Voyage to Alaska – The Blog

Let me start with a little preface on this one… Trish has convinced me to write a blog about our Alaska trip because of a few reasons. First, we have a lot of time on our hands. Second, we have a computer handy. Third, she assures me that you guys like reading my blogs, and if you’ve read this far, I’m assuming that she’s right. Lastly, we have a lot of time on our hands… really. I’d also like to note that this blog will probably be posted in a huge chunk, because, well, we’re in Alaska, and the internet sucks here.

This is Sunday, 19 September, 2010. Our adventure started 3 days ago, on the 16^th. We woke up at the unimaginable hour of 4am, or something like that, and we headed off to the airport. Our flight was pretty good, and it didn’t take us long to get to Seattle. Once in Seattle we met up with Jerry, the guy who works for the limo service we booked. Now before you go off on a rant wondering how I could afford a limo to take me from the airport to my hotel, no, I did not win the lottery. Trish bought a Groupon, making the limo company the same price as a cab. Unfortunately for us, the limo service also uses SUVs… wtf? I would expect it from “Discount Dale’s Limos etc.” but the limo service we booked had a legit sounding name… and last I checked, SUVs are not luxury cars. Anyways, the day as just beginning so we checked in and roamed Seattle by foot. Nothing super exciting to report there. Seattle is still a city, it’s still got pike market and it’s still got rain.

17^th 11am Game time. We grabbed a cab and headed to the dock. Looking out the window we spotted the ship at the end of one of the side streets, looked like a pretty big ship. But then it dawned on me… we still had to go down the hill to the docks… and the ship was just about our height. When we got to the docks, the ship dwarfed everything around it. Crazy big thing.

We were herded like cattle (or sheep, your pick) on our way into the terminal. First line up for baggage drop, then line up for security (kinda like at the airport). Then line up for room keys. More lineups on the gangplank. Line up for some mimosas and champagne. Line up for hand sanitizer??? Ok enough lineups we’re on the ship already! Oh wait, it’s lunchtime and everyone wants to eat lunch! Lineup at the buffet… wait for a table to free itself up… so many people on this thing. Though I’d like to point out that the buffet dining room is on the 10^th floor of this crazy big ass ship and is the size of hmm… probably a football field. Possibly with bleachers. The food was pretty good though, I don’t recall what I ate, but it was good because I don’t remember it being horrible.

Finally our room was ready so we headed down to set up our luggage. If you’re reading this far, you’ve probably read my China blog. And if you remember from that blog I was complaining about how small my room was, because it was pretty ridiculously tiny. Well folks we have a new record!!!! This room is even smaller, no windows either cus we took the el cheapo inside room. The whole back wall is a mirror though, because it makes it look bigger I guess. The bathroom in this thing is also tiny, barely enough room for one person in there. And if you open the bathroom door while someone is using the closet, bad things happen.

Once we’re all unpacked we get visited by Palton, our room guy… He’s got some sort of title that makes him sound cool, but I can’t really recall it right now. He’s like our personal housekeeping contact. Anyways, Palton lets us know that our supper is at the sit down restaurant called Trellis at 8:30. When we booked we had the choice between 6 or 8:30, do we picked the late one. We had some time to kill before supper so we roamed the ship. There’s a casino, an indoor pool, an outdoor pool, 8 hot tubs, a running track, a shopping mall, a movie theater, a real theater, a fancy restaurant that costs extra, some meeting rooms, a gym and a spa. Trish and I grabbed a couple’s pass to the spa for the week because it seemed like a good way to spend time. We then promptly used our couple’s pass and spent an hour at the spa.

They’ve got an herbal steam room, which is really hot and steamy but it doesn’t smell much like herbs… I guess they gotta cheap out somewhere. They’ve got a dry sauna, which isn’t very dry. The benches are stone everywhere and they provide hoses to wash the stone down. Sadly the benches make puddles, and the water doesn’t evaporate very fast. There’s a Turkish bath, which is pretty much a steam sauna with some sink in the middle to splash cold water on your face. And finally there’s some heated benches, which are pretty relaxing.

After the spa we headed down for supper, where we found yet another line up!!! Woot! We love lining up all over the place. It’s our favourite sport! Please note that MS Word has underlined favourite as being misspelled because I added the U in there and word is too stupid to know the proper spelling of the word. Anyways, we lined up only to get turned back once we got to the head of the line! Why you ask? Because we were on the 5^th floor and our table was on the 4^th floor… Right, ok, the restaurant is so ridiculously huge that it has two floors. So we make our way down a floor to be greeted yet again by another line. Great. We’re slowly making our way to the front when two old people who look completely lost just wander up to the front, pretty much pushing through people. Once they get to the front the guy gets seated… WTF?!?! I guess it pays to be rude around here.

Food… If you’re familiar with my blog, I spend a lot of time talking about ridiculous things and food. Mostly food though, because there’s not that many ridiculous things that happen every day, yet you typically get three meals a day. So more food than ridiculous things, unless you’re in a strange situation where everything is ridiculous. Then again, we’re on a ridiculously huge ship filled with ridiculous people, so things are looking up. Back to the food for now. Our waiters are Filipino as is our bar waiter style dude and the wine girl. I guess that wasn’t exactly food, but the next sentence will be. I ate a lamb shank, and Trish had salmon. Before we ate those we also got appetizers and soup. The soup was really salty… as was Trish’s salmon… I guess a version of “Young Richard Newton” works in the kitchen here. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of salt, but my dad really likes salt. He’s been good lately though, cutting down on the salt. But really this story isn’t at all related to my dad, I just thought I’d mention that when I had my soup it reminded me of the soups my dad used to make a long long time ago, in this galaxy. Anyways, all in all, the food was good. Pretty fancy for an all you can eat style of a place.

Saturday the 18^th – at sea. If you ever wondered what it would be like being stuck in a huge hotel with a tiny hotel room, look no further! Take a cruise. You get the added bonus of swaying. The ship doesn’t sway much because it dwarfs even the waves, but you can feel it. We woke up kinda early because breakfast stops at 9ish. There’s food available at almost all hours of the day, but what food is available varies. If you want waffles, that closes at 9. So we got up early, and ate some waffles. Yum. Trish didn’t like the seat we chose and the swaying of the ship was getting to her. So after breakfast she grabbed a Gravol style pill. We hit the gym to try and burn off some of the calories we ate. After cardio we started lifting some weights, but our workout was cut short.

I understand that people don’t want to shower before they go to the gym because they’re gonna shower after they go to the gym, but deodorant exists for a reason! There was a guy using the workout machines who reeked of BO… and I do mean reeked. If he just walked by his stench lingered in the air for a few minutes. But he would use a machine and not wipe it down so the machine stank after he was done with it. And the stink never really left. So we did.

We used the spa again and then had some lunch at the buffet. Nothing special. We headed to an art auction after lunch, the idea was to get some free champagne, since booze on the ship isn’t really free. The auction was somewhat entertaining, they would tell us about a painting, then tell us how much the “land” price was. But wait… out here on the water you can save so much money, and since this is the last Alaskan cruise, we’ll give you an even better price and we’ll throw in the frame too! So I’m expecting really cheap paintings. The first painting goes on the block for $2000! What a savings! Wow this is dirt cheap, I need three of these! Ok so I’m probably not their target audience cus the guy in front of me raises his little bidding number thing. So I’m expecting the auctioneer to go on a rant and ask for higher bids but instead he smacks his mallet and “Sold!”… That wasn’t very exciting. A bunch of paintings never sold, and nobody tried to outbid anyone else. How was that an auction? That was just some guy taking his sweet ass time selling a pile of paintings to people who would have bought them anyways. Lame. And the champagne didn’t taste any good either… Though I don’t really like champagne.

Supper came around and it was formal night. So we got dressed up all fancy. I wore a tie. So, tying a tie is pretty simple in theory. I’m good with knots, and understand the knot that makes a tie work. But theory and practice aren’t always the same. After a few bad attempts on my part and a couple failed attempts on Trish’s part, the phone rang. It was Palton (remember the room guy?) he was asking me if we were going to supper. Of course we were, I just needed to tie this tie. So Trish gave it one more shot and I ended up with a slightly crooked tie that was better than all our previous attempts. Once we got to the dining room, everyone was seated already cus we were a little late. But hey, no line up! Now we know the secret. Anyways, I went on a little rant when I talked about yesterday’s supper so I missed some key points. Number one, we were seated at a table by ourselves. Other couples shared tables here and there, but we got our own table. Two, our table was meant for 6 people, and they sat us across the way from each other. Three, the room was loud so we couldn’t hear each other. Four, we convinced Richard our head waiter to let us move our chairs to sit next to each other. Five, Richard decided that he would surprise us with chair placement every night since our table was so big, but he would always seat us next to each other. Six, Trish bought a bottle of wine because the Sommelier girl said she would keep it on ice for Trish even if she didn’t finish it that night. Ok recap over!

So we got to the table and Richard had indeed seated us pointing in a different direction but next to each other. The wine lady came almost immediately to pour Trish a glass of the wine she didn’t finish the previous night. And on the menu was even more lamb! As for the tie, apparently I didn’t need to go through all the trouble. Some guy across the way was wearing a plaid flannel shirt. That’s totally formal… I guess they don’t really enforce the dress code, it’s too bad though, it would have been nice had everyone been dressed fancy.

The food was delicious, Lawrence our sous-waiter stopped by and chatted with us. Apparently both our waiters and the wine lady find us amusing because out of all the people there they seem to spend way more time chatting at our table. I had the rack of lamb and Trish had the Chilean sea bass. Again, not things you’d expect from an included menu. Desert was an ordeal. Everything on the menu had dairy apart from the apple pie. The pie isn’t very interesting because it’s available every night. There’s a nightly menu and an “always available” menu. I didn’t want to have to resort to the always available menu so fast. I ended up with some apple pie and coconut sorbet after much discussion with Richard our waiter. He seemed to think that desert will always be an adventure for me, but he seemed kinda happy… which is odd.

The 19^th – Rachel’s Birthday (our old neighbour from Alta Glen). Rachel is not on the cruise, but it’s still her birthday. Ketchikan, Alaska. We arrived at 7am, or so the captain would have us believe. We were asleep, but we definitely got there before 8:30am, a time when reasonable people get up. A quick breakfast later we’re heading off the ship. This place looks like a tourist trap merged with a tiny mountain town with a side of fishery. The only thing completely new to me was the airport. I can hear you thinking “Airport? What does he mean? That’s not new…” or something along those lines. Admit it, you were thinking it. Now the reason this airport is new and cool is that it’s on the water. No, not like Japan where they build a land airport on the water. This is a water airport. I’ve seen hydroplanes before, but not this many of them and never this many flying, landing and taking off in such a short time frame. You see, Ketchikan apparently doesn’t have much in the way of roads out, so most of the stuff comes from boats or planes.

Apparently there’s something to do with jewels in the area, cus every second store was a jewelry shop. And everyone had coupons for free gifts just for walking in the store. I’ve never gotten so much free junk for so little effort before. We also bumped into someone who plainly assumed that everyone walking outside was from the cruise ship. She stops a couple walking outside with their two kids and asks them what’s down the road. The man starts to answer and she spouts out “Oh! You’ve been down there? Is there anything interesting?” to which the man answers “I live down there.” Hahahaha, you should have seen the look on her face before she started apologizing and making excuses. We found some cool stuff, and interesting locals. I think some of the “locals” are actually just people who go there to work during tourist season. Looks like the main industries in Ketchikan are fishing and tourist. I’m not sure what brings in the most cash.

We hopped back on the boat for lunch, spa and snack… There really isn’t tons to do on the ship. Sure they have tons of activities, but they seem kinda geared towards retired folk and the elderly. I honestly don’t really want to go to the casino or play bingo, nor do I want to learn how to mix cocktail drinks. And all the cool things to do on the ship cost extra (not that gambling is free, but you kinda expect to spend money when you gamble). One thing that sounded interesting was learning about diamonds, so I went to that, but it turned out to be “here’s how to find a good deal on diamonds”. And not really explaining much about how things really work.

Now we’re getting ready to go eat supper, it’s 8:20, so I’ve still got a few minutes. Trish is still complaining about the ship swaying, I don’t really feel it anymore. Though when we first got off the ship, I felt a little odd because the ground wasn’t swaying. Trish wants me to help tidy up our tiny ass room because while we’re gone to supper the maids are gonna come in and do a turn down service. I guess they have nothing better to do…

Supper was good, steak for me and seafood gumbo for Trish. We get a 4 course meal every night, so much food, too much food really. We’re here to have a good time and since they have good food, might as well enjoy. This meal, like the others before it came with desert, and like every night, it had dairy in it. After 3 nights of watching me eat sorbet and ask about dairy free desert only to be told that everything has copious amounts of dairy in it, Richard decided to try and get me something good. So he asked the floor manager to see if they could find me a dairy free desert for tomorrow. We’ll see how that turns out. Anyways, time for sleep.