Facebook link for Week 3's photo album
Facebook link for album of random photos of the Zaandam and me around the ship (will be updated throughout the summer so check back - I'll probably add a links section to this page so that you can quickly go to facebook albums without scrolling for them throughout all the posts).
Thursday June 5th: Day 7 - Last Sea Day
Today was nice and quiet overall. Hour forward always means that the kids sleep in longer. Liz mentioned that it was unfortunate that their is always a disembarkation meeting announcement from the Bridge around 9:45 am because it always wakes the kids up and gets them to Club HAL in about 30 minutes. I don’t mind because they trickle in and then we are already done by 11 am for the cooking class that meets in the movie theater with Chef Valentine.
The kids made really cute dough creations and the chef made a “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle” but he is from Holland and they pronounce J’s like Y’s so it was “neenya” turtle.
The afternoon also flies because we are open from 2-4, instead of 5, and then we get ready for our farewell pj party.
The farewell party was cute, the kids got along so well-- considering half of them don’t speak English. :)
Cruise 3 of 14: May 23 - June 6, 2007
Wednesday June 6th: Day 1 - Vancouver, B.C.
Today I didn’t have the opportunity to get off in Vancouver, though I didn’t mind because the weather was cold and drizzly. I get the pleasure of being a “buddy” to a newly embarking crew member who incidentally will also be my roommate. My previous roommate was only on this ship for 3 weeks and then will head on Friday to the ms Amsterdam to cruise from Seattle to Alaska for summer and then to Europe in the late fall.
I worked gangway from 11 am to 1:30 pm when my roommate Megan arrived. She is from Portland, Oregon and knows people at Corporate (always good to know people in high places). I have been taking her around to the various departments getting her situated with the security office, Human Resources, her safety meetings etc. I am glad that I was on board all last summer so that I have the answers to all the questions she’s asking me. We are so much a like it’s scary (personality wise). We are both confident and outgoing but in a friendly and non-obnoxious way and have to know what we don’t know. I think we’ll get along well.
The all aboard party this evening in Club HAL was fun. We had about 5 kids show up out a projected 23 on board, all except 1 were in the 8-10 year old range so that is GOOD! I love kids, I love tweens, but having too many kids in the tweens mix doesn’t really work well. The tweens want to be constantly active and the kids just aren’t at their same level of ability. If programming is geared for kids then the tweens won’t have fun because it’s too babyish - always a programming dilemma which way to tailor the program but if we end up this week with mostly tweens it’ll work out just fine.
Thursday June 7th: First Sea Day
Last night Megan and I stayed up very late talking about everything and anything. Neither one of us would stop talking after several times of saying “good night”...yikes! :) Hopefully we’ll not do this every night or I’ll be one very tired girl.
Today started out sunny and calm water. That made for a very pleasant first sea day. The kids came upstairs to check out Club HAL and again it was mainly tweens - YAY! We had some kids register for the week only after hearing that we’d have an activity called “raid the arcade” today where all the arcade games would be free for an hour (some cost 4 tokens or $1.00 to play so this is a huge crowd pleaser). The kids seem to have instantly bonded. Most of them are 8 and one is 10. Two of the kids are from Ireland, but have lived the past two years in Chicago. One girl is from Australia. A couple of kids are from Canada and the rest are from various places in the U.S. They are a fun group so far, hopefully the week will continue to go smoothly.
Megan is adjusting well and she has already got most of her stuff unpacked and put away. This is very impressive as it took me the whole first week to unpack. Her schedule is quite different then mine though. I only have chunks of time off in ports whereas she works every single day in blocks of time and the other block of time has off.
Tonight the ship started to rock. Quite unexpected after the beautiful weather we had all the rest of today. It wasn’t so bad that we were rocking in circles like last summer, but we are rocking forward to aft quite forcefully and I feel extremely nauseous. My stomach would be fine if only my eyes and the rest of me would match. Oh well, it’s time for bed and I did make it ok through the rest of the days activities with no incidents.
Friday June 8th: Tracy Arm and Juneau, AK
I survived last night without getting physically sick, yay!!! Thankfully today we are in the inside passage and the weather is GORGEOUS! It is sunny and beautiful in Tracy Arm, a very narrow passage between the mountains that we can cruise through and see some glaciers. The best glacier watching though is definitely in Glacier Bay.
One of the eight year old boys in my room is very difficult. He isn’t defiant, he isn’t malicious on purpose, he just doesn’t process instructions. He definitely has something going on because he behavior isn’t normal for a boy his age, he functions as someone about 4 years old instead of 8. The other kids like him though and include him in everything which is great. If they didn’t it would make for a very long week because he is quite high maintenance.
In Juneau today I took Megan to Subway and then sat with her outside the Governor’s mansion (which overlooks the valley from a pretty high vantage point) while she ate. Afterwards I pointed her in the direction of the library and then went to the info booth to inquire about taking the city bus to do some shopping. In my quest to do things that I didn’t do last year I decided to find out how to get to Costco. I knew there was one in the valley and that crew could get in for free, but last year I spent all of my time in the library updating my blog and didn’t get out much to do anything else. This year I have such a short time off in Juneau that I don’t want to waste a minute of it in the library when I really want to see what the capital of AK has to offer. So, after vehement dissuasion from the helpful info booth man about why NOT to ride the city bus (too far, too inconvenient for crew...) I smiled politely, took the schedule and went to the bus stop. The crew shuttle is $6.00 and will take you wherever you need to shop door to door. The bus is $1.50 and you have to walk 1/4 mile to Costco from the nearest stop. In good weather I LOVE to walk, will walk for hours in fact, and so I knew that I’d be fine. Hey, if I can ride the bus all over Milwaukee I think I can handle a city that has exactly 2 city buses :)
At Costco I purchased a 98 package of Nature Valley Granola Bars, that should last me a while. They cost a bit more than in WI, but that is to be expected. I took the bus back to the pier and went to work.
Tonight’s theme was Brave the Night. I love doing the food dares. The kids have to put their hand into a bowl and figure out what they are touching and they always come up with answers like applesauce and mashed fruit for salsa, raw eggs simply eludes them :)
My roommate is great, we get along really well but she is definitely a morning person timing wise and with my late night work requirements I haven’t been able to get a full night’s sleep yet this week. Hopefully we can find a happy medium between early mornings and sleep in mornings. I am getting a bit exhausted. I don’t want to hurt her feelings or offend her in any way though, because I really like her a lot - this is merely a logistics thing we’ll have to overcome together.
Saturday June 9th: Skagway, AK
Today I went on an excursion back to Jewell Gardens. Today is brilliantly sunny and HOT by Alaska standards, in the 70’s for sure. My body is now acclimated to cooler temps so I was warm (Mom, you’re probably smiling about that one!). At the gardens we had a guided tour and I was happy to see that the plants were growing in a bit compared to last time I went 2 weeks prior. After the garden tour we went into a sun room and had a tasting of different delicacies that they prepared with freshly grown plants and a cooking demonstration. That was really lovely.
After I got back from the tour I did a quick change and put on walking shoes and left the layers in my room, donned a short sleeved shirt and baseball hat and went hiking to a place told to me by my new friend Moira. It was so lovely. I met some guys from Anchorage and we were taking photos for each other, unfortunately the ones of me in the scenery didn’t turn out but hopefully the ones I took for them did.
Please check out my Facebook album to see the beautiful photos I’m collecting for this week. The link is at the top of this post.I wandered around in town very lazily and just simply enjoyed the day. I loved the sunshine, the lack of fierce winds Skagway is known for (Skagway means place of wind or Place where the wind is never the same twice). I was also able to make some phone calls to different people while sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere! I love nature and that was just the perfect end to a perfect day.
I got back on the ship in just enough time to run up to Club HAL to set up for Country Carnival. Thankfully I already had on my short-sleeved country shirt and jeans and just had to add a bandana in the back pocket and my red cowboy hat and run upstairs.
Country Carnival with this group of kids was so much fun. They are all so respectful and fun to have around that it was great. I sat and painted faces all evening and they tallied their own points for the games and they all left with prizes. Fabulous! I have about 11 regular attenders and that is an age range of 3-10 but most kids are 8 years old.
I didn’t get done painting faces until about 10:30 and so I didn’t get the room cleaned up and get downstairs until about 11:45 pm. Skagway is the furthest north so it is the port where it is still light out at 10:30 pm and so it’s deceiving about how late it is. That’s really good when I have to work so late, it keeps me more awake. :)
Sunday June 10th: Glacier Bay Scenic Cruising
Today in Glacier Bay was good and bad. Bad in that it is yucky and raining for the 3rd cruise in a row (the amazing Glacier Bay day happened the WEEK before I got on board). Any time now all the snow will be gone and my great photo opps for Glacier Bay will be done for this season. Oh well. It was really good at the same time in that we saw bears today through binoculars. One of the parents told us to come outside and see them and lent us his binoculars to look through. How exciting. We saw 2 bears on the way in to the Bay and 1 on the way out. Wow!!!! Last summer I only saw whales, porpoises and eagles and now this summer I’ve seen all of those plus sea lions and bears. I now need to see Seals, sea otters, puffins and I’ll be set. A moose and mountain goats would also be nice, but I don’t need to be greedy :)
I didn’t have Master Chef dinner tonight as I’m running the whole kids program by myself, but I really enjoyed movie night with them. We watched an animated flick called Chicken Little. Right about 10 pm a mom brought up her 4 year old for after hours baby-sitting and because it’s only me in this age group I stayed after to babysit. Thankfully I can sleep in tomorrow. The little girl’s name is Lauren and she is adorable so it was really fun to have one on one time with her. She loves to draw and read stories so the hour went really quickly.
Monday June 11th: Ketchikan, AK
I was awakened really early again this morning after not getting to bed very early last night (this morning) and so I was so saddened to find out that I was going on a really great tour. I was so tired I didn’t feel I would properly enjoy it. I ended up going to my supervisor for the Entertainment Dept. and having a conversation about how to approach the issue with my roommie that I otherwise adore. I felt better after the chat and put on my game face for the excursion determined to still have a great time.
I had a GREAT time. It was a photo safari excursion where the guides actually bait the water with herring so that the eagles will dive down right next to the boat so that we could photograph them. WOW. Unfortunately eagles are really fast so I got one amazing photo (slightly out of focus) of an eagle in flight close up and some way off in the distance. My 300 mm zoom lens on a 1.6x crop camera gave me some pretty good distance to my zoom and I was impressed with the detail in a bunch of my shots. We were on a moving vessel but having image stabilization means I can shoot most photos without a tripod and they still turn out good. The trip started out rainy but after we got out to where we were eagle watching the clouds broke and the sun came out. For the rest of the day in Ketchikan it was brilliantly sunny. I loved it!
Other things I did and saw in Ketchikan -- the tour went from being on the water to a place called Potlatch Park where native Tlingit totem carvers work at building up the totem collection to tell the native stories to preserve the history of their people.
Totems are not religious objects, they are used to tell the history of a people group that has only had a written language since the 50’s and were also used to decorate the supporting poles of the long houses they would winter in. Any ways, at Potlatch Park there is currently the only female master level carver in Southeastern Alaska. She demonstrated her techniques and it was really fascinating. At her level of skill she will earn around 1200.00 per sq. foot of totem. Wow! One pole takes about a year and is 20 feet high or so depending on the stories being told.After the tour I walked around in town and went to the park with the water fountain, only this week it was sunny instead of rainy like the picture I shared last week in the Facebook album. After that I walked up a road I hadn’t visited before and wound my way around to Cape Fox Lodge where there is a cable car that goes up the side of the mountain to the Lodge. At the top is the hotel and some totems. I ate a sandwich that I bought in town up there and then hiked down. On the way down I took a portrait of a house cat lounging in the grass with my telephoto zoom lens up close. It took a nice portrait! :)
Then I walked to a bridge near Creek Street and locals were salmon fishing there. The day before there had been the conclusion of the annual fishing derby where someone caught a winning fish weighing in around 42 lbs. They were still fishing today and one guy had a huge king salmon on his line and it kept jumping up in the air. I had my telephoto lens on the camera still at that point so I kept missing the shot because it would jump just outside the view of the lens. Disappointing for sure. I need to keep working on the best way to capture action shots because that happened while trying to capture the eagles this morning as well.
While walking back towards the ship I happened to glance up at the second story of a building along the main road and saw two dogs in the window looking out. The hilarious thing was these two American Staffordshire Terriers were wearing sunglasses. I laughed so hard. They were just hanging out like it was nothing.
After I kept walking 2 locals saw me laughing and told me the names of the two dogs and said there is actually usually a third one as well and that they are there in the window on any sunny day. I think it is a way for the local family to get a reputation with the tourists, but whatever the case it was really cute and funny. I of course snapped a few cute poses and put my favorite on Facebook for this week.I then went into a tourist shop (places I usually avoid like the plague) and bought a cheap Alaska Inside Passage t-shirt for 3.99. If I have a shirt that lists all the ports I am allowed to wear that and jeans as my uniform on the first night of the cruise for the Welcome Aboard theme rather than my usual uniform. I am all about getting out of the uniform and putting on theme wear. I wish we had comfy theme wear every night, but alas we do not. Pretty close though. :)
Tonight’s theme was Pirate Night. Love this night. We take the kids on a scavenger hunt around the ship to find treasure. Our kids this week are such great sports in having 3 year olds in with the 8-10 year olds. The older ones look out for the younger ones and the younger ones love being taken care of by the older ones. They are too cute!
My supervisor came out when the treasure was found, we hide it right near her office, and she interacted with the kids a bit. It was too cute, I loved it. After hours I went by the office and found a note from her in my mailbox that was very sweet and encouraging thanking me for the way I made the activity so special for the kids and that she really appreciated how I worked with them. I love her, she is such an encouraging boss.
Tuesday June 12: Last Sea Day
Today the seas were a bit choppy, but not too horrible. I watched Boomerang channel in the teens room waiting for my kids to show up, last night was hour forward so the kids never arrive very early because they think it’s still 9 am when it’s actually 10 am. Makes for an easy morning for me. Then we had Play Station time, a craft and then we all went downstairs for the cooking class at 11 am.
I’m going to really miss this group of kids. All week the parents have been SO GREAT. They are constantly telling me how much the kids love coming up to Club HAL and how much they love hanging out with me. That is so encouraging to hear! I love my job and love kids who can have a great time but still behave and be controlled. I kept seeing all of them in the different ports and they’d get so excited to see me and I’d hang out with them for a while, it was really neat.
Our final party was a huge hit overall until Jared had an incident with Jack and Diermud. All I had to do though was say that Jack hurt Jared’s feelings and because of that Jared had left the party to go to the Play Station room and he made up an excuse for why he needed to leave the room. I knew that he would use that time to go an apologize and he did. When he came back into the room Jared came with him and he had another reason for why they were both together. None of the other kids knew what had happened and it was resolved. Very thoughtful and resourceful of Jack, I knew he hadn’t done anything mean on purpose, it was simply a misunderstanding. Truly great kids.
After the party ended I found some lost and found items and so Liz and I went room to room delivering these items back to the kids. The families were so grateful, but one room no one was around and the lost item was a highly prized stuffed bear that walked and growled. Shannon had been SO EXCITED to show off this bear at the party so I knew she would definitely want it back. After 20 minutes of not finding her and finishing our other errands we went back to Club HAL to finish cleaning up and I called the room and left a message that we’d take the bear to the front desk. Well, lo and behold she and her mom go walking in through the other door and we quickly run into the room to give her the bear (she’s 8). She was absolutely in tears, frantic that she’d lost it for good and so terribly upset. I gave her a huge hug and apologized that we hadn’t been in the room earlier when they were back to look for it and that we had actually spent all that time trying to find HER. I knew how it meant to her and that we were definitely not going to let her go home without it. That made her smile through her tears and she left a very happy girl. Whew! :) As they used to say in the Little House on the Prairie “Alls well that ends well”.
This was a very very very very very fun group of kids and I definitely hope to keep having such great groups this summer.
I hope to hear from you, I miss you all and thanks for checking out my update for this week. Sorry it’s a bit late, we only have 2 staff so I really don’t get any free time (unless I’m in a port and the Shore Excursions guy has a crush on me so I keep getting on really great excursions that eat up my port times).
Catch up with you again next week!
T
