Alaska Days 0-2

Day 0

Day 0 was our day of travel, because we went up to Seattle a day early to avoid last minute rushing. Things could have been a little stressful on Thursday night as Dave had his lead assistant duties at his Oregon Food Bank cooking class, and I had Coach Tim’s going away party, but even though we really didn’t start packing until almost 9 it went smoothly and we had everything gathered up and ready to pack by 10:30. Since our flight wasn’t until 2:30 the next day, we figured we’d get it all stuffed into suitcases Friday morning.

Friday morning started early for me with a drive into Portland for Debbie Rosas and Winalee Zeeb teaching 52 moves for the last day of their blue belt training. I had a very good time as usual and got home at 9. We had a leisurely morning of packing and other house things (Tim went out to breakfast with Coach Tim and the boys who’d been at the Eugene meet) and left just after noon. Unfortunately traffic was bad, so we were a little tense getting to the plane. But once we got to the airport everything went smoothly, including the self-bag check in (except for a little confusion on my part about how to stick the tags on) and the incredibly fast and easy security check line for Seattle (keeps shoes on! Keep liquids and laptops in carry-ons!). Once we got to Seattle we were met by the HAL representative and got to the Fairmont Olympic without any difficulty. Dave went up and visited with Mama and Aunt Merna, while Tim and I stayed in the room and watched Shark Week. We had dinner at Shuckers at 7 (6:30 or even 6 would probably have been better) which was good food in a casual atmosphere and about perfect. Portion sizes are huge, so sharing would have been a good idea. Then we had a very early bedtime and slept until almost 8.

Day 1

We woke up at 8, and if I’d known how things would go I would have tried for the 9:30 Nia class on the other side of Seattle, although I suspect it would have meant cutting things tight and probably was just as well that I didn’t. We got checked in with HAL and had our bags picked up (which could have been done in the other order), then I went to get a snack from the bakery. I ordered a chocolate croissant and orange juice, to go, and the server got very excited. “I wish everyone ordered like that!” he said. I guess the usual guests at the Fairmount don’t make up their minds well.

Then I went off to the gym and did BodyFit day 2, and took a shower. Dave got us checked out while I was getting dressed, and Tim and I met him and Mama and Merna in the lobby.  The bus got there not long after, and we headed to the ship. There was the usual line at check in, and some confusion about elevators vs escalators for the M’s, but eventually we were all in line waiting to check in. I saw a wheelchair and got it brought over for Merna, and from that point the check in was almost a blur – we go whisked off to a private line and were on the ship in about 10 minutes. The only downside was that we didn’t get a boarding picture, but since they are generally awful it’s probably just as well.

Our check in person Dale,  aka #22, had told us that our rooms would be ready as soon as we got on board, but the M’s person told them they wouldn’t be, and besides it was time for lunch. So we went to the dining room for the nice sit down Mariner’s lunch, where the food was OK but Dave’s instant relaxing into cruise mode was wonderful to see. After lunch we did the tour of cabins, dropping the M’s off at their verandah cabin and Tim at his cabin. Tim’s cabin is amazing – although it’s not a verandah cabin it has a huge, unobstructed floor to ceiling window taking up almost the entire wall. Add that to the huge bed and spacious (for one person) cabin, and you’ll understand why Tim had a floor-to-ceiling grin on his face. It made me feel good too to know that even if he lies on his bed playing games on his phone all day, he will still get to see some Alaska going by.

Our cabin is a deluxe verandah, which is larger and has a desk with a window that I can sit at, and a big verandah with 4 chairs, and the giant bathroom with both a tub and a separate shower.  Woohoo! Our luggage hadn’t arrived yet, so we spent some time wandering around the ship. The Westerdam is a sister ship of the beautiful Oosterdam, which means that is laid out the same way, with the same number of decks and the same rooms on the same decks. Except it’s slightly different. Dave says it’s like the episode of Star Trek where the Enterprise gets reassembled in an anti-matter universe and everything is just a little different. It’s disorienting. We’ve spent 29 days on the beautiful Oosterdam, but both of us were having trouble telling our forward from our aft, even though our cabin is still on the odd (right, starboard) side of the ship.

We stopped by to listen to Barbi and her HalCats. Like last time, they have two sets of HalCats, but unfortunately (at least I think it’s unfortunate) the Ocean Bar HalCats, formerly known as the Neptunes, are back to playing what they call “The American Songbook” – Sinatra and that era music. So we won’t be closing down the ship on the last night in a dancing frenzy. We went back to the cabin and unpacked, then hung out listening to music until it was time for my pedicure. I’d been a little nervous when I booked it that I would be rushed getting ready for dinner and I was right. And my beautician Stacy Ann was unusually surly and uncommunicative. But sitting in the pedicure chair looking out at the scenery made up for a lot of things, and although we got very rushed at the end I have nice sparkly red toes.

I got to the cabin and changed for dinner, and we were the last to our 6 person table. Josh’s empty seat made me sad. Dinner was nice, although the food was about what we expected. Our servers, Sigit and Fendi, are very good, and although our wine steward was very busy he was also very nice and made Dave’s night by calling him “Sir Dave”.

After dinner we listened to some more music – the Ocean bar HalCats – and then went and hung out in the Vista lounge to wait for the show to start. We wanted to get there early to get good seats, but it ended up not being very crowded at all. We played a free game of bingo (we didn’t win) and tried to figure out why watermelon is a vegetable. The show was good and we got to hear all the musicians and singers and meet the Westerdam dancers. Afterwards we hung out in the piano bar with Barry from Boston, who is very good but a little self-absorbed. We finished up the night by putting Barbie and her HalCats to bed. I got up and danced to the last song but no-one else did so I sat down.

Then it was bedtime. I love our bed.

Tonight’s towel animal – ummm, ok, so there’s a towel folded on the bed in a shape, which is better than our last cruise when there was no animal at all the first night. But we can’t even hazard a guess about what it might be.

Day2

I woke up early to a very foggy morning and headed up to the Crow’s Nest to do some blogging. It had a small murmuring crowd, but I was able to get a seat by the window and had a nice write. I wrote a little long, though, so when I got to stretch class it was pretty full. I managed to find a place in back for my mat. Byron lead it and he’s pretty good, although we went directly into static stretches – I will need to get there a little earlier both to get a good spot and to warm up a little. Although he said tomorrow would be crowded, but after that it would drop of precipitously. He also said something very interesting, which is that he and Max understand that people don’t come on a cruise to get fit, they come to relax, and that’s why he and the other fitness people on the other ships are specialists in things other than exercise. I know that was the case on the last Alaska cruise as well – I guess I just got very, very lucky on the Hawai’I cruise to have had Mark and Matthew, who actually made the exercise classes a priority. It’s one of those things that had a far-reaching effect. If I hadn’t fallen in love with the ship workout, I wouldn’t have looked for a new workout solution after we got back, and I wouldn’t have found Nia, and I wouldn’t have done BodyFit, and I’d be a lot more sedentary and a lot less happy.

Abs class was only 20 minutes and also not very challenging; I never thought I would say that about an abs class but there it is. At one point we changed from supine to tabletop and started doing leg raises, and while we’d been doing 20s of the supine exercises, we only did 10 leg raises per side. I gave Byron an “are you serious, you wimp?” kind of look, and he grinned. We’ll see if I pay for that in boot camp, because yes, I am doing it. It’s only 3 days and the cost has come way down ($69 for 3 classes), so we shall see.

We had our usual breakfasts with a couple from Texas and two ladies form Oklahoma who are travelling together. The food came quickly and was good, and we had a nice chat. We didn’t take the elevators at all yesterday, so after breakfast we were thinking we’d missed the Saturday carpets and would have to take 2 pictures at the end of the cruise. But they don’t have the day carpets in the elevators! We checked both the side elevators and the central ones. It is very sad.

After breakfast we split up. I did a little blogging while Dave headed up to the Crows Nest for some relaxing and Sudoku. He saw porpoises (or dolphins) and whales. At a little before 10 I headed up to the gym for some boot camp, and it was great. We basically did the unmodified BodyFit day 1 workout that I learned from Mark all those years ago. We had 4 people, one of whom is a lady a little older than me who had never done a boot camp and has quite a pear-shaped body. I thought she’d poop out, but she did very well. I think I am going to be sore though. We will only do 3 days’ worth on this cruise, but Byron said they would mix and match exercises from the remaining days rather than leaving out an entire day. So I’m interested to see what they decide to leave out. I hope it’s frog jumps.

After class I changed into a dry shirt and met Dave in the Queen’s lounge for the culinary demo with Jacob and Hector. Jacob has the party planner role, although it has changed names, and Hector is the “show chef”. They made crabcakes and crème brulee, and we got crème brulee samples again. Yum. They had pretty good banter, but Chef Pablo remains the best culinary demo chef.

Now it was almost lunchtime. We met the M’s in line, and Tim showed up too. We thought he was sleeping, but he’d been woken up by cruise director Armand’s announcement at 10 and had gone to work out. The thing about being 5 is that we generally get seated at a 6 table, so we don’t get to meet people and Josh’s empty seat is really obvious. But we had a nice lunch at the right hand back table by the window – coincidentally, right where we ate breakfast. I had a romaine salad with beets and cornfetti that was very tasty.

After lunch it was time to head off to Dancing with the Stars in the Queen’s lounge. They started with one of the actual dancers from the show talking and showing the routine she did on the show. Her voice and delivery were incredibly annoying – I didn’t see how anyone could stand to listen to her. Eventually the picture froze up, and when they restarted it she was at normal speed and not annoying at all. Then we all got up and learned the moves to a routine. It was really fun but as at Nia I found that the sequences don’t stay in my head. We danced it several times, speeding up each time, until eventually we danced the whole routine at full speed with the music and no cueing. Then they chose 2 guys and 2 women to be the candidates for the finale, and they each danced the routine twice with one of the Westerdam dancers. And Dave was one of the people chosen! So much for his “I can’t dance, I can’t do Nia” excuses, because after the two times through they chose 1 of each gender to be in the finale on Friday, and guess who will be dancing with Laura? Hahahahahaha. Now he will be nervous for the whole rest of the cruise, and worse yet, he has lost his excuse for not going to Nia!

We came back to the room and hung out on the verandah for a while. It’s mostly cloudy and pretty chilly, but it’s still really nice to sit on the verandah – which has two comfy chairs and two footstools – and listen to the sound of the ship making waves as it cruises along. I took a very short nap, and Dave went to walk around the ship because he was too keyed up to nap. At 3 he went to the Alaskan Beer tasting, where he ended up sitting with two other homebrewers, so he really enjoyed that. I went to the diamonds and gemstones seminar, because they said they were giving out free tanzanite studs to everyone who came. It was an hour long and what parts of it I was awake for were stunningly dull, but I’m glad I went because that’s something we’ve never done and now we don’t have to ever do it again. AND, they weren’t giving out earrings at all, they were giving out cards which were good for earrings but you have to go to the tanzanite store in Juneau and listen to their spiel before they will give them to you, which is just sleazy.

Then it was pretty much time to dress for the first formal night of the cruise, which we did, and then we listened to the BarbieCats without Barbie. The piano player was singing and making jokes, and he was really, really good. We could have listened all day, but pretty soon Dave had to go tie Tim’s tie, and then they were done playing anyway and it was time for dinner. The food was uniformly good, and in most cases very good. I particularly enjoyed the carpaccio, and Dave’s mushroom ravioli was pretty special. I got two desserts because I couldn’t decide between the tiramisu and the chocolate soufflé. I ate the tiramisu and passed around the soufflé, which I actually preferred but everyone wanted to try and then I told Tim to finish it because I really didn’t need two desserts.

After dinner we listed to the RobbieCats for a while, then had our pictures taken, then went up to the crows’ nest to check out the guitarist there. No-one could ever match our beloved Chris, but I found this guys’ voice actively annoying, so we left after a song and a half. On the way we passed through the shop area and I found the perfect hat for my formalwear, and it was only 10 dollars so even though it’s a little too big (but what adult hat isn’t?) we bought it. After a short break in the cabin, we set off for the piano bar. We got there about 8:50,and people were filing in. We managed to snag the two seats at the end where I can see his fingers. When Barry came in he was very pleased to see Dave and told him he’d pointed him out as someone who should be watched.

Barry started out with The Carpenters and then moved into Abba. I knew more Carpenters than I thought I did, and less Abba. Then he took requests, most of which were songs I knew or liked, which was fun. There was a woman there who was chair dancing and made me very self-conscious because I thought she looked silly, and if she looked silly then I probably looked silly too, but what I eventually realized is that she was chair dancing to some other music and that’s what made her look a little strange. So I kept on dancing in my chair. I requested a song called midnight blue, which I remember only a little of (midnight blue,oooo, cherry red or midnight blue,oooo) and he sang a song which was nothing like what I remember, with the line “I think we can make it”, which I think is the theme song from Poseidon adventure. It is very, very frustrating not to have internet!

Somehow we stayed there singing until about midnight, which fortunately was only 11 since it was a turning the clocks back night. I was falling asleep in my chair, so we headed back to the cabin and called it a night.

Tonight’s animal: Squid, or octopus. Since neither of them has 4 tentacles it is hard to say. Also I had apparently gotten used to the stick-on eyes that Joe an Olih used on our cruise last year, so all the animals see to be missing something.