5/16–Seattle

Gorgeous day – full of sun and reasonable temps.  Finally off the ship (the gangway thing again!) and across the street (literally) for the car.  Easy!  We are on the road fast and out of town in a heartbeat.  Heading to Leavenworth for lunch then Roslyn – where they filmed the outside scenes of Northern Exposure.  Fun!

Spectacular drive up into the mountains.  It’s gorgeous, mountains still snow capped, rising up high up into the sky.  Following the mountain road, winding up and around passes (Stevens Pass!) and past ski resorts, it takes over 2 hours before we finally get into Leavenworth.

It’s an adorable little Bavarian town in the middle of the mountains.  Everything is in the Bavarian style – the architecture, the restaurants, shops and bakeries.  Too fun!  We have lunch at Munchen Haus – a brat/sausage place where we sit outside in the glorious sunshine and scarf down an awesome bratwurst and a very different chicken sausage – both accompanied by the best apple cider sauerkraut!  Yum!  We walk our lunch off while wandering the little German Village looking streets, then hop back in the car to complete our loop to Roslyn.

More mountain roads, the rain comes, the rain goes.  Then there’s a little bit of sun.  We roll into Roslyn and it’s just like being in Cicely Alaska – well, ok, sort of!  But how fun!  We can walk down the street where Joel has his office, and across the street is the general store run by Ruth Ann (and it looks just like the store in the show!).  On the corner is the bar that Hollins and Shelley own – then there’s KBHR radio – which is still set up as the radio station store front where Chris would broadcast!  Too, too fun!  You can totally understand why they chose this town for the outside scenes. Easy access to a major city (Seattle is only an hour or so away).  The right look and feel for Alaska – all the old wood buildings.  It’s great!

Back in the car – we head back to Seattle. Pit stop at the grocery store for supplies and gas – then sit in massive traffic getting back on the highway. Wow!  There are 3 huge entrance/exits all at the same place and it is crazy.  But the drivers are all so polite. Everyone merges nicely (just like a zipper!!!), no road rage, the guy in front of us even hand signals to us that we should be in the HOV lanes!  How nice was that?  Just as impressive as the traffic!

Takes us a while to get back into town, but once there, it’s a breeze to drop the car and walk back to the ship.  Fun day!

5/15–Astoria

Today is rainy and overcast – and bone chilling chilly!  We have gangway issues (oh no, not again! It must be us!) and finally get off the ship about 1/2 an hour late.  We walk over to Enterprise Car Rental – a nice quick little exercise – first in line for the car – and we are off to Tillamook pretty quickly.

One road – go until it ends basically! Although we do have the GPS, we really don’t need it.  We drive through the rain and the clouds and hit Tillamook around 10:30ish.  We go to the Cheese Factory first – it’s a self guided tour, but still pretty interesting (no headphones this time!). 

After watching the workers process huge blocks of cheese, we head to the sampling area then the store.  Yum!  We end up with Garlic Cheddar and Black label cheddar to snack on later.

Back out in the chilly rain, we head to the Tillamook Air Museum.  Cool place!  It is housed in the largest wooden building in the world. Originally built as a blimp hangar, it now houses all sorts of different planes and exhibits.  As we are leaving, we stop in the gift shop and find these great reversible fleece lined rain jackets for $20.  We figure we can use them today for sure – and probably the rest of the trip, so we find 2 that fit and we are set.

On our way out of Tillamook, we stop at the Tillamook Smokery outlet store for snacks/lunch.  2 feet long pepperoni sticks for $1!  Can’t beat that – pepperoni and beef sticks for lunch. Jerky and smoked beef to take home.  We stop at a viewpoint on the way back, high above the coast and enjoy the view while lunching on our sticks and cheese!

Then it’s back to town, and the ship, ready to head to Seattle.

5/13–San Francisco

Phew – made it here – and early too.  We sailed in around 7 – in the fog so you couldn’t see the bridge, but whatever.  We are here!  We take our time – but still manage to be outside by 8:15.

First up – riding the old restored trolleys.  Ed is a huge trolley buff so this is quite appealing. We pay our $2 each, hop on and ride all the way to the end of the line to Castro.  There we have a cappuccino at a cool little bagel store, then head back to the trolley and go back down to the waterfront.

We sightsee our way through Fisherman’s Wharf, walk back to the ship via Safeway(didn’t buy anything), and have lunch aboard.

Next, we head out to climb up to Coit Tower.  Great exercise!  We climb up I don’t know how many stairs (we were almost all the way up to the tower by the time we saw this sign.  Later found out that the total number of stairs is 400.  Invigorating!

Once up there – the views were spectacular.  The fog was lifting – so we could see everything – except the Golden Gate Bridge which was still half in half out of the fog.

Down Telegraph Hill we go – better coming down than up! 

And onto the pier to wait for our Alcatraz Ferry.  We get cat bird seats on the top deck and spend a nice 20 minutes in the cool breeze on the way to the island.

Once there – we get the general overview briefing and the included audio tour headphones.  This was a fabulous tour! The audio tour was incredibly well done – there were interviews and remembrances from 4 guards and 4 prisoners. I can’t tell you how impressed we were with it. Normally they are totally boring but this was captivating. You really didn’t want it to end!

It took us a little over an hour to go through the whole prison – and totally thoroughly worth it.  The stories, the facilities, just the idea that you are a couple of miles from San Fran, but in a whole other world.  Awesome.

Back on land, we wander to Pier 39 – oh so touristy!  See the seals…

…then back aboard for dinner and a show!

5/12–Santa Barbara in the Fog

First port – NOT.  We are fogged in – or I should say fogged out!  It is too foggy for the tenders to make it to shore so we are ditching Santa Barbara. Which is a real shame since we had great plans to drive up into the valley and go to the wine region, have lunch at a tapas restaurant that had wine from 27 wineries under one roof, then head to the brewery next door.  Sigh…oh well…an extra day at sea.

We can make both make a big dent in The Stand – which I’m reading for the 2nd time and Ed for the first!

5/11– Abbreviated blog

I’m taking the easy way out this trip! since we have a port virtually every day – this will be the abbreviated blog. You’ll still get the feel of the trip – just not all the run on details!  Let’s begin:

 

Embarkation day – we leave our hotel and get to the ship really early (no traffic on Saturday and our driver makes really good time!). We dump our bags with the cruise porter and spend the next hour and a half touring the USS Iowa (The Battleship of the Presidents) which is docked a couple of piers down from the Sapphire Princess.

It’s a gorgeous day, and a fun little self guided tour.

The ship is amazing – and I never realized the history – that this is where Roosevelt developed the plans to invade Normandy.  Pretty neat!

More wandering, conning tower, gun towers, mess, tomahawk boxes.  All interesting and a good way to pass the morning before boarding our more peaceful ship!

Aboard the Sapphire Princess, we go to our aft cabin – awesome huge balcony! – leave our travel bags and head to lunch.  Normal embarkation day – unpack, gym, dinner, show…then to bed for our first day in port

5/10–Long travel day

We are off on our Pacific Coastal-Alaskan cruises trip – at the crack of dawn. Well, actually before the crack of dawn!  4:45 wake up call, 5:30 shuttle to the airport and 6:50AM flight.  Phew – I’m tired just thinking about it!

Flight from Savannah goes off beautifully, plenty of time in Chicago to catch the 9:57 to LA. We grab a quick breakfast snack and head to the gate where we dutifully line up in our boarding zones. And, then.…the announcement.  Yep. Delayed.  First it is just a matter of getting the plane to the gate (it’s in the hanger).  Then it’s a maintenance issue that Engineering needs to sign off on.  It’s one hour, then it’s two hours….everyone is rushing for other flights, but we don’t really care.  The next flight is already 1 1/2 hours late arriving, the flight after that – well who knows?  We’ll stick with the original, even though it’s a tad boring sitting on the floor in the boarding zone line!

Eventually it all works out though, we get food vouchers (cool, lunch costs $1.30 in the final analysis) and when we are finally on the plane (push back 12:30pm), we get our first round of drinks on the house.  Hey- we’ve got nothing to complain about!

So, 2 hours late into LA, but we’ve nothing to do anyway.  Shuttle picks us up, we arrive at our cute little Best Western, go across the street for beer and wine, come back, sit by the pool and read, then head to dinner.  Casa Gambino, right next door, still the best Mexican food we’ve had in forever.  This time we stick with the happy hour menu which has items for $4 each.  We get the quesadilla, Tortoras (similar to nachos with refried beans and meat) and hot wings.  WAY too much food. The darn quesadilla is enough for two alone….plus beers (because their wine stinks) and we are so totally stuffed it isn’t even funny. For a total bill of $27.  In LA! Can’t beat it. And it’s the friendliest place. We end up chatting at the bar, and the guy next to us says – hey – I remember you guys from when you were in before!  Amazing!  He’s right – he was there 7 weeks ago.  Too much fun.

We waddle back to the BW and try to digest our food before bed time.  Not an easy task!

5/17–Victoria BC

Oh, icky day! Rainy, cold.  Not looking so good for our circle drive today. But – it’s the Pacific Northwest – what else can you expect?  We head off the ship, intending to walk to the car rental, but another couple we are talking with has a car there too and says they’ll pick us up.  Cool.  After some machinations with phones and such, we call and the van is on the way.

Good thing too – coz it is a far piece from the ship.  The original itinerary had said we were in Victoria until midnight – but actually we are leaving at 5:00.  Hmmm…that puts a damper on our plans.  But we soldier on – get the car and head out to Sooke and the Marine circle drive. 

It’s still rainy and chilly, and the drive proves to be fairly boring as well as a little tough on narrow roads that wind around the coast in the rain.  We go to the Sooke Forest Park for the blowholes, but it’s too wet to try to do any hiking.  Back on the road, we try to make it to Port Renfrew, but end up aborting before that.  It’s just too slow going to even think about making it all the way around the loop – we’d miss the ship. Plus – there’s not much to see or do in the rain, so we cut our losses and head back into Victoria.

As we head back into Sooke, we pass the Point No Point resort where we have read they have good Clam Chowder.  What the heck! We need lunch. So we stop – and it’s a great “accident”.  Incredibly cool resort with all sorts of different cabins.  A fantastic little restaurant perched up on the hill with picture windows looking out over the water to the coast of Washington state.  And awesome food!  The clam chowder was as good as advertised, and a bean soup was just heaven.  Then a shared Croque Monsieur sandwich – and we were just done.  Excellent meal!

Back in town, shuttled back to the ship, we pack and make ready for our Princess disembarkation and Oceania embarkation!