Tag Archives: cruise ships

1000 words

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Next week I’ll tell you more about the ship and the people on our Alaskan adventure, and we still have the amazing story of the Aleuts in Juneau and the Russian Orthodox church there, but for this week, please enjoy vicariously the photos we snapped. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is value for time. :]

Every time I woke up, I’d sneak out onto the balcony, and the views were always amazing. This is the first night, when the supermoon had just started waning.

Dawes Glacier was a huge chunk of ice, with pieces breaking off and refreezing over time. It is named for Henry Dawes, a laywer and politician from Massachusetts who apparently knew the right paperwork to file, because it had been named in 1890 by John Muir as Young Glacier after his companion The Rev. Hall Young, but Dawes renamed it in 1891 and the name stuck. The fog started coming in just as we were leaving the glacier; the whiter parts are the ice.

There were so many waterfalls, the disembodied voice that came on the ship’s com and began telling us things said, because there had been significant rainfall the week before. Normally the mountains don’t have so many waterfalls.

Pack ice was all over the place as we went north, always close to shore though. Sometimes they looked like dragons or other mythical creatures and you began to understand why mariners thought they’d seen monsters.

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The day the entire boat sat silent, taking in the grandeur of the glacier and fjords, we were also freezing on our balconies. Beth and Brandon waved from next door just before securing us all the day’s cocktail: Mallibu hot chocolate (rum added). We never found out how cold it was, but it reminded me of my days in grad school in Newfoundland, when the pack ice would come in and breathing near the ocean felt like ice razors were sliding down your throat.

More next week, including some of the fun fun people and silly things we did. But here’s one final shot of Jack enjoying the views. He said later that the balcony room had paid for itself – and that cruising was his ideal vacation: You sit with a drink in your hand watching the scenery walk past you.

Observations on Humanity While Cruising to Alaska

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Observations from my first cruise:

Going on a cruise is like being in an airport where everyone is going to the same place, so the entire airport’s ticketing desks and security lines are aimed at one single door.

When you get on the ship you have entered a floating airport stacked on top of itself like layers of a wedding cake. Swarovski crystal and duty free shops dominate the lower flowers. There are people everywhere. Most of these people are reallllllly excited to be in this floating airport—which is so big it kinda doesn’t feel like it’s floating. You can’t tell at first, and then you realize, every once in a while, that you are lurching toward a wall for no reason.

Many excited children (350, we would learn later) are in the floating airport. The airport is stacked, not flat, and the things the children want to do are at the top and bottom of the airport. You are going to get a LOT of experience over the coming week at dodging children on the stairs dressed in swimsuits, decked out as fairies and tigers complete with face paint, occasionally appearing in wolf and bear hats once people have visited ports and tourism shops. You will become accustomed to this changing wardrobe and also an expert at dodging the small human bullets of enthusiasm. But be wary: the enthusiastic little critters are followed by large exhausted critters, always holding an open canister of either hot coffee or sticky cocktails with fruit. Do not run into them; they will become angry if the liquid spills, and they are not looking at you; they are looking at the small human bullets ricocheting off the stairs.

The staff on the cruise ship are there to make you happy. This can become frightening. Of the just-under-6K people on the ship, 1,500 of them are staff. They are watching you. They will approach and open or shut windows so you can see better. They wipe wet seats, fogged viewing areas, and their own facial expressions when people start getting grumpy on day three. YOU are the target of their compensated kindness, and they want to make you new drinks, great food, and happy. If you are not happy, more of them will appear. Fake a smile if necessary, and they will dissipate.

If you take an Alaskan cruise going north in September/October, you are basically swimming upstream against every whale in the Pacific. The first day someone sees a whale spout, everyone on the boat will rush to that side of it jockeying for position at the railing.

By day three, someone will glance up from reading their book in a deck chair, yawn, and say “there’s another one.”

All bets are off if it turns out to be an orca. We only saw one of those, as opposed to about a thousand whales, and several groups of dolphins–or maybe porpoises. We weren’t close enough to be introduced properly.

When you pull into a harbor, everything swarms the ship. The seagulls and scua take up residency atop the lifeboats and wait for you to toss them pieces of muffin and toast from your balcony. This is forbidden, but the seagulls know human nature.

The seals and dolphins swim alongside the ship, doing cute things and picking up pieces of muffin and toast from people who overestimate compensating for wind in their trajectory. The people selling tours swarm the dock shouting interesting things you can do. Because the people who have never been on cruises before didn’t know they were supposed to pre-book excursions, they kinda wander ashore looking befuddled and are quickly eaten by the independent tour guides.

Next week we can talk about scenery and stuff.