Long Beach Peninsula

A friend and business acquaintance of John's has a beach house in Long Beach, WA and has invited us to join him and a couple other of our mutual friends for the weekend. We are staying at an RV park that is close to the beach and less than one mile from Mike's house. We arrived on Friday just in time to have a late lunch with Mike, Ray, Bart and 8 other men who were at Mike's for a business meeting. We then decided it would be fun to play 9-holes of golf at the local course. There were four guys and me but it was fun even though the weather was very cool and windy. Since we didn't start the game until after 4 PM it was after 6 when we finished. We went back to Mike's where the rest of the group joined us for drinks and then a very late dinner.

Saturday morning dawned foggy and cloudy. Despite that, John and I took off for a 3.5 mile walk along the beach. This beach is considered the "longest beach in the world" and is very broad, flat and hard. We spotted cars driving on the beach so checked it out. The beach is considered a Washington state highway with a speed limit of 25 mph. The only place we cannot drive is in front of the boardwalk in Long Beach. So we got the Jeep and took advantage of this highway and drove into town on the sand. Long Beach is your typical tourist town with lots of junk shops, restaurants, and t-shirt boutiques. Mike called about 2 pm and said their business meeting was over and that we were going to drive over to Astoria, OR for lunch at the Wet Dog Bar and Grill.

  

Astoria is only about 25 miles away and across the Columbia River on the four mile Astoria Bridge. We had a boisterous lunch. They all had to finish their meeting so John and I stayed in Astoria to explore this quaint town that is built on the hill side overlooking the river and Pacific Ocean. At times it felt like we were driving in San Francisco with lots of long, steep streets, some of which wound around the hill top. Of particular interest was the Astoria Column at the peak of a hill where we had a fantastic 360° view of the Columbia River and the valleys behind it. The column itself was covered with a spiral pictorial story of Lewis and Clark's explorations.

We spent the evening at Mike's, drinking his wine and sharing our tall tales and stories.