Day 15 (Astoria - Nehalem 77km)

I started the day late, sleeping in and watching TV until 11am to make the most of my motel stay, then went to the Astoria Maritime Museum to check out some naval history. The people here were really friendly and let me bring my bike into the janitor's room so my stuff wouldn't get ripped off. The museum was great and I liked the sections on local fishing trades, coast guard rescues, the history of the mighty columbia river mouth and the over 2000 ships that have wrecked trying to cross the treacherous bar, and the historical naval section focusing on Gray and Vanbcouver's exploits. Then I wandered into the modern US military naval section and got kind of agitated because it was just huge bombs with captions enthusiatically saying "Over 15,000 of these 40 inch high explosive shells were rained on Iraq during the gulf war. One was said to have turned a forest into a 900 foot helicopter landing zone!" Oh god... I found it pretty frightening, as well as the vaguely racist exposition on the Japanese-American naval campaign of World War 2.

I had a terrible chinese lunch and then rode south along some very beatiful road, up and down hills large steep hills, across bridges and through bucholic flood plain pastures with mountainous forest backdrops to a state park where I only had to pay 4 dollars to secure a campsite (Way less than what RVs pay this time!). There I met my first real pair of touring cyclists!