A Goonie Thanksgiving

Thursday

We left Washington Thanksgiving morning and spent the evening in Beaverton, Oregon! We made a pumpkin pie and found out everyone grows up on the same from-the-can-recipe! Nick whipped up some homemade whip cream and we feasted with some of my friends from back home in St. Louis. Thanks Stephanie, Sean, and Leo for letting us crash!

Leo

Friday

We decided to do a hike in Oregon to a well known waterfall, Multnomah. We hiked about 6 miles seeing several waterfalls along the way, including Wahkeena. We even hiked to the top of the 620 foot Multnomah Fall. The cliff at Multnomah Falls exposes six layers of basalt lava flows.

The Magnificent Multnomah Falls

Saturday

We decided to go off on our own and explore the Pearl District! We went to the nation’s largest bookstore!  Powell’s Books occupies a full city block, contains 68,000 square feet of retail space, and has over 4 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books. They buy around 3,000 used books a day. Then we walked around through Chinatown, blocks of food trucks, and even stumbled across the Portland Farmer’s Market. It is the largest continuously operated outdoor market in the United States.

We wanted to find a place to car camp and be closer to a quaint town, so we headed over to Cannon Beach. We walked along their Main Street and fell in love with the town. We were looking for some grub when we ran into a nice old lady named Jeannie. She recommended just about every restaurant in town, and talked to us for nearly an hour! Once we were finally able to tell her goodnight, we headed over to Mo’s where she works! We had clam chowder soup in a bread bowl and blackened cod tacos. The restaurant was right on the beach, but we couldn’t see it in the dark. Then we headed over to an RV lot and camped out for the night… or so we thought. The popo kicked us out at midnight, but it was for be best because we were lucky enough to catch some breaks in the clouds and spot some stars!

A glimpse of stars through the clouds

Sunday

We headed over to Cannon Beach and saw Haystack Rock featured in the classic, The Goonies! We even saw a couple of kite surfers catching air!

Kite boarder sending it

Then we headed back over to their main street and walked into a few of the shops. Shortly after hitting the road back to Washington we spotted a group of about 20 Roosevelt Elk off in a field so we whipped off the road to check them out for a while.  The largest bull looked to be 500 lbs or more…these guys mean business!

Papa and son out for a run

Further down the road we of course stopped for ice cream (you would think I wasn’t lactose intolerant). We stopped in the capitol, Olympia, at Blue Heron Bakery. They had live music and we enjoyed Blackberry ice cream, which we were told is very Pacific Northwest.