Day 6, Ketchikan

We docked in Ketchikan early in the morning, and it’s a measure of how tired we were that it didn’t wake us up – we didn’t wake up until Dave’s alarm went off. When I looked outside I was surprised to see it was raining and a little chilly. This is not unusual for Ketchikan, but it was very unusual for this trip – we have had the most amazing warm sunny weather ever. We needed to be ashore at 7:50 for our zipline, so I went up to the Lido and got a little breakfast and did stretch class with Alex. His stretch class was very slow and zenlike, and I enjoyed it. I was just as glad not to stay for abs.

We took a bus from the dock to our zipline tour. This is the third time I’ve been ziplining and I sure do love it. Each time has had something special; this time what was great was that it was a series of ziplines and platforms, so you’d zip from one platform to the other. We had a group of 9, and in between zips they’d clip us all to the tree in the middle of the platform. The guides were very professional and fun at the same time. It’s almost like you have to have a certain personality type to be a zipline guide. One of our guides, Andrea, kept repeating how nice it was that no one was crying (!) We all had fun, and it was nice to see Tim visibly enjoying himself. That’s one of the biggest differences between this cruise and our Mexico cruise 4 years ago – he’s willing to try different things and doesn’t have to do the bored teenager face. We ended up with a long slide where you get in a burlap bag and go very fast. I think I would like it if I did it again; as it was I was terrified. Here’s something that was weird – there’s a bus to and from the ship, and then Unimogs to transfer from where you gear up to the ziplines, and from the ziplines to the gift shop (required by law for every excursion, according to one of our bus drivers). The Unimogs have a roof, but no sides. This seems odd in a place where they get 12-13 feet of rain a year. We did almost have a disaster on the zipline because I was wearing my lovely tanzanite earrings and one of the backs fell off. Fortunately Dave noticed so I didn’t lose it.

We got back to the ship a little after 11. It occurred to us later that we could have eaten lunch at the place where we had the shore excursion last time, but we just back on the ship and ate here. After lunch it was time for the last DWTS, the Cha-Cha. We had a really good time and almost got the steps. Dave got chosen again but politely declined by telling her he was already in the finale. The great thing is that we both enjoyed it so much and felt like we were so close to having it actually working that Dave now feels like I do, that we need to take lessons before our next cruise. So that is on my to-do list.

When we got back to the cabin it seemed to be clearing up, so we sat out on the verandah for a while. They were doing the walk for the cure on the promenade, so we could hear the music from that. At some point Dave took his iPad and went to show pictures to the Ms – I don’t know when it was because I slept out there for almost an hour. When I woke up I went down to the Pinnacle for some blogging and chocolate trivia – I got in a group with 3 other signals and we might have won if we’d listened to our lone gentleman. Then I had to rush off to the RobbieCats in the Ocean Bar. So it was a good thing I took a nap. At the chocolate trivia they’d said there would be chocolate martinis, but there weren’t, so I ordered one at the Ocean bar.  It was happy hour so they brought two. Now I am very happy and somehow have to walk in heels.

The walking in heels proved to be not too difficult even though it was formal night and I was wearing my very highest ones. We had a very nice one, apparently our last in the fixed seating – because of our stop in Victoria tomorrow they’ve cancelled the fixed seating dinners. We’ll miss Renee, our wine steward, who called Dave “Sir Dave” and showed up on the count of 5 to offer port. But we didn’t bond with Sigit or Fendi at all. Dave thinks they have fewer stewards, so they don’t have time for the kind of banter that Yaya and Rono or Putu and Dewa had, and I think he’s right.

The entertainment was not really to our taste, so we decided to go to the 8:00 show, the Westerdam singers and dancers doing Stage & Screen. It was pretty much exactly what you’d expect, but because of DWTS we felt like we knew some of the cast (especially Cameron and Dave’s partner Laura), so we enjoyed it more than we thought we would. Then we listened to the BarbieCats in the Ocean Lounge for a while. There were actually quite a few people dancing, which Barbie was very excited about. It was a little intimidating because they were all doing the couple dancing very well, and it wasn’t the kind of music you could just freestyle to. I miss dancing.

When they took their break, we were kind of at loose ends. We stopped in at the piano bar but Barry was in the middle of his first set, so there weren’t any easily accessible seats. Also he was doing show tunes, which isn’t really our thing. We decided to go try out the piano player in the explorer’s lounge, who was technically excellent but very robotic and put Dave to sleep. About 10:15 we decided to call it a night, because we lost an hour and I wanted to be up for stretch and abs and Dave hasn’t had any naps at all.

It was a good night to go to bed early, because it gave us more time to spend with tonight’s towel animal: large hanging monkey!