After several years of scheming, planning, and almost building a home (twice!) on the Long Beach Peninsula, we finally escaped from the burbs. In addition to this introduction to our new home in Clatskanie, I also have posts where I put many photos of the critters, the new trees, the sky, and the fence.
In the summer of 2023 we finally moved from the bustling Portland, Oregon suburb of Beaverton, population ~98.2K (the blue rectangle on the map), to the quiet little country town of Clatskanie (“clats′-kuhn-eye”), population ~1.7K (the pink rectangle on the map).
For those not from around here, that river you see on the map that runs from the ocean to the east is the Columbia, which goes along the state line between Oregon and Washington.
A big part of our decision was that this was at least closer to the Long Beach peninsula (north of Astoria) where my brother and nephew live, while not being too far out of the way for visitors from Portland.
Our new place sits on a two-acre lot that is half expansive lawn and half woods in a neighborhood made up of other such lots. There is so much lawn here that it looks a bit like a golf course or a country club. I’d rather not have so much lawn, but that’s a topic for another day.
The day after we moved in, we found outside our front door an invitation to a neighborhood brat-roast party the next day. No, this was not the neighbors exalting in their awesome new neighbors. Rather, it was an annual event of the neighborhood that, through total dumb luck, we had arrived just in time to attend.
What an amazing way to meet the neighbors! Seriously, this was an incredible experience: what a wonderful group of people we had accidentally landed into the middle of.
We are simply amazed by how beautiful it is here.
The south acre
The house sits on the north acre, and the south acre is mostly woods with a deep ravine with a small stream at the bottom. There’s no space on this acre to do any development, but it’s a lovely place for a quiet walk.
Here’s a nice shot of the north bit of the south acre covered by deer.
We were delighted to get a few inches of snow for our first winter in our new home.
It was especially fun to see the tracks that the local dear and coyotes left behind.
For more on our adventure in Clatskanie, or at least for more photos, see my other Clatskanie posts:
The critters | The new trees | The sky | The fence