CRUISING THE ALASKAN PASSAGE! OMG… I literally can’t believe I am here. This is something I have dreamed of since I was in my late teens – probably due to being overdosed on nature documentaries as a kid – and it’s also somewhere I never thought I’d get to with my cactus back. But here I am!
Got up this morning stupidly early – moronic internal body clock has been deciding that 5hrs sleep is plenty since we arrived here actually – and looked out the window to see rain, rain and more rain. 🙁 Not what you really want to see when you are setting off on a holiday of a lifetime! That’s just not on. Spent most of the morning running about figuring out how to print boarding passes, deciding what we needed to throw out and what was coming with us, returning the rental car and squishing shit into suitcases. Called a taxi and got delivered down to the Canada Place Cruise Terminal and was briefly tempted to go to the other cruise ship that was getting ready to depart – the Disney Wonder which had Mickey Mouse ears on it’s logo and was heading down to San Francisco and Los Angeles, but I guess I’ll have to wait for that. 🙂
We have out little cabin with its little balcony and once our luggage arrived (Aunty Mary’s got held up by the guys downstairs… it could have been the cutlery she had on her or the bottle of wine in her suitcase, but we’ll never know because security released it before they made her open it!) and we settled a few things in, we set about learning the lay of the land – or lay of the ship as it might be. We have both cruised on Princess ships before and they tend to have a similar layout, so much so that when we first boarded and saw the decor we both immediately had a sense of ‘coming home’ as everything looked very familiar… from the timber panelling and carpets to the bars and pool decks, the Island Princess everything has a similar lay out to other ships in the Princess fleet that we were familiar with (the Dawn Princess and the Sun Princess). Only this is a smaller ship so there seems to be many more common areas, a few different bars and things that are not on the larger ships but they just don’t accommodate as many. Breakfast will be interesting with the Horizon Deck looking like it seats about half what we have seen in the past.
As the ship started to pull out of Vancouver the weather started to clear, and the rain ceased long enough for us to get up on the top decks and watch the ship pull out of port. Didn’t take long and the bars were thrown open and the Embarkation Party was kicked off by the entertainment staff. Now, I don’t care where you are from, but in my book, a band playing reggae and wait staff walking around offering cocktails with little umbrella drinks in them, does NOT a beach party make when it’s 19 degrees and still drizzling a bit! No matter how hard they tried they couldn’t get many people up and dancing with them and the cocktails weren’t selling so good… perhaps they should have been flogging mulled wine or rum toddy’s or something to warm the cockles. 🙂
We met our cabin steward, Jovie, who I found out has been working for Princess for nine years. It also turns out he worked out of Australia for a while. So we got to chatting and it also turns out that he worked on the Dawn Princess from 2010 to 2012 – the same ship we went on in 2011 for a Christmas Cruise around New Zealand. And wouldn’t you believe it? Jovie was on the Dawn Princess for the Christmas Cruise around New Zealand that year. Proving yet again that it’s a small world after all (*blatant Disney reference there for people playing at home). Such an odd coincidence but anyway there it is.
Tonight’s dinner down in the Provence Dining Room was interesting. We are at a table of six, I am the youngest at the table by about an easy 15-20 years. Two American couples – one from Kansas City, Missouri and the other from Southern California. And one Australian couple from Melbourne… this Aussie woman (wouldn’t you know it, her name is Sheryl) is about as loud, outspoken, brash, ill-educated, uniformed and boorish as they come. She doesn’t let anyone get a word in edgewise and speaks over her poor browbeaten husband all the time, even though he seems lovely enough. She’s anti-immigration, she’s anti-indigenous people, she’s anti-education funding, she’s anti-fucking everything and thinks ‘that woman’ needs to be voted out of office in September ‘because she keeps wasting so much money on things like education’… she actually said that – word for word. Strangely enough they think Campbell Newman is a bit of a disaster for Queensland, but that Abbott will be great for Australia. Made me wonder, are we actually from the same damn country and where is the goddamn KoolAid coming from? It was everything I could do not to yell at her, that if we spent more bloody money on education, then perhaps we’d have less ignorant fucktards travelling the world making Australians looking like backwater yobbos! *deep breath* It’s only a week and we can always get the maitre d’hotel to move us to another table. :S There’s always gotta be one, hasn’t there? Everyone else seemed lovely and had interesting travel stories and career backgrounds to share when noisome Sheryl shut her fucking pie hole long enough to let someone else talk to a minute altogether.
Anyway, had dinner and hightailed it out of there as soon as was decent to do so. Back to our lovely little balcony cabin and looks like it will be an early night here after such a long day. Tomorrow we are all at sea… literally.