Visit Stonehenge – without having to travel to England.
Oh yes, and taste (and possibly even drink) the 83 wines served up on the week-long Rivers of Wine cruise both at boutique wineries and also on board the replica gold rush steamboat S. S. Legacy.
The boat (44 cabins, renovated in 2013) offered non-stop high quality food and an open bar from morning to night.
Naturally the trip highlights were the visits to the 10 wineries. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed the variety of non-wine attractions.
For example, we left Portland’s downtown Tom McCall Waterfront Park on a Saturday afternoon. Heading up the mighty Columbia River on Sunday brought us to the Multnomah Falls with spray cascading straight down to break on lower level stone outcrops. It was definitely worth climbing the easy footpath to the bridge about halfway up the falls.
And so to our first winery: Springhouse Cellars, housed in the ruins of a former turn-of-the-19th-20th-century fruit cannery and distillery.
We returned to the ship and my complimentary massage. I was so relaxed I slept back in my cabin for an hour and awoke to an almost surreal experience: giant brilliantly coloured butterflies skimming across the whitecaps, which turned out to be windsurfers and kitesurfers darting back and forth on and above the wind-whipped waves of the Columbia River Gorge, with the snow-covered Mt. Hood in the background. Magical, wonderful.
“No cellphone reception: enjoy the peace and quiet!” we were informed as we neared Palouse Falls State Park. Several people took the plunge into the Snake River to cool off.
Wednesday and we were heading back downriver, accruing more wine tastes and knowledge at the Walter Clore Wine & Culinary Center, and Red Mountain’s Terra Blanca with a very nice Cabernet Sauvignon.
Then there it was: Stonehenge, an exact replica of the 14th century original in the English countryside, built on a hill in Washington overlooking the Columbia River by Quaker pacifist Sam Hill to honour the military dead of the First World War.
On our final night on board S. S. Legacy we wrapped up the daily 5 p.m. wine tasting/learning session by enjoying a 2011 Chateauneuf-du-Pape which would probably cost around $375 a bottle in a restaurant. Still, when we disembarked back in Portland, we realized how much more there can be to a wine cruise than just the wine.
See www.uncruise.com for more.
