Road Trip with Bruce and Louise: August 6, 2016, The End of the Lewis & Clark Trail, We Reached the Pacific, Cape Disapointment, Fort Clatsop

August 6, 2016, The End of the Lewis & Clark Trail, We Reached the Pacific, Cape Disappointment, Fort Clatsop

We have reached the end of our journey along the Lewis & Clark Trail. We have gotten to the Pacific Ocean and Fort Clatsop. This portion of our trip is complete. What took Lewis & Clark 18 months to do we did in one month, but we both went about the same distance. 4, 000 miles. Today we drove from Kelso in Washington to Cape Disappointment and the Lewis & Clark Interpretative Center on the coast. The center is located on Route 101 south of Long Beach, WA. This is also the home of Fort Canby, which was built to protect the entrance to the Columbia River. This was an active fort up through WWII. It is now home to the interpretative center for Lewis & Clark. It has a nice museum and some trails. Lewis & Clark reached this point in November of 1805 and stayed here for a little while before moving over the Columbia River to what became Fort Clatsop.

Moving south and across the Columbia River is the National Park Service's Fort Clatsop - Lewis & Clark National and State Historic Park, in Oregon and Washington around Astoria, OR. This park has a reconstruction of the 1805-6 fort that the Corps of Discovery stayed in at the end of their trip. It is pretty cool to see the fort and there is also a nice interpretative center here. We also so a cool demo of how to load and fire a flintlock musket.

Fort Clatsop is our last stop on the Lewis & Clark tour of America. We have come to the end. It is has been a great trip so far. We have seen a huge chunk of the American west and learned a lot. It has been very hot for the entire trip and our idea of camping has been put on hold until it gets a little cooler. Overall a great trip so far. We now spend some time in the northwest and then will start heading back to New England.