San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
After quick cruise, no place like home
It was about time to get out of town. The great pandemic lockdown had shut down travel so much that I had forgotten what the rest of the world looked like.
The Sailor Girl, my travelling companion, and I had taken the alarms, warnings and cautions so seriously that we hadn’t gone out of California for nearly three years. No farther north than Mendocino, no farther south than Ventura, no more east than far Contra Costa County.
And to think that in 2019, the last year before COVID took off, we’d been to Japan, to Kodiak in Alaska, to Scotland, to Nicaragua, the Panama Canal, and a dozen other places. The last trip ended with a long and unpleasant middle-seat December plane ride from Miami to SFO.
When I picked up the last bag from the luggage carousel, I was tired of it.
“Let’s stay home for awhile,” I said.
Little did we know. So when the pandemic died down, the mailbox and phone inbox filled with offers: trips to Hawaii, Greenland, the Rhine, England, Ireland, Rio, the Antarctic, New England, the Shetland Islands, Illinois.
The Sailor Girl signed us up for a quick cruise — a round trip from San Francisco up the coast to Vancouver, British Columbia, and back. Only a week. We just got back.
There’s something to be said for sailing away from your own homeport, where the pier is only half an hour away.
That’s the theory anyway. But this time it was necessary to get tests, booster shots and fill out a bewildering set of forms on the internet. The electronic police are on the job, clicking and swiping. It took forever to board the ship.
But once aboard the ship — it was the Ruby Princess, as big as an aircraft carrier and as pretty as a wedding cake — all was well.
The Ruby Princess sailed not long after 4 on a Saturday afternoon, the passengers raising a glass and looking back at the San Francisco skyline. You forget, sometimes, how beautiful the city is from the bay, from a distance, the towers glittering, the buildings receding as the ship moves away.
And then, just 10 minutes after the ship left the pier, the Ruby Princess moved into a fog bank, and San Francisco disappeared, as if a curtain had come down.
The Ruby Princess sounded its whistle at regular intervals, and passengers were able to hear the deep bass of the foghorn at the center of the span of the Golden Gate Bridge. They fire off fake foghorns when the local teams do great things at sporting events, but there is nothing like hearing the real thing on a ship heading out to sea. It’s the true San Francisco sound.
A good meal, a good night’s sleep and the next day we were off the Oregon coast, miles at sea, no land in sight. The ocean was deep blue, whitecaps in the afternoon, the ship on a northerly heading.
I’ve always liked sea days, mostly for the feeling of being far away, even though land is just over the horizon. On longer voyages, mostly across the Pacific, we’d be at sea for several days. I remember one trip, three years ago from a northern Japanese port to Kodiak in Alaska across the north Pacific. We sailed for close to a week and didn’t see another ship and very few birds. Just the ocean, and at night the stars.
But this was a short voyage, and by the second morning the Ruby Princess was approaching the port of Astoria, Ore. The first thing you notice is the shore birds. And the land smell. Astoria smelled a bit fishy, the legacy of canneries and fishing fleets. The town was gray and green, a bit faded, as if its best days were behind it. But it is friendly and walkable and we paid a visit to the world-class Columbia River Maritime Museum.
Off again in the afternoon, this time up to Puget Sound with Seattle in the morning. I’ve been in and out of Seattle by sea several times and always liked the place.
We played tourist, rode around on one of those big tour buses, took the monorail and went up the Space Needle. It was a wonder of the world, centerpiece of a world’s fair when it opened 60 years ago. It’s still impressive, but it is the past’s vision of a space-age future that never quite happened. Back then we thought that by the year 2022, we’d all be living on the moon.
We strolled around a bit as well. Even tourists notice that the town seems much cleaner than San Francisco. A different vibe.
Then we sailed off for a long day in Vancouver, a city that seems to have been completely rebuilt in the past few years. A recorded tour spiel pointed out what it called an older part of town. “Some buildings date from the 1950s,” it said. Vancouver streets are also squeaky-clean.
Victoria was the last port of call, a brief stop. Then down the beautiful Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Canadian coast to starboard, the Olympic mountains of the United States to port, big clouds, a touch of fog, and out to sea again, bound south.
A beautiful warm final day, smooth seas, time to put the feet up and do nothing. San Francisco the next morning, as the dancing lights on the Bay Bridge were turned off at sunrise.
After a week away, San Francisco looked good to us. We had a last breakfast on board and went ashore. There’s no place like your home port.