doing something behind the counter. She saw me standing there, handed me a menu over the counter, and told me I could sit anywhere. She then brought me a glass of water. I don't think that was her job, since when my waiter ("if you want more ask for Les") showed up he brought another glass of water.
Oh, I had said "nice hat" to her when I came in.
I ordered the charbroiled salmon steak, which, at $6.50, was the cheapest seafood on the menu. It wasn't fancy, but I got the largest, best-tasting chunk of salmon I've ever had.
The girl's name was Alla, her grandmother's name. It's Russian in origin, but her grandmother wasn't Russian. She makes candy. I missed it, but there is a big pot of chocolate by the window, and she sits there and dips truffles so that passers by can watch. She worked at a candy factory before coming to work here.
I bought some of her coffee truffles (my first coffee during my entire trip, in a way). I had intended to eat them in the motel tonight, but I made the mistake of keeping them up in the car with me, so they were gone before I stopped for the night.
They had a marionberry cobbler, but I passed. Alla said a marionberry is like a large blackberry.
I had to go back south to catch 101 north, which took me off the isthmus. Isthmus. Isthmus. I like that word.
I passed a cranberry bog, thoughtfully marked. There must be more in the area based on the number of cranberry shops I saw.
The next hour or so of my drive was in big time logging country. I saw several stands of trees. I wish I knew which were which. I know there are spruce and Douglas pine and hemlock.
A lot of logging has been done around here and a lot of replanting. I saw tiny trees planted in 1991, bigger ones planted in the early '80s, and even bigger ones planted in the early '60s.
I know when they were planted because Weyerhaeuser has put up signs to make sure people know they are putting trees back. The trees show what growth they are and what year they were planted.
At the farthest entry into Raymond and throughout town were rusted (on purpose) metal sculptures. Some were flat, just cut out of sheets of metal, and some are more three-dimensional. There were Indians and hunters and fishers and golfers and cyclists, deer and ducks and geese, people planting flowers and walking dogs and leading horses, and lots of other things I probably missed.
I went to the little tourist information shack because I wanted to know more about these and because they offered public restrooms.
The woman said they didn't having anything printed about them, but they really needed something, and she thought they would get something soon. She pulled out a scrapbook and showed me articles about them and their initial sculptor, who was from some town just up the road.
She said there was a great deal of controversy when the city was given a $300,000 grant to put up the sculptures. There are other things in town that need doing. They don't even have a public pool.
As with most public art, the controversy has died down and the townsfolk have grown to love their metal art.
She said one woman in town affectionately calls them their public shrapnel.
Sometimes one of the woman sculptures will suddenly be wearing a bra. It will stay on her a few days until someone takes it off.
Around Christmas one of the deer grows a red nose. For Independence Day the men wear red, white, and blue ties.
We talked about the trees (she's lived here her whole life, and she really should know which tree is which, but she doesn't) and the poles in the water (she didn't know) and the bridge to Astoria (she has been across it often).
She told me she went down there to see the U.S.S. Missouri as it was making its way to Pearl Harbor, but the friend she went with didn't want to cross the bridge because of the crowds.
We talked about Long Beach and the roads in the area. She said that they used to have to back up their Ford Model T in some places because it had a gravity fuel feed.
She sold the Model T after her husband died because she couldn't keep it up, but she still has her Model A.
I told her that my college's mascot (one of them, anyway) is a Model A. She said she would look for it on TV this fall and tell the folks in the club.
She took out her wallet to show me a picture of her 1928 Model A. She also showed me her old Model T and a picture of her husband in his high school basketball uniform. They won the championship that year.
She only works a two-hour shift, so I got lucky. I wish I had gotten her name.
Not every area of harvested trees have been replanted. I saw several empty areas.
I passed two big cooling towers, but neither was giving off steam. I assumed it was a nuclear power plant, but I can't be sure. It was near the town Oaksridge, which is probably a coincidence. I saw an exit sign later for the Satsop Power Plant, so I guess that was its name.
I drove through Olympia (state capital) on my way to Tacoma on a busy I-5. It was rainy in place and sunny in places, which produced a nice rainbow right in front of me.
I've stopped for the night in Tacoma. I think I'll just stay here tomorrow night, making a brief excursion into the Emerald City tomorrow. I need to get the car cleaned out and figure out how I am going to repack my luggage so everything will fit for the flight home.