Wednesday, 17-June-2015

Our first day at camp, and my first day (yes, my first day ever) in Oregon! I know, it’s kind of crazy… but I got hired to this new job sight unseen – I did two phone interviews, and then they offered me a job. No in-person, nothing. And I’d never felt the draw to take a trip out to Oregon – it’s beautiful, I’m sure, but there were other places that had called out to me just a little bit louder.

But now, I was in Oregon. Our tents were set up, and the cars mostly unpacked.

So we packed back into the cars, and headed into town. If you had asked me, I couldn’t have pinpointed for you exactly why I wanted to visit Astoria… but for various reasons the name stuck out in my head.

(Ed note: Dark Astoria, from the City of Heroes video game. So Long, Astoria, the album that Ben loves. The Goonies, a pretty damn good movie. The name just generally being freaking cool)

So we headed in, looking for the one thing that we did know Astoria was famous for – its breweries.

Since we had driven all day, we didn’t aim to do a full pub crawl – instead, we picked one place and hunkered down for an evening of food and tastings. Our choice was Buoy Beer… mostly because it was easy to get to, and highly rated on Yelp. Yeah yeah, make fun of us for using yelp. We were on a road trip and you weren’t, ohh fancy-pants.

Buoy Beer Brew House. Bison Burgers. Bevies of Bountiful… Boysters. And beer. We ate hamburgers and drank beer and slurped oysters. It was delicious and amazing. I’ll admit, hindsight being 20/20, that the oysters weren’t as good as New England oysters. But the Bison burgers and the beer were very much top notch.

Top notch enough that we could barely move as we wandered Astoria after we’d eaten and drank our fill. But we did – we explored a bit and walked off some of the food coma. Or at least enough of it that we could make it back to camp that night, and pass our surprisingly early.