Mission #1 - find the famous Goonies house in Astoria.

Not easy to locate... unless you cheat by finding the address on some Goonies Web site and plugging it into your GPS. 

The house is located up a hill.  No cars are allowed, so you park at the bottom and hike on up.  And you can't go inside (it actually looks like someone is living there).  But you can, apparently, stand outside and snap a few photos with no one bothering you.  We were respectful and tried not to get too close.

Mission #2 - find the source of all the noise that we could hear from the Goonies house.  Turns out it was the hundred or so sea lions at the E. Mooring Basin down the road.  Boy are those sea lions loud! View the photo gallery.

Mission #3 - Get my picture taken in front of the biggest anchor I've ever seen in my life (located at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria). 

Mission #4 - Find a good spot to get a photo of the Astoria-Megler Bridge.  Get sidetracked by the chocolate shop nearby.  Realize it's way too hot to be toting chocolate around.

Mission #5 - Get a real meal that doesn't involve melting chocolate.  And we had two rules - it must be seafood and it must not be a chain restaurant - my husband was adamant that we support a local business.  We ended up in the town of Hammond - at a restaurant/bar called Buoy 9.    The fried oysters were fantastic, the waitress was wonderful and there was hardly anybody there - just our kind of place.

Mission #6 - See what Fort Stevens State Park is all about.  We vaguely remembered being there like 16 years when we first met and didn't realize there was a gorgeous campground there that has somehow missed our radar.  There are like 300 or so sites there and we drove through to check it out. We were surprised to see that it was pretty full - campgrounds usually clear out on Sundays. But then again, one whole loop was filled up Lazy Daze motorhome owners. 

And when we left the campground, we found a neat shipwreck on the beach.  I've seen this thing in photos many times, but didn't know exactly where it was so I could see it in person. Now I do. View the photo gallery. 

Mission #7 - Try to figure out what a guy is doing with this big yellow thing. Some kind of kite surfing, we decide.  We were disappointed to see him packing up the gear and leaving.

Mission #8 - Get a photo of a "Kids Don't Float" sign, which we kept seeing around the area.  We liked the idea of loaner life vests for kids that are easily accessible. This one was at Coffenbury Lake at Fort Stevens State Park.

Mission #9 - Get back to the trailer to rest up for Monday - a day touring the Long Beach Peninsula.