Portland: Oregon Coast, Astoria & Cannon Beach Day Tour｜United States

Two hours west of Portland the land runs out. At the mouth of the Columbia River a four-mile-wide estuary meets the open Pacific, the stretch of water sailors named the Graveyard of the Pacific. Above it sits Astoria, the oldest American settlement west of the Rocky Mountains, a hillside of clapboard houses and old canneries that Hollywood has been borrowing since the 1980s. Forty-five minutes south, the same coastline turns into Cannon Beach.

Your driver-guide collects you in central Portland or at PDX at about 9:00am for the 1-hour-45-minute drive out. The day starts at the Goonies House, the 1896 Victorian on 38th Street where Mikey unrolled One-Eyed Willy's map in the 1985 film, photographed from the public street. You then walk up one of Astoria's hillside stairways for the view over downtown and the four-mile-wide river, visit Pier 39 with its 1875 cannery building and free Hanthorn Cannery Museum, and stop on the Riverwalk under the Astoria-Megler Bridge, at 4.1 miles the longest continuous truss bridge in North America.

Next is Fort Stevens State Park. You can walk straight into Battery Russell, the coastal battery shelled by the Japanese submarine I-25 in June 1942, which makes Fort Stevens the only mainland US military installation fired on by an enemy during the Second World War. A few minutes away the rust-red ribs of the Peter Iredale lie on the open beach, where the 285-foot British barque was driven ashore in 1906 and the tide still fills her twice a day.

The afternoon belongs to Ecola State Park. Indian Beach stood in for First Beach at La Push in Twilight, and the headland above it played the cliffs over the Fratellis' hideout in The Goonies. From Ecola Point you look south along a run of sea stacks toward Cannon Beach, with Tillamook Rock Lighthouse a mile offshore, before the last stop: the beach itself and Haystack Rock, 235 feet tall, a protected marine garden with tide pools at its base and tufted puffins nesting from April to early July. We read the tide table on the morning of your tour and time this stop to it.

This small-group tour is limited to 6 participants, and you may share the vehicle with other travelers. Your driver-guide speaks English, with a fluent Mandarin Chinese guide available on request at no extra cost. Door-to-door transport within the pickup area, parking and Oregon State Park day-use fees, bottled water, and child or booster seats on request are included. You return to your Portland pickup point approximately 8.0 hours after departure.