This is last full day in USA this end of the trip, as we are flying to Toronto tomorrow. We now have an excellent understanding of the behaviour of sea lions, and now know why that whenever you see them during the day, they are asleep, because they party all night, barking enthusiastically non-stop. Despite this we did manage a reasonable nights sleep.
We awoke to a thick, soupy fog over Astoria. It was not looking good for the trip North. We ventured out into the soup at about 8.30 am, and visibility was poor. It got worse as we crossed the bridge, then all of a sudden about three quarters of the way across the bridge, the sun broke through and the north side of the river was clear. The bridge is 6.5 km long, and you cross into Washington State about 3/4 of the way across. We are amazed at the size of the Columbia River and the scale of its harbour. You are not sure if you are looking at the ocean or the river sometimes.
The fog on the Southern shore is Astoria
The landscape today is very different, we are in timber country. There are pine forests and sawmills, and none of the little resort towns we saw sprinkled regularly up the Oregon Coast. In between the forests are swampy wetlands.
The first reasonably attractive spot we came to was South Bend, it was nothing special compared to what we have been used to over the last week or so, but more interesting that the rest of the scenery.
From here on there was not much to see. Lots of forests and highways, so we chalked up the mile pretty quickly and stopped in Olympia at around 11.30 am. We had a look around the West Marine Store there, bought a pair of binoculars and motored on tour motel in the Southern suburbs of Seattle, where we arrived at around 1.30 pm.
Finally a show of Autumn colour at Olympia
I had been in touch with Holland America Line this morning, before we left Astoria, and had a pretty unsatisfactory discussion with one of their customer service people, with regard to them paying for our airfares to get from Quebec City to Boston, the meet the new ships program. In the end I asked to speak to someone more senior, and left my number for them to call me. Just before we reached Seattle there was a message on my phone that they had agreed to pay the fares and to ring the supervisor who had called me to finalise the details.
As well as crediting the unused portion of the cruise they are offering a few incentives to sign up for the shortened version, which we intend to do anyway.
After lunch and a bit of a rest, we drove into Seattle to have a look around the waterfront. There is a huge amount of redevelopment going on there at the moment and we wouldn't have bothered had we known. We had a quick walk around Pike Markets ( pretty quiet in the afternoon) , a walk down to the waterfront, and got in the car and came back to our motel . It was 5.30pm by then anyway.
Pike Markets
The Waterfront away from the construction zone
Quite a lot of it looks like this, with greatly limited pedestrian access.
Driving back to the motel, we see the imposing snow capped Mt Rainer in the distance, but struggle to capture a photo of it doing 60 mph in chaotic traffic.
Back at the motel, we put our feet up for a while, and wander down to a local Chinese restaurant, who served remarkably good American Hong Kong Chinese cuisine.
It is early start tomorrow, so we are making an early night of it.
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