Today went well.
When getting ready to head out this morning, I realized that in my rush to get ready, I had left my deodorant behind. Fortunately, the desk happily gave me a travel stick. So much praise to Cedarbrook Lodge?
Had breakfast, then was trying to sort out memory cards and the like (they still had a lot of my pics from Revelstoke on them) when I got a call going, “aren’t you joining us?”
I missed our meetup time.
Fortunately, I was mostly packed and managed to get our shuttle less than 5 minutes late. We then went to the port and the Eurodam.
It’s a bit weird. I cruised on the Eurodam before, with Becky and in Europe. So I kinda knew my way around. I found my cabin, dropped my stuff off, and went to find the rest of the group.
They were hanging out on the pool deck. We had a few beers, then went to explore the ship.
My last cruise was years ago. Becky and I enjoyed them, and we had been on a lot, but things had changed. Covid, I supposed. But we all no longer gathered in a big room to go over evacuation procedures. Instead, we just went to our muster stations, someone scanned our card, and they gave us a 5-minute briefing. That was it.
Hells, that’s way better than my earlier trips.
After that? Well, we left Seattle and were on our way. The weather was good, and I got a lot of pics.
I did meet the rest of the group (which was far bigger than I had thought) for dinner, then wandered on my own.
I found my two hangouts for the week. The first was the “Crow’s Nest.” This is a lounge on the forward end of the ship where you can look out ahead. It was on deck 11, which is the highest passengers can go. There’s a place serving coffee, so I spent most mornings there. The shore excursion desk was also there.
One of my excursions had been canceled due to a lack of participants, but I could get it rescheduled. It was a whale-watching tour.
I had never seen a whale, and I wanted to see one. I have been to Alaska years before, but that was hiking inland. I wanted to see a whale.
I’m at the age where “bucket lists” start taking priority. So that was my goal for this trip.
I also found a lounge called the “BB King Lounge.” They had the Alaska beers. I selected that as my evening hangout for the trip and used my time there to upload the photos I had taken to my laptop. And you can see them above.
They had a trivia game in the Lounge. I didn’t officially join in but followed along. It was just as well; I wouldn’t have won anyway.
So far, the only problem we had was that Slack (the app we had chosen to use to say in touch) didn’t work with our on-board Internet package. So we had a bit of a problem coordinating. I ate dinner in the buffet tonight because I didn’t know when anyone else was planning on going for dinner. Oh well, at least I could stay in my t-shirt.
Their Internet also would not play well with my VPN. So who knows.
After dinner, I stopped at one of the stores long enough to get a lanyard for my passenger card. They do everything on-board using those cards. It opens the door, is used to pay for everything, and gets scanned as we get on and off the ship.
We’re supposed to be at sea all day tomorrow. It looks like we go directly to Juneau, then stop at places on the way back. Fine. Doing nothing but relaxing for a day sounds good.
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