Baked Alaska, A Highlight in Astoria, Oregon
“I see a place I want to eat!” I cried out as we were looking for a lunch place. “Baked Alaska!”
“You want to eat Baked Alaska for lunch?” AdventureMan asked me, thoroughly confused.
“No, the name of the restaurant is Baked Alaska. It’s underneath the Raymond James office and it’s right on the waterfront. I’ll bet it’s good,” I speculated.
One time when my niece, Professor Little Diamond was visiting, I told her how AdventureMan often accused me of speculating.
“Join the family!” she exclaimed. “It’s fun! We all just speculate our asses off!”
You can see why we loved it when she would come to stay for a while. She and I would go to the bookstores and tote out volumes and sets of Islamic books on scriptures, history, and the precedence of scholarly attributions, and all kinds of books about customs. Some I would mail to her, many she would manage to take back with her in her suitcases, leaving behind clothing rather than sacrificing room for a book.
We decided to go to Baked Alaska for dinner, and it was a lovely, memorable meal.
We had this amazing view of all the ships making their way up the Columbia river. We also saw seals playing in the wakes.
AdventureMan ordered a dry Chardonnay, and the waitress brought a glass of the house Chardonnay, bottled especially for Baked Alaska, which she described as “crisp.” We both heartily agreed, and think it was one of the best wines we tasted on our trip.
We both had the arugula salad with roasted cauliflower to start. You can’t see it, but it’s there, along with roasted garlic. This salad was fabulous.
It also came with tasty bread:
AdventureMan ordered clams, this time in a creamy sauce:
He said they were very delicious, and very rich. The next day, he said he thought maybe he’d give up on clams for a while, that he loves them, but sometimes a rich treatment is too rich, and keeps him awake at night. Aren’t they beautiful, these lovely fat clams in their cauldron?
I had the seafood small plate, with Pacific shrimp, sous vide smoked salmon, and Dungeness crab. I couldn’t decide which I loved the most, the salmon or the crab, but . . . Dungeness crab trumps almost everything anytime.
They had some tempting dessert offerings, including, ahem, Baked Alaska, but we are trying to both eat delicious foods, and keep our waistlines, so tonight we skipped dessert.
Even without dessert, this was one of the best meals we ate. Well, there were a lot of best meals . . .
We fell asleep to the sound of barking sea lions.
Astoria, Oregon
We are taking the backroads; we are more interested in the experience than the destination. We are on old highway 101, along old familiar beach fronts, and going into old rural Washington en route.
I couldn’t resist these fabulous mossy trees:
And this wonderful huge Quinault painting on one of the old buildings, I am thinking in Aberdeen, WA:
We see a lot of timber; we see it growing, we see it clear cut, we see it replanted, we see it at mills and we see it transported along the great Columbia, going who knows where? China?
We find ourselves briefly along the old Lewis and Clark trail along the banks of the Columbia as we approach Astoria, our goal for today. We made it a point to come into Astoria over one of the old bridges, an elegant bridge.
AdventureMan wants to explore the Columbia River Maritime Museum, which he heartily recommends to all with an interest in history and commerce in America.
Before we go, however, we want to have lunch. We stop at Josephson’s Smoke House for some clam chowder and some of the best local made salmon burgers we have ever eaten. I apologize; they were so delicious we ate them before I remembered to take a photo. I do have some photos of Josephson’s, which is more a processor, smoker, canner and seller of salmon products than a real restaurant. Their menu is limited, but their salmon products are outstanding.
Our hotel was a nondescript and not all that welcoming Hampton Inn. Having said that, in spite of the lackluster welcome, they had a great pool, we could open the doors to our balcony and hear sea lions barking, and we got a great night’s sleep. There is something to be said for all that. I also liked some of the hand crafted art work in the dining room.
The nearby sea lions:
Kalaloch Lodge and Creekside Restaurant
OK, I am going to risk boring you. I have a think about lodges and historic hotels. I love the old architecture, the high ceilings, the spacious rooms. I love the restorations and renovations that include gracious private bathrooms (!) and I love the vision that created these lodges in the first place. So I am going to show you lots of photos, because I can’t help myself. Honestly, I have shown restraint, but you may not think so.
This is the exterior of Kalaloch Lodge
These are some of the cabins. Many of them have cabins with kitchens, and people bring their own food for the week.
This is the wedding pagoda; the signs posted say that the pagoda is reserved from like 1 – 4 for a private event 🙂
The registration area and gift shop
Upstairs area
Our room looking out over the beach
Our view – oh WOW. I just wish you could hear the waves.
Sunset at Kalaloch
We ate dinner that night in the Creekside restaurant at the lodge, thanks to being urged to make reservations when we arrived. There is no place anywhere near Kalaloch you can eat without 30 minute drive. Fortunately, the Creekside Restaurant had delicious food, and some great choices for wine and beer.
Restaurant is on lower floor; above it is one of the suites.
We don’t often end up ordering exactly the same thing, but this night we did. A great arugula salad and a big bowl full of clams, and some really good sourdough French bread. AdventureMan had a local beer, and I had a dry red wine. Life can’t get much sweeter 🙂 I am very proud that for once, I remembered to take a photo before we started eating.
He restoreth my soul.
Lodges, Sea and Mountains
You may remember, I am an Alaska girl. It goes deep. When we moved to Pensacola, my husband and I looked for a house on the water, which we found, and did not buy for a lot of really good reasons. One is that it showed signs of having been underwater at some time(s) and another was that the water here doesn’t do much. In Alaska, on the West coast, there are waves, and sometimes they are lovely huge crashing waves.
So one of the things I need to do to feed my soul is to get back to where I can be near mountains, and sea, and nights without a lot of ambient light, and scenes of sheer grandeur. We are all wired differently; I NEED this connection to restore my perspective on what matters, and what does not.
We started our journey out of Edmonds on the Edmonds ferry to Kingston, a ferry I have taken a lot in my life. Here is a map of our first day:
We stopped by the Edmonds bakery to get my Mom a maple bar. If you ever go to Edmonds, WA, the Edmonds Bakery is on Main Street, close to the roundabout, and has been making the best pies and pastries around for many years.
We said our goodbyes, and by the grace of God, made it to the ferry line just as it was boarding, no wait. It’s raining lightly but in Edmonds, teams are out playing soccer, couples are hiking around the hills of Edmonds, and the rain doesn’t stop normal activity, it is a part of normal.
The Edmonds Ferry
A rainy foggy day in Edmonds
I hate it when we are parking on a slant! They put blocks behind the wheels, but I have visions of the car just rolling right off.
That’s the Edmonds Ferry going from Kingston to Edmonds seen through the ferry car-carry area.
Someones fanciful house in Kingston
The dock in Kingston approaches
The Ferry system in Washington state is a part of the highway system. It’s how people living and working on the islands get gas and groceries and household goods. The ferries can hold a full sized moving van, and daily there are construction vans, electrical maintenance and highway maintenance vehicles traveling via ferry to remote destinations. It’s a part of life. Many people commute to the “mainland” from the islands for work, keeping a car on each side to reduce ferry costs (it’s a lot cheaper to walk on than to take a car on board).
When we planned this trip, I told AdventureMan “I don’t have any control over the weather. It might be rainy and cold the entire time.”
And AdventureMan grinned at me and said “I’ll bring books.”
He’s game.
I tried to take him to a wonderful restaurant on the Dungeness spit called The Three Crabs. We found Three Crabs Boulevard, but . . . no Three Crabs. It no longer exists.
We ended up at a small restaurant just outside of Port Angeles. We would have eaten in Port Angeles, but every restaurant we saw was a chain restaurant, and we were on a detour and had concerns about staying close enough to the road we needed to be on. As we left Port Angeles, we found the Fairmount, the kind of place we love to try, a local place, full of people still eating breakfast, or drinking coffee, or eating pie, but mostly checking on the latest local news.
AdventureMan wanted a hamburger. He said it was pretty good.
I had thought “Port Angeles! Fish!” and ordered halibut. This is frozen halibut; I could get this is Pensacola.
By this time, though, the skies have lifted and we are seeing some blue sky, which is really amazing, because we are in the Olympic Rain Forest. During the next couple of hours, on our way to Kalaloch Lodge, it must have alternated sun and rain, sometimes even heavy rain, fifteen or twenty times. We were just thankful it was not a steady dreary rain.
Along the way, we marveled at the trees. There were some very ferny kind of trees, and also some trees with lots and lots of moss on them.
We took a stretch break at Storm King Ranger Station, on Lake Crescent, where one of the funniest incidents on our trip happened. We were walking out on the dock and a group with two dogs were out there, and the dogs jumped in (they didn’t mind the cold water) and swam and swam, the happiest dogs you ever did see. As one was exiting the water, he stopped and pooped. His owner, a young woman, yelled “Oh no! Oh no!” She is waving her plastic poop bag (people are SO conscientious in the PNW) and goes on to wail “How am I going to scoop that poop out of the WATER??”
Well, I think sometimes you just have to leave well enough alone. Her earnest concern, her utter shame at not being able to recover that poop just totally cracked me up, even as I felt sympathy for her. “You can’t do anything about an act of God,” I laughed, “that’s just what dogs do.”
Mostly, I really wanted you to see the color of the Lake Crescent water. Isn’t it gorgeous?
Lost My Way :-)
Aren’t vacations great? I had such great plans; travel to all these fun spots AND read two books I have to have read by the time I get home AND do Trip Advisor reviews AND tell you about my trip on this blog.
Hahahahahahahhahahahahahahahaha.
I managed to read one New Yorker on my flight from Atlanta to Portland.
I managed to blog in Portland.
I even managed an entry or two in Seattle, where we were spending time with my Mom, who had been hospitalized the previous month with a particularly nasty bout of influenza, suffered two subsequent rounds of pneumonia and a couple small strokes. She was in rehab, re-gaining her strength, and shortly after I left, she returned to her home. My Mama has some amazing resiliency. She is 94, and she still has all her marbles. I am learning a lot about what having great genes and living a long life can mean – it takes courage. Mom has that in spades.
Once AdventureMan and I got on the road, however, I just don’t know where the time went. Certainly, I didn’t MAKE room to keep up with the blogging. We usually landed where we were headed mid-afternoon, and would explore. Then I would take a look at the next day, and AdventureMan would take a look at the map and we would plot our course. Then . . . sometimes we would take a nap before dinner. Sometimes we might take a walk. And then, by the time we finished dinner, had figured our what we might need for the next day (for example, we each had a medium sized bag, but some places we stayed didn’t have elevators, so we would repack what we needed for that night in a smaller bag and tote that in, rather than tote everything.
In the Fred Meyer’s in Lynnwood, we had found a noodle, so if a hotel had a pool, we toted the noodle in, too. It’s cheap, and it really makes for good exercise, and at the end, you can put it in the recycle and maybe someone else can use it.
So sometimes we would also tote in the noodle.
We also had emergency supplies: a bag of Halo’s (small seedless tangerines), dark chocolate, rice crackers, a bag of peanut M&Ms for AdventureMan (even the smell of them makes me gag), ginger candy for me. Mostly that stayed in the back seat unless we were staying two days or there was no breakfast included.
We quickly discovered our rental car, a Nissan Altima, had no pick up at all. Going up the twisty turny roads on Highway 1 and California 1, the car would go slower and slower. It was like navigating an ocean going vessel. We love our agile little Rav 4’s. We joke that we are a Rav 16 family; between the four adults in Pensacola, we have four Rav 4s. It is agile and fuel efficient, and comfortable for long drives. The Altima . . . is not any of those things.
Please pardon the two week interruption while we voyaged. I will start to catch you up now, I promise.
O’Yeah, Tasty; First Meal in Seattle
A month ago I was in Seattle when my 94 year old mother suddenly came down with influenza and was hospitalized for 13 days, drifting into pneumonia twice, and suffering several small strokes. It was a difficult time, and as I was running errands for her one day, I passed a new Chinese restaurant near the hospital, O’Yeah Tasty, Szechuan cooking.
Szechuan. Near Edmonds Community College. Hope springs eternal, maybe I can get some really good Chinese food in the midst of all this emotional chaos!
(When we were moving to Pensacola several years ago, our son sat us down, looked at us very seriously and told us he had something to tell us we weren’t going to like. With a long face he stated “You need to know that there is not a GOOD Chinese restaurant in Pensacola.” We searched. We tried them all. Most were sort of Americanized Chinese, none had the good strong flavors we had become used to overseas. Longing for GOOD Chinese food is something we have grown used to experiencing.)
I had something called Mongolian Delights, recommended from the Chef’s specials by the cashier/order taker. It was fabulous, and the Hot and Sour soup I had with it was really HOT. When I told my sister on the phone where I was, she said Mom wanted some Hot and Sour soup, so I took some to her, and she ate it, claiming it was delicious. It was just about the only thing she ate that day. A day or two later, I ordered an old favorite, Chong Qing Spicy Chicken, and I almost cried when it arrived, it was so totally TASTY, so close to what I remembered from the Taiwan Tourismo in Amman, Jordan back in the day.
So when AdventureMan and I arrived in Seattle, at lunch time (our delicious breakfast from The Courtyard had finally worn off) we headed straight for O’Yeah Tasty.
We ordered fried egg rolls, and AdventureMan ordered the Seafood Three Delights, and I ordered my all time favorite Chong Qing Spicy Chicken.
And the dish that makes me cry, Chong Qing Spicy Chicken:
As we ate, the restaurant filled with Chinese students from the nearby college. We got to see what they were eating, even as we enjoyed our own food. There was so much food, we packed it up and took it with us to put in our hotel room refrigerator and have later for dinner.
This is how much I love this food: when we were talking with my mother who, by the grace of God is greatly improved, and improving more every day, she said she was able to go out for dinner this very night. A part of me ALMOST said “how about tomorrow night?” because I love that Chong Qing Spicy Chicken so much, but fortunately I love my mother more and the thought was just for an instant; we quickly made plans to take my mother to an Italian restaurant she loves this night and to have our treasured left-overs for dinner tomorrow.
If you are ever in Edmonds looking for spirited and authentic Szechuan cooking, hurry to O’Yeah, Tasty.
Dinner and Breakfast in The Courtyard
Sometimes you just take the easy way. We had a great lunch at Gojo, and we had a long day. We knew there were so many great places in Portland, and we were tired. We decided to grab something quick at The Courtyard.
When we walked the short walk down the hall from our room to the restaurant, we discovered it was packed!
We were happily surprised to be quickly seated, and were doubly happy when we saw the menu and some non-pubby kinds of food. We ordered the Curry Butternut Soup and the entree Heirloom Tomato Salad. The soup was a little sweet to our taste, but some like sweet more than others. The Heirloom Salad was fabulous, full of a lovely variety of tomatoes, really good and tasty greens, prosciutto, and a very tasty variety of olives.
We were very pleased. It was tasty, it was healthy and it was original in creation and presentation. We were so delighted that we decided to have breakfast in The Courtyard again the next morning. As we got there, one of the servers was loading the wood burning stove.
The menu had more surprises for breakfast, we found. AdventureMan ordered Biscuits and Gravy, but not your Southern biscuits and gravy. The biscuits are home-made and baked fresh, and the gravy was a gorgeous mushroom and rosemary combination that satisfied without coating his blood vessels. I had the smoked salmon benedict, which was served on rye bread and had lots of avocado and herbed cream cheese in addition to the salmon and poached eggs.
The day was cloudy and rainy but the warmth of the meal and service kept us cozy and happy and content all the way on the rainy drive from Portland to Seattle.
Thank goodness for Google Maps, which gets us in and out of cities in the most efficient, least trafficked way, and which has a voice that will tell AdventureMan in advance what is coming, and which lane he needs to be in and which way he will need to turn. We occasionally get into trouble, but rarely, and can quickly orient ourselves to where we need to be.
Gojo Ethiopian Food on Alberta Street in Portland
As if the easy access and the great hotel weren’t enough, within four minutes of our hotel is a delightful little Ethiopian restaurant, and we can’t get Ethiopian food in Pensacola. There were two or three groups already eating, and the smells drove us wild.
We ordered quickly, a vegetable combination plate and Doro Wat, a spicy chicken that always comes with a thick, hot sauce and a hard boiled egg. Actually, I don’t care that much about the chicken or the egg, it’s that thick hot spicy sauce I love. We also loved the smokey green beans and the vinegary greens, the pickled cabbage, the beet colored potatoes and the red and green lentils – it was all good, and not dumbed down.
Our meal:
Extra injera:
There are so many good possibilities for good food in Portland, but we are so stuffed we think we will never eat again!
McMenamins Kennedy School Hotel in Portland, OR
We don’t like cooky cutter hotels. When we start thinking about a trip, I put a lot of time into looking at hotels. I ask AdventureMan “do you want to stay downtown?” “What would you think about staying in a former poor-house?”
Not every choice turns out, but AdventureMan was kidding me because I still remember one really bad hotel in France in like 1987.
This time, I nailed it. I hit it out of the park. When I saw his face, I nearly danced for joy. He loves this place.
McMenamins is a trendy Oregon brewery that has done some really smart things – put good food into their breweries, and bought up old, decaying buildings, restored, renovated and turned them into hotels with charm and character. The one we are staying at is an old elementary school, and much of it is still in place – the wide hallways, the fabulous wooden floors, the signs for restrooms, gymnasium, etc. and classrooms which have been turned into guest suites.
The closet in our room is the former cloakroom, just like the very old school I went to school in, with hooks in place for students to hang their coats:
This is the major restaurant. There are also at least three bars, maybe four, and other spaces which are used for meetings and events.
One of the things we love is that the neighborhood and community gather here. There is a movie theater that plays current films; guests at the hotel get free admission, but other people are here, too. There is a soaking pool outside near the old gymnasium, and local mothers had their children in the pool, warm enough to be teaching them to swim on a cool rainy day in Portland.
It hits a lot of blocks for me – high ceilings, huge windows, wooden floors, all this and a sense of history and a gathering place for the community. Nearby is a growing arts and crafts street, gentrifying, with lots of really good restaurants. This is a really cool place for us. AdventureMan loves the history of the place, the glory of the vibrant plantings in the gardens, free parking and nearness to culture, food and convenience (drug store, very trendy grocery store, etc.) We like the Portland vibe.
Our Spring Adventure Begins: We Land in Portland
AdventureMan always know when I need to roam . . . I get edgy. I get bored. I get this trapped, wild feeling and I have to go roaming. I have to hit the road. For forty five years, God bless him, he has hit the road with me. He loves Adventures 🙂 and he is my best travel partner.
So we are up at oh-dark-thirty to catch the early flight to Atlanta and the ongoing flight to Portland, and the longer flight, Atlanta to Portland, isn’t full! We each have aisle seats, and we each have an empty seat between us and the closest other passenger! In this era of cattle-car air transport, we revel in space and celebrate these rare occasions.
When we arrive in Portland, the car rental pick up is right in the airport, just a short trek from the baggage pick-up. We are with Enterprise this time, and it was an easy check in and then a concierge car service as he told us to pick a car from those available. They were large trucks, and vans, and very big and not what we wanted, and then a Nissan came in and we said that one would be just fine. Within minutes we were on the road, and mere minutes later, at our hotel.
Great start to a great adventure.
Recent Comments
Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 