Coastal Cruise - Astoria

 It’s Bubby’s Birthday!

We woke up around 5:30 to get ready to cross the Columbia Bar – the place where the widest river in North America meets the mighty Pacific Ocean, the Graveyard of the Pacific, the place we’ve been waiting for. The Pilot came on board a little after 6, and Dave and I bundled up and went down to the Promenade deck (there are no open forward facing decks on this Dam ship) to watch us cross the bar. It was forecasted to be a beautiful day in Astoria – sunny and 55 – and the Pacific was living up to its name. We crossed the bar as the tide had just started going out, and it was about as unexciting as it is possible for a thing to be. Like, unnoticeable. Shortly after we crossed we saw the Cape Disappointment lighthouse, a lighthouse which they put there because they knew how we’d be feeling.

I was cheered up by breakfast at the Lido with Jen and Dave (one guess about where Josh was) and then it was time for our Behind the Scenes tour, a fun excursion through the working sections of the ship. It was lead by our cruise director Simon, and took us to all the places you can’t usually go, including the engine control room, which was pretty cool. The tour lasted about two and a half hours but went by super fast. I was wearing my David Hill sweatshirt on the tour, and we met someone from Hillsboro who knew the winery, which was fun.

After the tour we disembarked and went for lunch at Bridgewater Bistro, a 10 minute walk away. We had a super corner table and lunch was delicious, especially the outstanding crab and artichoke dip that Jen got. (The dip replaces the fabulous crab cheesecake, which is sad). After lunch Dave and I decided to continue walking towards the Maritime museum, while Josh and Jen headed back to the ship. Josh had been getting notifications on his watch all through lunch about how his favorite players were doing in the Masters golf tournament, so he needed the downtime for sure.

Meanwhile we walked up the waterfront trail, which runs for about 5 miles from the cruise ship pier up past the museum. There’s a trolley that runs along it, but the timing was exactly wrong – we saw it pull out from the station when we were maybe 40 yards away, and it takes about an hour to do the whole loop. That was fine because it turned out to be a stunningly beautiful, completely wall to wall blue sky day, with temperatures in the low 60s – T-shirt weather on the sunny walk back to the ship. At the Maritime Museum one of the American Cruise Lines riverboats was docked (180 passengers) so Astoria was full to bursting for an April Thursday.

On the dock there was a cute little makers market with 8-10 local vendors. I almost bought a souvenir but our suitcases were too full. On the way back, we saw the Captain and his dogs – he’d told us at the coffee with Simon that his dog sitter was driving them down from Seattle for a visit.

Once we got back to the ship it was time for some blogging again – it has felt more like a chore than usual on this trip, because we’ve been so busy. I did a little blogging on our verandah, but eventually decided to head up to, you guessed it, the Tamarind bar, stopping at the Lido for my usual fizzy water. I learned today that ordering a sparkling water gets you imported San Benedetto, while ordering soda water gets you a domestic. I’m not sure if there’s a price difference – I need to check!

After blogging I showered and got dressed for Dressy Night and picked up Jen for One Hit Wonder trivia. Our partners from yesterday were there and were happy to team up again. We got to talking about kids, and she told a very sad story of her husband marrying a woman with 6 daughters, and then his wife died of a brain bleed and now he’s engaged to a Samoan woman but the girls don’t think he should remarry. We still don’t know her name. Anyway, they were thrilled to have Jen along because the theme was one hit wonders and Jen is a hit at that category! We got a lot more things right but still didn’t win.

The timing worked out that it made the most sense for us to go wait in the Tamarind bar, since dinner was in about 25 minutes 9 floors above where we were doing trivia. Fortunately I was wearing heels so we took the elevator. Josh and Dave joined us and at 7:30 we headed in to dinner at the Tamarind Restaurant, which was a flop.

First off they hadn’t realized we were a 4 top, not 2 2-tops, so we ended up at a table smushed in a corner by the kitchen. The food was just ok, and we didn’t get out of there until almost 10 – at 9:00 we hadn’t yet gotten our entrees. We tried making conversation but eventually it was past all our bedtimes and we just sat there. Apparently their grill had died shortly before service began, but that doesn’t explain why everyone else was gone an hour before us. We slunk back to our cabins, grabbing our nightly mint tea on the way, and everything got better!

Many of you know that we took this cruise to get our 4-star mariner loyalty status, but what we haven’t mentioned is that this cruise also put us over 100 days on board HAL ships. So when we got back to our cabin not only were our 4 star mariner pins and congratulatory letter waiting, but our incredibly gaudy and fabulous 100 day “bronze” medallions were waiting for us as well! And a towel swan! We went to bed as happy & proud as can be.