siblingrousness

Monday, June 22, 2009

day 1 (or 2) - on the boat.

we spent all of today sailing up to juneau. we explored the boat more, ate too much, and rested. I'm going to just caption photos.

here's our stateroom. that's not a spittoon. the couch folds out, but it's almost equally comfortable folded up. the bathroom's back-right, and while the water pressure wasn't the best, i liked how high the shower head was. the shower had a clothesline in it too. the closet's back-left, and is big enough. it has four life vests. the balcony is behind us.

this is the other direction of the stateroom. the desk is to the right & is nice. the balcony is big and has a rubberized floor. the wind kept it kind of unusable a lot of the time, but it was good to have someplace to escape.

another view of the balcony.

desk, TV. the use of mirrors to make the stateroom less cramped was interesting. the TV had a lot of channels in a few languages, and would often have the ETA/sailing conditions on channel 40. or sometimes it would just show a real time view of the ocean in front of us.

we saw these boats twice, and I think it happened each time we went over the US/Canada border. This thing showed up fast, zipped under the back of the boat, and I saw them take away a backpack. Maybe the backpack's owner was already offboard.

this is the muster station deck, deck 5, with the life boats hanging above. it's a nice balcony, but it was often too cold to stay out there long - mainly only smokers hung out there.

chara taking a photo from deck 5.

water.

the rest of the photos are of the boat. this is from the small duty free store. i was impressed by the lack of packs of cigarettes for sale - cartons only.

this is the 10th deck, where shuffleboard and the morning "Walk a Mile" program took place. the Walk a Mile thing was strange because the only time i watched it, a guy being pushed in a wheelchair was the front of the pack.

another view of deck 10 - inside the room to the right is the children's room, full of educational toys. there's also a teenager's semi-club and a video game room on the other side of this deck.

also deck 10. overlooking the deck 9 pool, and looking toward the back of the boat. the room on this deck is the discotheque; behind it is the workout room and then the climbing wall.

view from approximately where the guy in the previous photo is standing.

deck 9 pool/lounge/hot tubs. not many people in the open air part of this because of the wind & temperature, but they'd sit in the covered area to eat or smoke.

this is from inside the 9th deck looking down on the atrium. they'd play live lounge music there, and most of the on-boat facilities (shops, excursions sales, library, card room, . . .) face it.

this could be in a number of places. obviously it's on an upper deck. there wasn't too much cloud cover, but it happened occasionally.

view from the back of the boat, deck 10. the discoteque is facing us; on the right is a crane.

view of a lifeboat from a portal window on the 6th deck.

day 0 (or 1) - seattle

day nothing - seattle. we all slept at the marriott by the seatac airport, which was kind of crowded. but the continental breakfast was great - they had the automatic waffle makers and lots of fruit. while we waited for the shuttle bus to the airport (to catch a bus downtown), nathan and i stepped out to the street for a second, then headed back up to the hotel. a guy was walking down the sidewalk & when he saw us turn back he asked us where we wanted to go. we said thanks, we had it covered, and he insisted on helping us . . . kind of typical for seattle. maybe it was just the good weather - apparently it was the unhumidest, sunniest, unhottest day ever. it was nice. we caught the shuttle to the airport, chara found a royal caribbean area at the airport that took all our bags to the boat for free, and we went downtown. we went to borders for way too long, then walked down to Public Market Center on Pike St., by the ocean. It's full of local foods and crafts, we got doughnuts and photos and things. We also went to Left Bank Bookstore for amusement and zines. Then we went to try to find our boat, which we'd heard might be in any of three places. It turned out to be in the farthest of the three, but we had plenty of time and a bike path led about a mile along the water straight to the pier, so we took that. We arrived in plenty of time, went through the huge warehouse to check in (I hadn't realized how many people would be on the boat - 1,800 + crew, which was under capacity), and went onboard. We got our seapass cards (basically hotel room keys, but they also functioned as debit cards onboard and linked to photographs of us, taken as we went onboard the first time). The room was smaller than we'd anticipated - 7 or 8 feet by probably 14 feet, but the balcony was nice. We were hungry and there was supposedly a free buffet upstairs, so we went for our first of many feasts, then were told to report back to our cabins for the safety drill. We put on live preservers, lined up at our muster stations (we were #5) on the 5th deck, and were told what to do if the boat exploded. or sunk. then we went back down to our rooms and the boat left. the harbor was pretty & full of sailboats; we were surprised by how long it took us to get out of having land on each side of us - we were sailing through a strait, i guess, with Victoria B.C. on our west. Once we were settled we explored the boat some, then went to find out about our formal dinner (we were scheduled for the 6:00 feast). Everyone at the counter resolutely told us we'd prefer to eat at 8:30, so we switched our time and were assigned a table in the middle of the huge dining hall. The meal was good, we explored the boat some more, and we went to sleep. End of day nothing. or one.