Okay, it's taken a while, but I am finally getting around to chronicling my trip to Alaska. It will likely come in dribs and drabs, but here's a start.
We were scheduled to leave from Boston at 6:20 in the morning. This meant a couple of things had to happen. First, we had to leave from Rod's house at 4:30 in the morning. And before that, Rod had to pack. He opted to do this at around one in the morning. Men are so practical. While he packed, I took a brief nap, then got up at 3 to shower and then we headed off to Logan. At 5:15am, Logan Airport is a barren wasteland. It's like the airport in The Langoliers - there's just nobody there at all.
So we wandered in, bleary-eyed, and sat at the gate for an hour. Upon getting on the plane, we both were asleep withing minutes. I have no recollection of the plane ride whatsoever except waking up about four minutes before we landed in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh is a fun airport. There are lots and lots of shops there - it's like a mall in the middle of the airport. Rod was still exhausted and sat with our bags at the gate while I wandered, mumbling, "Get me a present," before I walked away. With that as my mission, I meandered through the airport and ultimately wound up at Godiva. The girl at the Godiva counter was extraordinarily giving. SHe offered to let me try the three new truffle flavors for fall. I didn't want to disappoint her by saying no. I bought some chocolates and she forgot to ring two of them up but gave them to me anyway. Then I went to the Discovery Store and got Rod his present - a crocodile keychain that lit up when you opened the mouth. Quirky without quite attaining the label of lame.
I returned to the gate, we hopped on board, and Rod was asleep before the plane even took off. He woke up about ten minutes later and was notably confused to see that there were clouds out the window. This puzzled him so much he decided to just go back to sleep.
The little pocket thingy on the seat in fron tof me was all broken and there was this hard wire that stuck into my knees for the whole five hour flight. Yippee. Some previous passenger had attempted to stick it up with bubble gum. Very attractive. Needless to say, this did not make for a comfy flight experience. Rod finally woke up about 3 hours into the flight and got to listen me gripe about it... no wonder he sleeps so much with me bitching non-stop.
We arrived in Seattle and headed for the pier. There was ahuge line of people waiting to check in at the boat but a woman was standing in front asking if we were US citizens or not. Rod isn't, I am. There were about two people in the non-US line, and about two hundred in the US line. Thankfully, they let me go with Rod and thus allowed us some time to explore Seattle before we had to get on the boat.
We went to this kitschy marketplace where there were bakeries and eateries and fish stores and a magic shop and all manner of things... it was a bit on the touristy side and we didn't stay all that long. We did buy a couple of HUGE cookies - a molasses and a snickerdoodle that were to last us two days - literally. We headed back to the pier and stopped at a little place along the water to have fish and chips. Instead of your average cod, we had salmon. So good!
When we had checked in at the boat, we were given a boarding group number. That number was 13, and they were calling goup four. I think there were about a hundred people in each boarding group - that's just a guess, mind you - but when we returned to the pier two and a half hours after leaving it, they were just calling number 14. So we sneaked in front of those folks and climbed aboard.
About two weeks before the cruise, I had booked our shore excursions online but I had never received confirmation for them. So the first thing we did when we got on board was go check in at the shore excursion desk. I was fairly pissed to find that only one of the two shore excursions that I wanted had been booked, and the other one was sold out. We put ourselves on a waiting list, but I fumed about that for a bit. Luckily Rod did not sleep through the fuming, but instead vented along with me. We dumped our stuff off in our stateroom - our wee tiny stateroom - and headed out to explore the ship. We hit the top decks first, where they attempted to give us cocktails that, as it turns out, were six bucks a piece. No thank you. We had somebody take our picture on the top deck with the space needle in the background. (I will put some links to our pictures in as soon as I'm able to figure out that whole puttin'-pictures-online business.) We were up on deck checking things out shortly after the boat took off - you couldn't even tell when it started moving! We spent a little more time wandering the boat and finally just got really tired. It had been a long day already, so we went back to the stateroom and took a nap which stretched into just sleeping till te morning.
And that was day one.
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