Alaska Cruise Day 2 "Yes, We are Back on a Ship"

After going to bed late for us, not even considering the time zone difference we of course wake up early. The hotel has a free breakfast, which was definitely worth the price. If you were looking for high sugar carbs this was for you. They did have a sign explaining that due to current health department COVID restrictions they could not offer their normal breakfast. OK, fine, but some sort of protein would be nice. In the past you were allowed to bring on a limited amount of soda, water, wine on with you. This is stated in our contract. However they have a new rule, you are not allowed to bring on soda or water. We have usually bought a soda card, $25.00 for $50.00 of fountain drinks. It is now $50.00 for $50.00. Yeah, I think that I will pass. Rob has found a couple of stores at which we can buy soda. One is a 7-11 near our hotel. We go to check it out. $7.99 for a 12 pack of Diet Coke, they do not even have Coke Zero. Rob knows of another store, but it is “quite a hike.” I head back to the hotel and he heads to the store. It turns out that this store is now a 7-11 and the soda is the same price. He hauls it back in a large tote bag. We finalize our packing and check out. We have a 1:00 embarkation time and an 11:00 check out time. It will not take us two hours to get there. Last night Rob had asked about walking to the Light Rail station. Oh, the hotel shuttle will drive us there. We get out there and they drive us to the station. Yes, we could have driven there but Seattle is a lot of hills and this station is on the top of one of those hills. We go to pay our fares. They have machines for this. The machines do not like any of our credit cards. We finally resort to cash and get our tickets. We are at the end of the line so we do not have to worry about which way to go. The train comes and we board with all of our stuff. We ride and ride and ride. We had time to kill and this is a cost effective way to get there. We get to our stop, wrestle our stuff off and figure out which exit we want. We ride up a long escalator, then another long escalator. Rob asks if we are ever getting to the top. I say no, we will be riding escalator after escalator until we are to the top of the Space Needle. We finally see daylight and head for a corner. Our plan is to get a taxi to ride to the cruise terminal. We cross the street and I can see a yellow cab down a hill. I stand at the edge of the curb to signal the cab. Um, it is just a yellow car. I am sure that man was wondering why I was waving at him. We wait a while and there are no cabs in sight. We call for a Lyft. He is there in less than five minutes. They have changed their system, I have a number. The Lyft driver can recite the number so it is him. We drive to the terminal. We have to give our embarkation time to get admitted. We are dropped off and we have to show our boarding pass, on my phone and our vaccination cards. Oops, time to dig them out. They are trying to do this as efficiently as with as little contact as possible. We pass the first hurdle and are sent on to the next one. Our luggage has to go through the scanner. They pause when our bag with 2 12 packs of soda comes through. Rob is all set for a battle. They back the soda up, call someone over, she shrugs and says that is OK. That is a nice surprise. We get in the long line, they have a shorter line for people with a higher ratings than we have. If the cruises had not been canceled we would be almost there by now. The long moves quickly. Rob has his passport out and I have my drivers license with a birth certificate since the passport office still has my passport 3 months later. Rob goes up, the scanner recognizes him, they scan his passport and he is all set. I go to the scanner, it recognizes me and I put up my license. Oh, I am so sorry, it cannot read that, you will have to go into this other very slow line. Rob wants to head to our room, no sir, stay with your wife. We wait and wait. The people behind us have the enhanced Washington State license and were told that would work, but they are in this line. I finally get to the counter. He looks at my license and my birth certificate and finds my photo on the computer. OK, we are set. They have groups of chairs with signs for “Group A” and “Group B.” We are group D. We sit down and Carol calls me, they are on and she said that she just walked on. OK, what is the worst that can happen. We go through and are aimed to the ship. There is this lovely group of crew members welcoming us back.

We find our cabin. Rob is really ready to put the soda down and the backpack. He has been carrying my DSLR and keeps reminding me how heavy it is. I guess that I had better figure out how to fit that into my suitcase for the trip home. I have heard from two more reporters who want to do interviews on our return to sailing. I will see about “borrowing” someone’s wifi for this. We have lunch with Carol and Tony. Great to catch up. We both get lunch from the Asian Bistro, our favorite place to eat. There is no general muster drill. They would have everyone at an appointed time show up at your muster station. This is where you go if there is an emergency. They would either scan your card or call names. To avoid all of those people standing around close to each other you just show up at your muster station and get your card scanned. We are told to go back to our cabin to watch the safety video. On our way we meet two women. One has one bottle of wine and one has two bottles of wine. They are going to have a fun afternoon. We make our reservations for dinner. We like open dining but like to choose our table. If we like the table and the waiter we go back to that table every night. Now it is time to unpack. We are only on this cruise for 7 nights, how is it this hard to put our clothes away, we did this for a 31 day cruise, but there were more drawers in that cabin. Now it is time to relax and have a soda on the veranda. We are on the back of the ship. We can see Mt Rainier from the ship. It is a beautiful day and feels so nice to just sit out there and enjoy it. They kept announcing that everyone needed to report to the muster station. People must have listened because we pull away from the dock ten minutes early. There is a lot of fan fare for this. The fire boat puts on quite show. We are off, we just stand out there and watch Seattle fade away.

In the dining room they had a QR Code on our table to scan for the menu. This reduces the number of people touching the menus. Well, my phone will not load the menu. The waiter told me to not tell anyone and he handed me a menu. In the past you got a dessert menu after dinner. Now you order dessert when you order dinner. Again, fewer touches. Dinner was great, seafood cocktail and rockfish for the entree. Yum. We had planned to go back to our room for a little bit. Rob laid down for just a bit to check out the blanket that the room steward brought. Yeah, the rocking of the ship puts him to sleep pretty fast. It might be 8:30, but my body is thinking that it is 11:30. We did make it to a talk about the History of Holland America in Alaska, very interesting, Rob did not sleep throught that much of it.