"F" is for FORBES: Cape Disappointment

This weekend we drove down to Cape Disappointment, which is on the Washington side of the mouth of the Columbia River. It was about a three and a half hour drive. We went this way:

Vivi did very well--she talked to herself and played with sleepy bear and puppy (the one Nana gave her) and read books, then when she looked tired we turned on our CD of classical lullabies and she went right to sleep.

Here is the park, and all the places we went:

Cape Disappointment is where Lewis and Clark finally made it to the Pacific and they have a museum about them at the park, so we started there.

My three favorite parts of it:

-An exhibit on the dugouts they made to float down the Columbia River. There was a 1/2 scale replica of one which looked absolutely impossible to navigate. We got to try loading a suspended miniature canoe with as much "luggage" (blocks) as we could without tipping it over.

-An exhibit on how hard it was to find enough food to feed everyone. There were pictures posted on the wall of all the different animals they ate, scaled to what they would look like from 100 yards away (their accurate shooting range). We had to look through binoculars to read the labels on the picture that said how many people the animal would feed, then we sighted them with a rifle mounted on the railing around the exhibit. It took a lot of hunting to feed a company of 33!

-A replica of Lewis's "traveling library," including references on navigation, botany, medicine, Indian tribes they were likely to encounter, etc. There were also a few replicas of the actual journals they kept on their way. Pretty fascinating! I wish we could've gone on a field trip there when we studied Lewis and Clark in American Studies.

Vivien sort of liked the museum. She mostly liked to run into the room where they were showing a video for all the people too lazy to read the information and distract them with her singing and dancing.

They also had a room in the museum about "The Graveyard of the Pacific." There's a giant sandbar at the mouth of the Columbia river that makes this stretch of the coast particularly treacherous, so there were exhibits on lighthouses, the improvement of rescue systems, and a map of all the shipwrecks. The room had a beautiful view of the ocean, but we were there at sunset so the blue-eyed people in the family were not able to enjoy it much.

We were not supposed to climb in the boat, so I made Drew stand on a chair behind it. You were fooled, weren't you? You thought they were in the boat. That's how good of a photographer I am.

After the museum we went for a little hike over to the Cape Disappointment Lighthouse. Vivi hikes very well downhill. Or maybe it's just that her momentum is so great that she can't stop and pick up every rock and pine cone she sees.

Her new favorite thing is to yell "YYYYYYYAAAAAAAH!" with as much intensity as she has when she is squeezing Rice Chex into powder. Here she is in the middle of saying it.

She was trying her hardest to get off of Daddy's shoulders so she could run the wrong way.

The most scenic beach we saw the whole weekend, but it was off limits--property of the U.S. Coast Guard.

The other side of the scenic beach. I got this picture on the first try!

View of the Lewis and Clark center from the lighthouse.

Vivien was far more interested in the puddle she found than the Pacific Ocean, and Drew was looking particularly handsome in his Columbia shirt by the Columbia river.

Cape Disappointment Lighthouse

That night we ate dinner at a fun restaurant in Long Beach (a town a couple miles north of the park), then attempted to roast marshmallows over some very damp wood at our cabin. We fell asleep to the sound of croaking frogs and fog horns from the ocean.

The cabin. There was a table and chairs, a futon, bunk beds (with a full size mattress on the bottom), and a heater in the corner. Bathrooms were in a building right behind us. It was very easy to clean up when we left! We slept in our sleeping bags and took the pack-n-play for Vivi.

Our view of Lake O'Neil from the cabin.

Eating breakfast

Welcome to Waikiki! In the morning we went to Waikiki Beach, which is apparently named for a Hawaiian sailor whose body washed ashore after their ship wrecked on the infamous Columbia sandbar in 1811. Despite its dismal history, it was very pretty and it would probably be fun to swim there in the summer.

You can see the lighthouse we hiked up to the day before on top of the sea cliff in the back.

Driftwood surrounding Waikiki Beach. It was VERY slippery!

Then we drove over to Benson Beach and walked all the way to the North Head. We saw a HUGE eagle that Drew (after some research when we got home) decided was a juvenile bald eagle. I didn't get a picture because I was standing there gawking at it with my mouth open :)