It’s been a long time since we have done anything socially because of covid and now that we have been fully vaccinated and received two booster shots we felt it was okay to consider going for a short weekend excursion and taking in a public event. So, this weekend we went to the “Crab” Festival in Astoria, Oregon that was written up and suggested by the AAA magazine Via that we get every month.
We reserved a vacation rental through what didn’t used to be but seems to have become a behemoth vacation rental website. I used to rent my house as a vacation rental through that same website but I think since then it was bought by a large corporation and now if you need help with anything you have to go through a call center which is located somewhere else on Earth, I think in this case it’s the Philippines. It’s not as easy to use the website and this simple transaction was not a smooth easy, uncomplicated transaction. I eventually got the reservation all set up but not without a certain number of calls and email messages and frustration. The rental unit itself was a cute cozy cottage in a great location and exactly where we wanted to be. But it was hideously expensive for what it is. For that kind of money I would expect something like staying in a five star hotel. It is definitely NOT a spa resort with all the goodies. It’s a small, no frills cottage. When I was renting my very large house with some nice amenities and a dynamite panoramic view overlooking the south end of the Puget Sound with this same website, I wasn’t charging nearly as much as this property owner charged. Maybe I’m being overly reactive and negative. And, the cottage, as I said, was nice and suited our needs. But I just think it was too expensive for what it is.
It turned out that the “Crab” Festival of Astoria was not really at all about crab. Crab wasn’t even a second thought. Parking was very limited so we had to either pay $20 to park if we had tried to take the car there and park, or take the shuttle bus from downtown for $3 round trip. The bus ride was actually pretty nice even though it was in a school bus. The good thing was that the Fairgrounds where the event took place was less than a four mile trip from downtown. And there was a $25 per person entry fee into the “festival”. What the festival turned out to he was not the focus on Dungeness crab that we were led to believe that it is. Instead there were about 150 vendors selling all kinds of things other than crab. There were two vendors out of about 150 vendors who had food with crab in it. One had one crab item on the menu, a small, open faced sandwich of melted cheese with a dollop of crab on it. The line for this sandwich was the longest line in the entire festival and once you got your crab sandwich there was no seating for sitting down to eat it. You had to take it standing up, with a gazillion other people milling around and tightly packed together. The other was a crab “meal” that had either half of a cooked crab or a whole crab with a couple of very small sides. The lines to get what little food there was available were very long. And seating for sitting down to eat food once you got it was not in extremely short supply and most likely already occupied because of such a short supply of it. Even though we are still living in the midst of a pandemic that as far as I know has not been brought under tight control, almost none of the festival attendees wore masks and social distancing was non-existent in the packed-tight-as-sardines venue. So, even though most people who attended the crab festival, (no guarantee there,) may be vaccinated and boosted, I would not be at all surprised if after this event there is an associated spike in infections of covid within this cohort.
I wish I could have given this experience a better review. But it was what it was. Still, we took our dogs with us on this little excursion and the four of us did enjoy the walks we took and a stroll on the beach at Manzanita. The silver lining, I suppose, of having had this experience is knowing that from now on, if we want to have crab, it’s better just to buy some at the store and prepare and eat it at home. And also that these festivals usually are not what they are billed as being. Crab at the Astoria Crab Fest, at best, was not even an after thought. They really should rename the festival to reflect this reality and call it something else, something honest, like the “We sell all kinds of crap other than crab festival”.
thoughtprivacyandliberty.com 