Cruise June 2018

For this cruise my bag got bigger. Usually, Helen and I choose to travel with airline-acceptable carry-on luggage even when no flying is involved.

This system limits us to what we have on our bodies, one ridiculously small rolling bag, with one even smaller item strapped on the top. This gets us onto planes without any checking or collecting of suitcases. When we do this when not flying, it gives us an extreme level of mobility climbing aboard buses, or trains.

Our current trip is a two-week cruise to Alaska. The ship doesn’t care about how much luggage  that guests show up with, and there is no flying involved for us. There are, however, a crazy number of buses and ferries.

I decided to leave my small bag with a tiny bag on top system at home, and haul a single, large rolling bag instead.

This gave me tons more carrying capacity than I am used to. This meant that I could take a few extra shirts, and formal shoes, and my favourite sandals. I also had lots of bag volume I could share with Helen. She stuck to her small luggage system.

So off we went on Sunday morning. I drove Helen to the bus stop near our neighbourhood school, and dumped her and our bags off, and took the car back home. I then walked back to the bus stop.

The driver was super nice, and informed us that he was going all the way to the ferry. Sometimes we have to transfer buses at the mall in town, so this was a pleasant surprise. About an hour later we were aboard the 8:40am ferry headed to Vancouver.

We were the first foot passengers off on the other side, and power-walked to the waiting city bus so briskly that we managed to get seats. This is a huge deal when riding with luggage.

Rode to downtown in relative comfort. That was followed by a few blocks of walking to get to Canada Place cruise ship terminal.

About a week earlier we had received an unusual notice from our cruise line. It told of the boarding times for different groups of passengers. This part is nothing special, but they said that it was expected that the terminal would be seriously overcrowded, and that passengers would be denied entry until their allocated time.

I interpreted this to be an attempt by the cruise line to make the process easier for themselves by spreading the guest arrivals out through the day, and to do so by lying to their customers. I checked, and there would only be two ships present that day. It is quite normal for Canada Place to handle 3 ships with ease. Clearly there would be no serious overcrowding.

I also didn’t think the cruise line would try and bar entry to their customers, who are all paying premium fares. The final clue to this all being nonsense was a referral in the warning communication to “suggested arrival times.”

Anyhow, we ignored it all, and showed up at our convenience instead of theirs. There were no issues, or crowds, and nothing was even said.

We were through all the steps; security, cruise line check in, and US customs, and aboard with minimal waiting by about 11am. We headed straight to the buffet on deck 9 for the first of many chow-downs.

Our travel buddies, Lola, Bernie, and Phyllis were a bit behind us in the process, but showed up very soon. 

After a lovely lunch, we headed off to our various cabins for naps, while some went exploring.

This ship was a lovely surprise. This is a mid-sized vessel, as modern cruise ships go. Her name is Westerdam, and she is about 81,000 tons.

A very nice feature was that this ship was totally refitted in 2017. Usually, when this happens it means that the ship has gotten some needed repairs, and gets a few minor real changes. The Westerdam’s refit was a complete redesign.

This line, Holland America, is known for distinguished decor that strongly emphasizes dark wood tones, and a total lack of pizzaz. This is no longer true of the Westerdam. She has become a beacon of bright, tasteful colours, and an airy feel. There is a great deal of chrome, and brass. The new furnishings are stylish and comfortable.

Lately ship casinos have been loosing popularity. For many years ships vied to have them bigger and bigger. These two factors have combined into making the casinos seem abandoned, tired, and sad.

Westerdam’s has gone the opposite way. It has been all re-newed, and halved in size. This has put the gamblers into a more vibrant atmosphere which is attractive to other passers-by. The reclaimed casino space has been utilized into a very popular duelling pianos bar. It, and the casino seem joined. If this does nothing else, it makes more space available for the non-gamblers, but I am convinced that there is actually significantly more money being earned by the casino.

This is just one of a number of innovations.

There is an actual, small museum on board that is also popular. An under-utilized top deck lounge has been transformed into a very high-tech information station full of computer table maps, a small library in the middle of the action, and a lecture area, and a Starbucks-like coffee bar. It is all intensely popular.

This is a beautifully re-designed ship that has had a great deal of thought put into every space and every bit of decor. Already on day two Bernie was proclaiming this his favourite ship ever.

Ships typically have two seatings for dinner, early and late, and have an open-seating restaurant style choice as well. We booked this trip very late, just a couple of weeks ago. As a result, couldn’t get our preferred early dinner seating, and so all ended up as open-seating people. This means you can make dinner reservations ahead, or just line up at the door, as at most land restaurants.

We kind of cheated the system. We were nice and early at our first dinner, and Lola got to work on the reservation people. We ended up with a gorgeous table right at the big stern window, and had it booked for 5pm for every day of the next two weeks. You really aren’t supposed to be able to do that, especially as next week counts as an entirely separate voyage; not that I’m complaining.

Lola and Bernie also signed up for access to all the fancy spa steam, sauna, and therapeutic pool for the first week. Helen and I didn’t think we’d use it all that much, so didn’t. It isn’t Phyllis’s kind of thing at all. The fee is reasonable if you will use it, but silly if you won’t.

I like the production shows on board, and there was a shortened one on the first day. The singers and dancers were all there to show off in wonderfully edgy costumes, with zingy dancing and singing.

Over the years we have cruised a great many times. All of the food has been wonderful with no clear standouts amongst all the vessels, until this cruise.

The food on this ship is the best and most consistent of any we’ve travelled with. Holland America has always had the reputation of being a bit above the others, but we haven’t seen that on earlier voyages. This time it is really true.

We boarded on Sunday, and sailed about 4:30pm. The rest of that day and all of the next was spent at sea. We did the nicer inside passage trip north.

Our first port of call came on Tuesday. We docked at Ketchikan early. Phyllis stayed on board, but the rest of us did various wanderings ashore. Helen and I did a walk to the Totem park, and back to Creek Street.

We also looked into a fur and taxidermy store, a jewelry place, a couple of tourist junk shops, a fabric store, and the Tongas clothing emporium. There was also a thrift store, and a stationary store where Helen bought some crazy glue to fix her shoes.

We were all back aboard by lunchtime, followed by nap time. Before supper I put in a few kilometres on a treadmill in the gym. It was another fine meal.

As the main show was a magician, Helen went by herself while I camped out in the duo-piano lounge. Lola and Bernie visited me there with Phyllis before wandering off again. That left two of us to hang out listening to the fun chatter, nice singing, and impressive finger work by the pair of entertainers. Helen joined us after her show. She held my seat as I escorted Phyllis back to her cabin. She is remarkably spry, but as she is 95 years old she deserves a little extra care.

Helen and I stayed at the piano show until it ended, and then called it a night.

Now, I am up once more and seated with coffee up on deck nine in the buffet area. This is the top full deck. It is a little after 5am, and Bernie should be joining me soon. That is our usual morning ritual. We just hang about at a window, drinking coffee, and having a bit to eat once things here get rolling. Afterwards, we go to pick up the rest of our companions for a dining-room breakfast.

It is our third morning aboard, and Wednesday, and Juneau day. None us do anything like organized tours. It will likely just be a walk-about into the tiny downtown. This is always a pleasant way to handle port days, and doesn’t interfere with all the shipboard eating. One thing I’ll never understand is all the people who race ashore looking for a place to eat. The meals they have already paid for aboard are far better than what they can find along the docks, but those places are always packed with seemingly happy cruisers.

It is also my resolution to crank out more miles. I only ran for a half-hour yesterday on a treadmill, and would like to do double that in Juneau. After Helen and I did a bunch of shop visiting, I got changed and ran south along a coastal road. It is nothing special, but better than running nowhere. Went 4km out, and then turned back.

I really like cruising, and a top feature of this super trip is that it will last more than the normal one-week length. We will be aboard for 14 days.

Almost all of my favourite cruises have been long ones; Europe for 14 days, Caribbean for 15 days, and Asia for 4 weeks. I am always on the lookout for new places to go, and the longer the better.

At the top end of the scale are the round-the-world voyages. These have two drawbacks. The first is that they actually hurry too much, with too few stops. The other is that the price per day is way out of line with other sailings. You think you’d get a deal buying your days in bulk, so to speak, but the exact opposite is true.

Other long cruises often have better prices per day, and normally run on some kind of theme. They might go around South America, or circle the edge of the Pacific; that sort of thing. Bernie has his eye wistfully on a round-the-Pacific one that is coming up for 80-something days. It sounds very nice, but is just a fantasy at this point.

The days roll by gently. Thursday it was Skagway. It is a tiny place nestled at the mouth of a river. Long ago it was the gateway to the Yukon Gold Rush, and had a big part in history for a very short while. Now it is nothing more than a cruise ship stop, but a good one.

There is a railroad built up an impossible route that used to transport mining essentials, but now exists solely to show the area off for tourists. The cute and kitschy main street has all the jewelry and tourist attire such a place can manage to flog.

This is the first town on the Alaska run that I started running in, and is still my favourite.

We arrived very early, at about 5am. The train arrived about 40 minutes later, pulling right alongside. Guests taking that excursion don’t even have to leave the wharf to get aboard.

After breakfast, we split up into couples, and Phyllis stayed aboard. Helen and I walked to town. We walked and shopped, buying mostly nothing. On the way back we swooped over to the Disney Wonder cruise ship and took some pictures.

Altogether there were four cruise ships crammed into this tiny town today.

Back aboard in time to all meet up for lunch on the buffet.

My afternoon consisted of part of a movie, a nap, and 8 km on a treadmill. The day turned too darn cold and wet to run out in the Alaskan wilds.

Supper struck, and a comedian in the theatre, and then the very pleasant evening wound down into slumber.

Woke up even earlier than what is normal for me. Coffee in the upper-deck buffet wasn’t ready, and I caught a team of electricians changing out a whole zone of ceiling pot lights.

Today is Friday and also Glacier Bay day. A crew of park rangers comes aboard to provide commentary, nature talks, and I suspect to make sure the ship follows all the park restrictions. For example; deck sports like basketball and ping pong are forbidden due to the risk of a ball going overboard and into the environment.

My arm got hurt at Jiu-Jitsu quite a while back, and I have been counting on these two weeks as healing time. Woke up this morning, and am back to square one. I really hate old person sleep injuries.

The weather cleared up nicely for Glacier Bay. Bernie and I met up stupid early at the buffet on deck 9, like always, and watched the approach for a few hours and then met up with the whole group for dining room breakfast about 8am.

We found a great indoor viewing window nearby where we settled in after the meal. The ship slowly danced about in front of two glaciers, and finished in perfect time for lunch. We had a huge window there to watch our glaciers shrink from sight as we ate.

We then split up, and I enjoyed a shortie nap before Helen and. I headed off to a talk about Glacier Bay.

Really, the glacier day is a sea day, and that was followed by a sea day. I love those the best. There is lots of activities, and naps, and eating with no shore visits to mess up the rhythm.

And then it was the town of Seward. It is a couple of hundred road kilometres from Anchorage. This is where most of the passengers end their ship voyage and either fly home, or continue to explore Alaska by land. A new load of shipmates get loaded aboard, but a few like us stay aboard for the trip back to Vancouver.

We had booked this trip pretty late, and so none of us were able to book the same cabins for the back-to-back trips and so had to pack and be moved to our new ones.

The process always has snags, but it all went as good as we could have hoped.

Helen and I went ashore and took a town shuttle on a sort of unofficial tour. We walked the downtown and Helen bought a few trifles. We were back aboard for a late lunch.

The new people all dribbled aboard throughout the day.

As returning guests we didn’t have to line up on deck for the disaster drill, but instead gathered in Phyllis’s room like a bunch of kids skipping school.

Helen had been battling a cold for the previous couple of days, but by evening time it had gone full-blown. She skipped her usual tour of the evening entertainment offerings and stayed in our cabin.

Monday was a sea day in the Gulf of Alaska. Going north had been rough, but things were even bumpier going back.

In Seward we had ridden the shuttle with a couple who had both been really sick during the earlier rough stretch. I always wonder how many people have a bad time with this kind of thing.

The sequence of this week will all be exactly backwards from our northern leg. The only difference is that we won’t be visiting Skagway, and will be in a really tiny place called Haines instead. A really, really tiny place.

Cruises are very wonderful things. Even so, they sometimes seem to run in counter-productive ways. They seem to be constantly chasing a clientelle of a shrinking demographic. It would make much more sense to tailor their product to a younger crowd instead.

A crowning example of this is their internet policies. All ships now have it, but they charge gold-standard prices. To get full access on this ship, it costs thirty bucks per day. Keep in mind, that cheap motels provide free wifi, as do coffee shops and McDonalds. People my age consider this vastly overpriced, and anybody under 30 considers free wifi to be a birthright. A cruise line that embraces cheap or free wifi will gain a huge leg up on the rest of the industry.

We have mostly sailed with Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Princess, and Holland America. They all have high-priced internet, although they have finally set things up so that people can text within the ship while onboard. All their ships have roughly the same fare structure for their cruises.

In many ways, Princess is my least favourite. Their buffets are old-fashioned. The decor is very much also out of date, and their ships have some strange design flaws. However, Princess has done one thing that catapulted them to the top of my preferred list. They provide a small quantity of free wifi to anybody who has sailed with them more than 5 times. We qualify, and this one silly little thing has taken them from the bottom of our favourites list to the very top.

Keep in mind that I am only moderately addicted to the internet. Yes, I could buy some, but that goes against the grain. When we are planning a cruise, a price difference of a couple of hundred bucks has no bearing at all. A ration of internet at no additional cost does. It is quite possible that Princess will gain a disproportionate amount of my business all due to wrapping internet into the price. I am very sure that I am not alone in this.

If my otherwise favourite line, Royal Caribbean, provided a similar amount of internet to its loyalty program guests, they would secure a majority of my return business. If they actually included unlimited free internet to everybody, they would get 100% of my loyalty, but enough of that.

It is currently early afternoon on a sea day. The weather is overcast, and raining, and as rough as we’ve ever had in Alaskan waters.

Helen’s cold has reached a nasty level, and she avoided breakfast. She made it out of the room for lunch, but went straight back afterwards. Lola also has some sort of virus, but is holding up well.

I like our new room more than the other one. The bed runs parallel to the very large window. It is much like a veranda (balcony) room, except the window does not open, and there is no balcony, and we have a lifeboat smack centre of our view.

Today the crew opened the boat up, and tested the engine and electrical, and inspected all the other stuff. I watched. Inside it were two tiers of seating, intensely packed together. The upper tier wouldn’t be too bad. Even skinny people would be sharing butt-cheek space, but the lower is worse. It is just as packed, but also has the legs of the upper folk crammed in somehow as well. It would be bad.

The lifeboats are exactly that; tools to keep you alive. Miserable, but alive. If, in a disaster, your rescue craft is instead one of the tenders, you’ll have it good. The seating is tight, but still not as much as the lifeboats, and nobody’s legs will be beside your face.

I did a little sink laundry. I brought about enough clothes for about half of the cruise, and so do a bit of washing as we go. Helen is doing about the same thing.

I like mine to feel easier towards the end, so I brought a slightly asymmetrical load. I have enough socks along that I stopped washing those several days ago. Now, I no longer need to do underpants. All that I need wash are shirts, and soon not even those. Luxury indeed.

Now, in order that Helen can rest undisturbed, I have moved to the deck 10 lounge to do mostly nothing.

Glacier day starts in fog. The ship’s horn is sounding as the ship creeps along. The early morning crowd in the deck 9 buffet is missing altogether. It is only 5am, and I am happy that the coffee is on. Sometimes it isn’t at this hour. A beauty of the north at this time of day in June is that all is in full daylight, fog or no.

As we travelled towards Glacier Bay, the fog broke into patches. We had full sun, and fog, then sun again. Entering the Bay itself, visibility dropped to a consistent low level, but we plowed on.

Eventually, the sky opened up and everybody had a perfect day for viewing the scenery.

The next port was the town of Haines. It is small, and not very touristy at all compared to the other stops.

It was day 11 of the cruise. In the second 7 day half, I hadn’t run a single step. Week one was bad enough, but I did manage 8km in Juneau, and 3 sessions on the treadmill. It is a method for balancing some small portion of all the eating.

The only other way to do the same thing would be to cut food intake. On a cruise that is hard to do, and spoils a lot of the fun. I unofficially resolved to cut the chow down a notch, and to run ashore whenever the weather let me, and even to....shudder...get back onto the treadmills.

I have never gained at the mythological cruise rate of a pound per day, but the gains are always terrifying enough. This summer we have enough other travel that getting down to my chosen weight range will be difficult to achieve. I might still be packing some of it into the fall.

Each week at home will have about ten hours of Jiu-Jitsu along with restricted eating, and running on my preferred forest trails. Knocking off 2 pounds per week is not unrealistic. This will only be possible during times at home, which will be shockingly rare. During our many upcoming small travels weight will not drop. It will creep higher if anything.

During our Haines Alaska day I started the campaign. Breakfast was a bowl of muesli and two sticky buns, and I ate nothing more until supper. I had wonderful grilled fish. The accompanying items were not inspiring, so I ignored them. Desert was a splurge with deadly chocolate cake and a cherries jubilee sundae.

In terms of activity, Helen and I clocked a big walk all over the tiny town, after which I ran 10k through the forest. My fitbit said that my wee sprint burned off 800 calories.

Instead of gorging like Henry the VIII, My food plan was to eat like a regular fat king.

On the second Juneau day Helen and I rode the city bus out to Mendenhall Glacier. The nearest stop is still a 2.4km distance from the park. It made a nice walk, and we experienced some pony-sized mosquitos along the road.

We like all the Alaskan ports we visit, but seeing them twice within 2 weeks is overkill. In the second  Ketchikan day, we hopped a shuttle to Walmart. We are very sophisticated travellers.

There was even time for a run south down the coast road.

A very cool thing is that during dinner the captain made a string of announcements. It seemed that one of the two azipod propulsion units on the ship was broken and being worked on. Our departure was significantly delayed, and when we finally got underway it was at half power.

It has been a dream of mine to be on a ship beset with troubles. Nothing major, mind you. Just enough that they refund us in full, and we get a future cruise for free.

No such luck, as in within an hour the troublesome azipod was back in operation.

Our last full day came with very few decisions. There were no ports. We sailed well out at sea and at high speed on the now fully-functional propulsion system. Later in the day we funnelled between Vancouver Island and the rest of North America. I always find this the most scenic part of the trip.

The last day we had time for breakfast, and then did our hugs and waddled ashore. For Helen and me it was then a city walk, a bus, a ferry, and then more buses. We were home by about 3pm, which might just be a home-from-cruise record.

I got started on the big pile of laundry from the trip and we both did some other chores. We were both very tired, and were happy to mostly do nothing. We have been away from a home a great deal already in 2018, and just being here is great.

And restful.