Goonies Festival and the Beach

I semi wrote about the Goonies Festival in June, though I mainly shared our (spectacularly failed) attempts to find a hotel because that's what we felt like doing last minute.

(And actually, totally off topic, but that wasn't the only time we failed to find a hotel in our random and unplanned adventures. More recently the three of us took off to the Columbia River Gorge on a whim, decided to find a hotel to stay the night...but wound up coming home at like 3am because we couldn't find any place.)

Back to the Goonies...

Several months ago I picked out photos to share, so probably the best thing I can do is just write about each of them. So that's what I'll do, after a brief reminder of how I started off that first post a few months back:

I was eaten alive by a balloon turtle, yet lived to tell the tale. I found out that the Goonies is a movie about pirates, and that it was filmed in Astoria Oregon. I let my hair fly free as I enjoyed a break from walking on a swing set at a children's playground. I got into a food fight with a four year old in a nice restaurant. I walked through grassy dunes to get to a beach. I got really sunburned. I made a sand castle on the beach. And I had a fun weekend that was full of surprises with a friend and her daughter. Ultimately, we wound up staying in a hotel not far from where I live.

The festival was spread across I don't know how much of Astoria, but the "headquarters" I guess you could call it contained vendors selling seemingly everything eighties. Above you can see a vendor selling movie posters, and a comic book vendor.

Same thing, just a closer look.

A different vendor had more current posters, including a Day of the Doctor poster that I had to get for myself. Amber also got a couple of Labyrinth posters. 

If I'd actually seen the movie (yes, I plan to...) I could probably tell you more about this building. It's the old county jail turned Oregon Film Museum, and was apparently part of the festival.

There was a Geocache hunt that was part of the festival, and since I've done Geocaching before I just pulled up my Geocaching app and took us off to find the closest cache.

...turns out there, it's apparently possible to make themed geocaches that don't show up on the app, which was what they'd done, plus we didn't even find the cache I took Amber and Pip off to find. Then the one we did find we had to figure out the code word, enter it into the website, and then that's when the site congratulated me with the "You Found It!" screenshot I shared above.

We lost interest in the Geocache hunt after that.

For those who don't know, Geocaching is basically a treasure hunt where someone hides a cache (they come in all shapes and sizes, can be easy or difficult to find, and can potentially have trinkets in them) then puts basic info and GPS coordinates into the Geocache website. Next, other Geocachers use GPS to find the cache. Or that's how it usually goes, and I should probably do a proper Geocache hunt with Amber and Pip sometime soonish.

Those uninitiated into the joys of Geocaching are Muggles, and a cache that has been removed by a Muggle has been Muggled.

It is with great pride that I say this worldwide treasure hunt began in the Portland area.

Many businesses had signs saying "Welcome Goonies!" in their windows, like the one above.

We parked on a hill a bit away from the action, and looking down the street gave us a nice view of the Columbia River and Washington state on the other side. In this photo you can also see a ship, which I'm sure was very careful as it managed the entrance to our river. So far as rivers goes, this is one of the most dangerous in the world for ships to enter.

Eventually we decided to take off to the beach. And with my lovely navigating skills, I somehow managed to take us to the only one we'd have to hike to get to. This was the start of the hike, with a lovely platform where we could either gaze out on the ocean or observe how far we would have to walk to get our feet in some sand.

A panorama during our walk through grassy dunes.

To be clear, I don't mind hikes. But when I want a beach I want a beach, not a hike. Then again, I was the one giving driving instructions, so I do know whose fault this was.

My lovely red toenails attached to my wonderful foot in my gorgeous sandal...finally planted firmly in sand.

Not foot prints in the sand...bird prints in the sand?

There were birds. Lots of birds. Amber and I speculated about whether they were plotting to kills us, since that's what would happen in a horror movie, and fortunately little Piper either didn't understand us or she knew better than to take us seriously. Or, maybe she was too focused making a sand castle to pay any attention to us adults.

The sun was getting low in the sky at this point, though we had time to enjoy ourselves and still get back to the car before night.

You know those things that you fill with sand, upend, and then you magically get a castle? I'm pretty sure that I'd never touched one before. But since we brought one along for Pip, I finally got my chance.

On the left is Pip's sand castle, and on the right is mine. It was actually pretty fun to make.

Of course this wasn't the end of our adventures during that trip, but the rest of it mainly consisted of: trying to find a hotel, giving up, and finally staying in a shockingly nice one for surprisingly little pretty close to home.

Overall, quite an adventure.

Timeout for Mr. Lizard

This is one of those random details from life that I normally wouldn't write about, but Amber thinks this will come back to bite her later. And if it does, she wants to be able to look back at where it started. So, here it goes.

After spending a lot of time in the sun without sunscreen I was very sunburned, particularly my shoulders and upper arms. My skin was bright red (it still is) and it hurt (still does, though it's improving). So although I'd been quite fine with little Piper's toy lizard crawling on my legs, I had to object when Mr. Lizard started crawling on my shoulders. I didn't yell, or get angry, I just said something little like "Ouch, please don't, that hurts."

Piper though...I really don't know what exactly went through her head. I think even her mom is still trying to figure that out, and this isn't the first time she's seen this happen. It seems that Piper was angry at Mr. Lizard for doing something wrong, or else felt like she'd done something wrong herself, and decided to punish him for it.

I wasn't sure how to respond to this, and even Amber is trying to figure out how to handle it when this sort of thing happens. We tried explaining to Pip that we weren't angry and that Mr. Lizard could play on my legs, but that didn't help. It didn't even help when I put Mr. Lizard on my head, Piper just retrieved him and went on as before. Eventually Amber suggested that Piper could put Mr. Lizard in timeout.

The timeout idea is something that Amber hadn't thought of before, and it seemed to help. But it's also what she suspects will come back to bite her later, and Amber is already imagining that an eight year old Piper will try to put a boy in timeout. I find myself laughing at the thought, and hoping that it's at least for a good reason.

Beach and Hotel Adventures

I was eaten alive by a balloon turtle, yet lived to tell the tale. I found out that the Goonies is a movie about pirates, and that it was filmed in Astoria Oregon. I let my hair fly free as I enjoyed a break from walking on a swing set at a children's playground. I got into a food fight with a four year old in a nice restaurant. I walked through grassy dunes to get to a beach. I got really sunburned. I made a sand castle on the beach. And I had a fun weekend that was full of surprises with a friend and her daughter. Ultimately, we wound up staying in a hotel not far from where I live.

It started when Amber asked me to go to the Goondocks festival thingy with her in Astoria. I've never seen the movie, but that didn't stop me from saying yes. Amber, by the way, is the friend I mentioned in this post but who I hadn't talked to about introducing her on my blog. When I asked about coming up with a name for her she said I can just use her actual name, along with her daughter's which is Piper or Pip.

I don't even know how to describe the Goondocks, so I'll leave that for another post. I do know how to tell about other parts of our adventure though.

Sunset

After leaving the beach as the sun was setting, Amber and I set out to find a cabin or hotel to stay in. I don't think I can explain that part of our adventure any better than when I exhaustedly posted photos of our hotel room on Facebook, so I'll just copy and paste from there.

We were at the Goonies, and decided to stay overnight. But Astoria was booked. Seaside was booked. Canon beach was booked. Then we almost ran out of gas because canon beach doesn't know that gas stations exist. We finally gave up and decided to come home. Then got tired and decided that Hillsboro was close enough to home...and wound up in this place, which we got at a discount because the nice lady at the front desk told us to book online. Except then I booked at the wrong location, which was only blocks away...but eventually wound up here, in time to hear the birds begin to greet the dawn.

I still can't believe how nice this place is. It seriously isn't as expensive as it looks.

The room had a huge bed, a nicer bathroom than I'm used to seeing in hotels, an amazing couch and reclining chair, a desk, a table for eating, full size refrigerator, kitchen area, and cabinets. All that when we had just needed a place to sleep because it wouldn't have been a great idea to have to drive any further. It was also an excellent place for playing hide and seek with a four year old, and to our amusement Amber found an empty bottle of vodka on top of the cabinets when she was hiding on the fridge. And yeah I'm going on about the hotel, but I'm still surprised at what we saw when we walked into our room.

It was an amazing weekend, and we're talking about doing this sort of thing pretty regularly now. It's too much fun not to.