Trip to Astoria and Cannon Beach, Oregon April 21-22

Christopher (Dancing Penguin) and I drove to Vernonia and Astoria on Wednesday, April 21, geocaching and benchmarking along the way. We had a free guided tour ride on the waterfront trolley in Astoria. We stayed overnight in a motel suite overlooking the Astoria bridge and the Columbia River.

After breakfast we did some benchmarking in Astoria and then traveled to Ecola/Indian Beach to complete the 4th and last of the "twilight" series. We hiked up the hill where we hunted for two hours for the cache but were unable to find it. I slithered under a log and Christopher climbed over it. We searched both sides for about 100 ft. Found some likely places but no cache. There was a lot of blowdown from winter storms. We did find a brown beer bottle and Christopher found a frog. Deeply disappointed.

We traveled back to Portland/Vancouver on Hwy 26 stopping for late lunch at a Dairy Queen. Christopher had a Geocaching meeting at a restaurant at Clackamas Town Center so I took him. Afterwards we went back to my house to watch "Survivor."

The Dalles-Dash Geocoin Challenge - Saturday, April 3, 2010

My daughter, Catherine, and I drove to The Dalles so she could do The Dalles-Dash Geocoin Challenge. We stopped in Hood River at McDonalds for breakfast where my Subaru Forester, a Travel Bug with the license place TVL BUG, was discovered. Catherine found The Dalles-Dash caches rather quickly using her Garmin Etrex Venture GPSr. She slipped on the muddy trail at one of the cache locations and got her sleeve and the seat of her jeans muddy and injured her shoulder. It was unfortunate as she was supposed to play First Violin with an orchestra on Monday and Tuesday evenings and had to cancel. We had time to visit Maryhill Museum to photograph and get the coordinates for a Glacial Erratic at the far end of the museum parking lot. We arrived back at Anzac Tea Room in The Dalles in time for a lovely afternoon tea. Afterwards we traveled west on the Old Columbia River Highway over Rowena Crest. At Mosier we stopped to view another Glacial Erratic in the quarry. We saw a lot of waterfalls from I-84 as we drove back to Vancouver as the sun was setting.