After six days on The Olympic Peninsula I was beginning to believe there wasn't a single ugly thing to be found on the whole of it. I wondered, as we continued south along the 101 towards Grays Harbor, how the good people had managed to keep their communities so clean, so apparently free of crime and decay. That is, until rolling through Hoquiam and Aberdeen. I guess everyone and everything has an armpit and an asshole (I'd probably call Aberdeen the armpit, and Hoquiam...poor Hoquiam). I shouldn't have expected the Olympic Peninsula to be any different.

These were the ugliest, dirtiest places we visited on our tour of the Pacific Northwest. A little word of advice...lock your car doors as you roll into town and blow through as quickly as possible. Nearly every building had bars on its doors and windows, and all the car lots featured 10 foot fences capped with razor wire. Main Street seemed dead. Only the liquor stores and the tattoo parlors appeared to be thriving. And there were plenty of these. Not surprisingly, nearly everyone we saw was covered in body art, and carried a 40 ounce malt liquor. Colt 45, baby!

The scenery improved significantly once south of Aberdeen. We passed through nice little towns like Raymond, South Bend, and Chinook along the 101 before crossing the 2 mile long bridge spanning the mouth of the Columbia River into Astoria, Oregon.

Astoria is apparently the oldest continuously inhabited settlement west of the Mississippi River. Its history and architecture are very cool, but, I was only interested in one thing...The Goonies House! We had gotten directions to the place online, and we spent the rest of the afternoon looking for it. Finally, and just before giving up, we spotted it. We'd driven by it about ten times, but hadn't recognized it (it's much nicer than I remembered from the movie). It sat at the end of a private drive, perched proudly above the surrounding neighborhood.




I was speechless. All I could think of while sitting there, staring at this monument to my youth was:

"Chunk...Do the truffle shuffle...Do it..Do It!"


The Truffle Shuffle!





We got a room at the Holiday Inn (right under the bridge) in Astoria, popped popcorn and watched The Goonies on pay-per-view all night. Tell me this isn't the best vacation ever!