vegefest and a goonies vacation!

please be warned. this is going to be a long post with a lot of photos and quite a few links to videos. are you ready? ok, let's begin.

sunday, leff and i hit vegefest at the center. if you're really interested in this, check out the flickr set. there were lots of free samples. if you have questions about it, i'll answer them in comments.

but now let's get to the good part. leff and i went on a goonies vacation!! a lot of the movie was filmed in astoria and cannon beach (both in oregon) both of which just happen to be really close to seattle! so off we went in our purple rental car (not pictured)!

we wanted to stay off the interstate as much as possible (you can see more interesting things that way.) so it was hwy 101 for us. this was exciting to me not only because i'd always wanted to drive 101 (it is spectacularly scenic in many places) but also because there are small towns where things like this still exist.



a freakin' "analog" gas pump! wow! i hadn't seen one of those in years!

101 is an awesome drive. but i'm getting antsy. let's skip to the astoria part!



technially, leff and i stopped by fort columbia (one of the forts that guarded the mouth of the columbia river.) to get a pano of astoria. but none of my shots turned out. so i'm just gonna' start typing about the goonies stuff now!

i swear, it looks like a freakin' movie set in astoria! here's the flavel house musuem which, in my book, is known as "mikey's dad's museum".



immediately across the street from it is the country jail where the fratellis broke out!



seriously, they are right next to each other. if you stand "here"



you can see both of them.

sadly, we didn't have a gas can and a gun to recreate the get away scene, but that's probably for the best anyway.

a few blocks away are mikey's and data's houses! look for this sign,



park your car at the bottom of the hill and walk up. the owners don't mind people taking photos of their houses. (although i'm sure they must get tired of it.)

anyway, can you believe that the data and mikey houses are really this close in rl?!?



data could *totally* slide through mikey's front door. and, guess what?!? we saw someone do the truffle shuffle while we were there!! seriously! i have video!

near the houses is the astoria coffee company, a.k.a. "where rosalita crossed the street with some groceries".



aye! dios mio! make sure to look both ways before you cross the road!

since we had pretty much exhausted "goonies" locations in astoria (although we didn't get a shot in the bowling alley where chunk smashed a slice of pizza and a milkshake into the window nor did we find the football field where andy encouraged everyone to practice their spirit pyramid.) leff and i drove on to cannon beach and haystack rock!!



i mean, holy hell! is that not impressive? (er, not my pano but the geologic formation, silly!)

it was so awesome that poor luther shed a tear.



and leff had to moblog it.



we walked around with our shoes off for a while, collecting sand dollars and taking waaay too many photos. on our way back to our room, we found where the fratellis drove onto the beach to join the 4x4 race at the end of the chase scene.



and i also found some baby...RUTHS!



this rocky...ROAD came later in our trip, but i thought that it fit well here.



there's also an accompanying ice cream video that was shot at the tillamook cheese factory, but i'm getting ahead of myself.

back at our "hacienda" we watched, of course, "the goonies".



and later that night we went out for pizza at pizza a fetta where we ordered the crab pizza. (not only was it delicious, we also got to say "crab pizza, crab pizza" like we were on mst3k. (sorry, inside joke.)

the next morning, leff and i drove to ecola state park where, not only the fratellis' restaurant used to be located but where we also saw some elk!!



i also took a really crappy movie of an approximation of the goonies bike ride to the restaurant.

ok, so i don't know about you, but if i'm within easy driving distance of a cheese factory, i kinda' have to go there. esp if they have a self guided tour. which is how we ended up at the tillimook plant in, appropriately enough, tillamook, or!



they have lots of cheese samples.



but unfortunately, the plant was closed for maintenance. oh well. here's a shot of the ice cream manufacturing section anyway.



just outside of downtown tillamook is cape meares. the big draw is, i suppose, the lighthouse. but i'd read about the octopus tree and was *dying* to see it. (that's kind of a pun since it might possibly be a burial site.) anyway, here's the prehistoric, huge, wonderful octopus tree.



you can read a little more about it here but there's not a lot of info. i have a feeling that octopus trees are about to become an obsession of mine, however, so stay tuned for additional trivia on them, if you're so inclined.

oh! here's a video of the pine forest leading up to the octopus tree. it was really windy and the trees were bending and making a lot of noise. tres cool in a very scary, creepy kind of way! (although the video doesn't do it justice.)

having finished with the tillamook area, leff and i started the trip home. but not before stopping off one last time at haystack rock!



if i had enough money, i think that i'd get a vacation home in cannon beach. but only if i brought months of provisions with me because their grocery stores suck. (heh heh)

of course we didn't head straight back to seattle. nope! lewis and clark had been mocking us the whole way



so we decided to stop off at cape disappointment.



i've always loved how optimistic those two were. (haha!)

there's another lighthouse that we walked to. i'm sure that leff has photos. i shouldn't belittle these things because the views at all of the lighthouses that we visited were SPECATCULAR!! and at cape disappointment you can, apparently, watch whales from time to time. i was just too cold to bother dragging out my camera.

see, even the mouth of the columbia river only got a cursory "from the parking lot" photo.



and i dig the columbia river. (note to self: next time, when visiting oregon in march, make sure to bring your coat.)

and that, in a billion rambling words and photos, was our awesome vacation. i really, really want to go back to cannon beach. really.

today i think we're just recuperating. and maybe i'll work on my edible book. or maybe i'll surprise us both and make us bus to higo. either way, i've got to stop typing. my fingers are chilly.