Brian & Patty's Awesome Adventure!: July 14th and 15th

We ran out of time at Fort Stevens on Friday to see the Guard House. It closed at 4:00 and because the walking tour went long we did not have time to see the tour of it.

Fort Stevens Guard House

Because Fort Stevens is only about 10 miles from our campsite we decided to go back to see the Guard House on Saturday.

The Fort Guard House is the fort's jail. This guard house was build 100 years ago in 1912. It was mainly for AWOL or unruly soldiers that had a few too many, but they also had isolation for those that had committed felonies. The cell cages are below street level to make it harder for the prisoners to escape.

Jail Cell

In the picture below they staged what the cell would have looked like with prisoners in it. There are original Look and Life magazines from the 30's and 40's. That's a mannequin in the cell not a person.

Jail Cell

There were volunteers who would lead you through the guard house giving you history of it. Pretty cool. Here are the staff quarters.

Staff Quarters

In the Museum at Fort Stevens there was information about a historical landmark where one of the Japanese shells hit near Fort Stevens. It says what street it is on, but not where. We went out looking for it and found it. On the way we saw this pond with all these lily pads!

Lily Pads

Just several hundred yards away we found the marker.

Site of Shelling

What's funny is that we had seen the sign from the main road pointing out the historical marker at least a dozen times. The sign points to another road and we didn't know it was this site.

Landmark

We went back into Fort Stevens Park to the camping area, not the fort part. We remembered there was a parking area called Battery Russell. If we did go to this last time we were here 8 years ago, we didn't remember it. From the parking lot it doesn't look like much, but when you climb up the steps through the bushes and trees look what you find.

Battery Russell

You can even go inside the different room here. You can see on the ceiling where the rails were for armaments and the lantern holes in the walls.

Inside Rooms

When we got back to camp we were bad and went to the Banana Split social but we split one banana split. That's not as good as it sounds because this Thousand Trails is not the same as any other we have been at. Christopher the manager is a trained chef and in fact has owned his own restaurant. He does everything huge! The banana splits had three HUGE servings of ice cream over at least two bananas and then you put on whatever toppings you wanted yourself.

We then played candy bar bingo where if you win you win a candy bar. We didn't get close to winning until the end where we won the last game which gave us $7.75 credit for breakfast this morning. We normally wouldn't eat breakfast at Thousand Trails, but as I said Christopher is an amazing chef, not a cook!

We used the credit this morning for breakfast before church. Patty got the small stack of fresh blueberry pancakes which comes with hash browns.

Blueberry Pancakes

I got biscuits and sausage gravy which also comes with hash browns. We got a side of bacon. After our coupon we won it cost about $4.00 for breakfast. Obviously we couldn't finish everything!

Biscuits and Gravy

After breakfast we went to our new church North Coast Family Fellowship for the last time. I hope we like our new church as much, but I can tell you that God has really led us to some GREAT churches so far!

NCFF Church

It is raining today so we decided to take a drive down the coast a few miles and then back to our home to kick back and watch some TV.

Seaside South Beach

We then drove down the Ecola Beach State Park. That is where we saw some Elk last week. We were on the scooter so we didn't take any pictures. It is so pretty we wanted to go back and show you what the road looked like. But first the beach. Notice the arched rock off shore?