We had to get up to Seattle to get to Starbucks by 10:30. Steve found us, the interview went quite well, and then he had to go on his way.

The next few hours were a little bit of mental relaxing, since getting to Seattle and finding the stranger was a success. Quentin and I went back to the car to drop off the camera equipment and then roamed around downtown and down by the water.

We ate lunch at this place that I can’t remember the name of, but it was on a pier. They brought out a bunch of seafood – crab, various shellfish, shrimp – along with corn on the cob, sausage and potatoes – and then dumped the bucket on the table and provided you with one of those tiny crab forks and a wooden mallet as the utensils.

It was pretty messy eating, but it was good. The one real drawback was that the shrimp still had their heads, so you had to peel the heads off. What I can only imagine was their liquified brains would sometimes squirt out as you did this. So I kept squirting myself with brownish red shrimp brains. We didn’t finish the shrimp.

We decided to go to Astoria on the way back to Portland to try to find the Goonies house. Traffic on I-5 was way backed up, so it took us probably twice as long to get to Tacoma as it should have, so we didn’t get to Astoria until just before sunset. It was also cloudy, which didn’t help much.

My friend Mike had been there years before when he lived in Eugene, and he remembered finding the house by eating at a restaurant like Dairy Chef (the burger place from Auburn history) and then looking out the window up on the hill and seeing the house. Using those clues (and then a convenient tourist map) we located what we believed to be the Goonies house.

Quentin said, “Do you realize we just drove 120 miles out of the way to take a picture of a house that we’re not even sure is the right house?” It was fantastic.

So then we ate at Geno’s, the restaurant that helped us begin the treasure hunt. We weren’t heading back to Portland until after 10, and it was raining and dark and I had to take windy mountain roads back. That last 75 miles was a long, stressful drive.

I got to my cousin Kendal’s place well after midnight, so very very sick of driving. I’m pretty much in place for the next 2 days, which is nice. I slept for 10 hours. That too was nice, and much needed. Today’s just going to involve hanging out and finalizing interview times for the rest of the trip.

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