My Second Summer at Sea - Alaska 2007

Week 12 of 14: August 8-15, 2007

2007-08-16T23:42:00.000-06:00

Blog update coming within the next couple days. I did update the photo link with photos from last cruise and also want to mention that next week's photos (week 13) are fun because I went to the Vancouver Aquarium at Stanley Park on the 15th. So, be looking for those next update!!! :)

T

Week 11 of 14: August 1 - 8, 2007

2007-08-10T15:13:00.000-06:00

Wednesday August 1st: Vancouver, B.C.

This is my second full day of isolation and the rest has been very much needed. I have slept a good portion of each day and still fall asleep by 1 am each night - late for me I know but after sleeping a good 8 hours of the day or more as well that’s sorta early.

I ordered room service for lunch today, the kind dining steward wakes me each morning to inquire if I would like breakfast but today I was too tired and slept until 10:30 am. Around 11:30 am I called them back and ordered a grilled tuna melt with tomatoes and fresh fruit. I haven’t had a huge appetite, but I haven’t completely lacked one either so that’s good.

I read part of a book that my roommate recommended for me and watched TNT for a few hours (Law and Order re-runs is the staple for that network I think) and then fell back to sleep until dinner around 6:30.

I have to say on a side note that the stewards have all been so nice when they bring my food and I call on the phone. It’s great attending the Sunday night fellowship with a bunch of them because word spreads and they are all taking really good care of me. When I call the caller ID tells them it’s my room and they greet me each time by name and then kindly ask what I’m in the mood for and then if I don’t call around the next meal time they call me back and inquire if I’m in the mood for the next meal. That has been really fabulous. :)

I also had the distinct privilege today of updating my blog in the morning as I didn’t have to work. I really needed this rest and am really thankful to have gotten it.
Thursday August 2nd: First Day at Sea

I went to the medical office this morning to be cleared for work, even though my stomach is still rumbling I definitely do NOT have Norwalk - that would have been constant symptoms for 24 - 48 or more hours. So I’m going to feign total health and go back to work. I do have sinus issues going on - that comes from living with a smoker (I’ve been sick all summer because of the heavy perfumes she sprays to cover up her odor) but otherwise I’m peachy and ready to work.

My kids didn’t know me because I missed the first night of activities and some really gave me a cold reception - wow. I was told that certain ones were super sweet and cute and suprising enough those are the ones giving me the problems. Hopefully they simply don’t trust the “new girl” and they’ll warm up after awhile.

The ship was rocking a little bit today and the kids were slightly seasick, but thankfully no incidents in the room. I can tell sea wise that we are slowly transitioning into fall weather in Alaska because the sea is gradually becoming rougher on the first, last sea days and Glacier Bay evening when we are in exposed water rather than the protected Inside Passage. I will say though that compared to last summer it’s so much better and much much more beautiful on this run from Vancouver. If any of you desire to sea Alaska by cruise ship I highly recommend Holland America (very traditional and not a party ship compared to the other lines) and also would highly recommend the Inside Passage cruise from Vancouver. It is well worth the hassle of flying or driving into Canada as the port of origin.

Tonight we had our photo scavenger hunt and the kids were SO WELL BEHAVED. I was really amazed at how wonderful they did. They really worked well together, got along really well and had great teamwork/ sportsmanship. That really makes my job fun when I have such a conscientious group of kids.

After work I played Spider Solitaire on my computer. My friend Kim emailed while I was in isolation and asked if I was playing that again like I did last year when I was isolated because of my roommate. It actually hadn’t occurred to me this summer to play that game in my spare time until I was reminded. Way to go Kim, now I’m addicted to it again! :) I have also rekindled my passion for reading, another something I don’t think of doing when I have the internet and TV so readily at my disposal at home. I have TV here but not much of anything to watch and the internet is way too expensive to use it for entertainment purposes, so reading it is. It’s free and educational!

Friday August 3rd: Tracy Arm / Juneau, AK

It is so gorgeous today in Tracy Arm. The glacial ice is so aqua I kick myself for always forgetting to bring my camera to Club Hal on this day. Maybe next week I’ll remember. Tracy Arm is a very narrow passageway carved by a glacier that our ship must slowly navigate and make very sharp turns super carefully. A few weeks back we canceled Tracy Arm because we couldn’t see well enough to navigate it safely and not hit any of the icebergs. Not wanting to be a modern day Titanic we skipped it and sailed straight on to Juneau instead. Today though it was gorgeous.

In Juneau I wasn’t able to get off the ship until late because we had a meeting for all members of the Passenger Notification Team at 4 pm. So I took my camera and went to the Governor's Mansion and the Capitol building.

Tonight’s theme was supposed to be Brave the Night, but I had one boy (Henry) show up. He started out the week quite shy and withdrawn but tonight we had a great time together. He is very courteous and respectful and helps to pick up without being asked. He looks for ways to help out. I love that in a kid. Well, I asked him what he wanted to do and he didn’t care he said I could pick and he’d be fine with it. Wow! Well I insisted that we do what he was interested in, so we finally picked out a game to play and towards the end of the night one other boy finally showed up that was Henry’s age. John and Henry really hit it off that night and became fast friends. The boy’s ended up playing foosball for about 30 minutes using John’s tokens and then they helped me clean up the room and reset it for the next day.

Saturday August 4th: Skagway, AK

Today I walked around in Skagway once again but my journey also took me on some beautiful new trails. If the weather cooperates this next cruise I plan to pack a picnic lunch and spend the day at this new location because it is so relaxing and makes me feel like I’m either at my grandparent’s old cabin in northern MN or back at Camp Forest Springs in northern WI. The climb is 500 ft almost at a 10:00 type angle until you get to the top and then it levels out to a beautiful wooded trail and mountain lake. It is called Lower Dewey Lake. Moira, if you read this you need to go there when you get back on board before the Z leaves Alaska because thought the climb is steep it is so worth the effort when you get up there. There is a picnic table and some beautiful trails and it is so quiet and serene it’s completely amazing. And yet I didn’t worry about bears because even though I hiked independently there were lots of other people coming and going the whole time so I was never technically “alone”. Look at my album this week to see a brief snippet of the beauty of Lower Dewey Lake.

Tonight our Country Carnival was a huge success. The kids had fun and were very well behaved. The night started out really slowly, but by the time we got to the carnival games they were very animated and eager to play for prizes and win tickets. All in all a fun evening with fun kids. It’s really cute watching the older ones help the younger ones and they did it willingly.

Sunday August 5th: Glacier Bay National Park

It was warm and sunny today in Glacier bay - at least 65 degrees with the sun heating the air to maybe the lower 70’s when it came out right at Marjorie Glacier. This week we didn’t see quite the magnificent calving that we saw last week, but just enough small chunks to keep the kids waiting for more until it was time to go in for lunch.

This afternoon the weather was still amazing and the Park Ranger and guest singers came up for their activities. Afterwards I sent the kids out on a scavenger hunt and then we ate ice cream. How great is that! I love the kids this week - they are so super sweet. I’ve been so fortunate to have had 3-4 groups in a row of good kids. This trend can’t possibly last can it?

Movie night was good and there was no late night baby sitting so I was able to make it to the fellowship meeting. I had prepared sufficiently to lead the message portion, per a request from two weeks ago when I ended up with late night baby sitting, and was thankful that my stomach was hanging in there because the sea is quite rocky tonight. The meeting went very well, I feel so blessed after going and know that in that group are true friends that care about me in a right way. After the meeting we sat around and sang praise songs until about 1:30 or 2:00 am (thankfully for ME tomorrow is Ketchikan and I don’t work until the pm, but unfortunately the others still have to get up in a few hours and go back to work).

Monday August 6th: Ketchikan, AK

Today I slept in for a bit and got off the ship around 11 am. I went over to the local internet cafe and purchased 5 hours of time for $20.00 (not quite half price as the ship but almost) and finally filled out my FAFSA form for student aid and signed up for one class. I now have to wait until Juneau to see if it was approved and then fill out the request for loans from UWM and US Bank. Hopefully I can get it all to go through rather quickly as I only have a month until classes start. I already know though that I’ll receive a rejection notice in the mail because of a notice on my credit regarding a misplaced wallet from 3 years ago. Now all online credit approvals are rejected and I have to call an 800-number to approve the application being filed in my name. This is fine by me, but the timing had to be worked out so that when I apply for aid on Friday it will have 2 weeks to come in the mail as rejected and then I’ll have to call and take care of it right when I get home and then hopefully I’ll have approval and disbursement before the 3rd week of classes when payment is due. It wouldn’t matter if I’d done it earlier because I wasn’t home to receive the rejection notice. So anyways, I finally got that all taken care of using high speed internet. That’s one thing I’m really looking forward to having again when I get home, but I have been so thankful to have internet in my cabin this summer I am not complaining about the slow speed (I don’t know anyone else that can get it in their cabin, I just happen to live right across the hall from the hotspot).

After going to the internet cafe I then walked to City Park and sat on a bench and called friends. It was overcast, but not raining and so it was really peaceful and pretty. I enjoyed the tranquility. I love the fact that I can safely find places to be alone and have such gorgeous surroundings.

Tonight’s theme was more scavenger hunts. My kids are so great working together in teams that I let them pick their own and they did 2 scavenger hunts for prizes. I even broke out the good prizes because they are such great kids.

Tuesday August 7th: Final Sea Day

Today we hung out in the Loft and played UNO and then went to Playstation and the cooking class. This afternoon they did another scavenger hunt and had an ice cream eating contest.

For the farewell party I brought back the Brave the Night theme night for most of the games because we didn’t do that earlier in the week and I thought they might enjoy it. So with a few of those games combined with t-shirt decorating and some other stuff we had a very fun final night together. I’m going to truly miss these kids. :)

I hope that your week was a fabulous one like mine and I look forward to hearing from you! :)

T

Week 10 of 14: July 25 - August 1, 2007

2007-08-01T12:12:00.000-06:00

Wednesday July 25th: Vancouver, B.C.

Today was a very beautiful day in Vancouver. I had mandatory IPM for today but was able to get off the ship for about an hour and a half after straightening out a switching dilemma with security. I knew that I didn’t have a ton of time to go back to Stanley Park, but I did want to walk and enjoy the gorgeously sunny day anyway. I took my camera back to the park where I shot the heron in hopes of seeing it again, but instead saw Canada geese and ducks and a very young and unintimidated crow that appeared to be dead until I was only about a foot away from it and it started to move away from me. I stayed as long as I could and then I made my way back to the ship where I got ready to cover gangway detail.

The 5:00 pm meeting went well. Julie wasn’t able to lead it so she assigned parts for each of us to lead. I really enjoy speaking about stuff I know so it was much more interesting than standing there like we usually do while she says all the info. Afterwards we got ready for our welcome aboard party.

Crystal had a migraine this week and was unable to join us. I was really sad about that because this week the kids looked at me the first night as though I was an alien from outer space when I asked them to dance for one of the games. They wouldn’t move around at all (I don’t expect much - just a little finger jiving or SOMETHING) so I kept moving from game to game to find something that might intrigue them. Overall the night ended fine, after 2/3rds of my tweens signed themselves out before 9 pm due to boredom, but HEY I would rather they go where they will be more entertained if my best isn’t good enough for them. Hopefully this isn’t a sign of things to come for this week. We’ll have to wait and see :)

Thursday July 26th: First Sea Day

Today the seas where a little rough and many of the kids looked a little green. I ended up taking both halves of the Bonine and ate a stack of ginger snaps to ward off the green monster myself. Even after the other half of the medication I still felt the headache, but I failed to wear the wristbands today so who knows.

I was a bit nervous this week about doing scavenger hunts. These kids have some crazy tendencies that came out today but I divided them up by simply numbering them off and not doing anything special to orchestrate the groups and they worked together perfectly. They had such a blast they actually want to keep their same teams and finish the rest of the scavenger hunt on Monday night. Wow!
Friday July 27th: Tracy Arm & Juneau, AK

Tracy Arm was very lovely today and slightly sunny. I’m hoping that the overcast weather on our sea day will translate into sunny ports this week. Strangely with the sunny sea days we kept having rainy ports, so I’m hoping that the opposite will hold true this week. One can only hope.

Juneau this week was gorgeous! If I’d had more time I would have definitely gone up the tramway or to Mendenhall Glacier it was so nice. This week though, in an effort to not waste all my tip money on internet cards, I went to the library until close at 5 pm to try and register for two more classes and fill out financial aid paperwork. Unfortunately in my haste to finally get off the ship I failed to bring all the documents I have collected along and therefore could only just start the FAFSA for this semester coming up. I also was only able to register for one class and not two as the other newly added class still conflicts with my schedule. So, this fall I so far have only 3 classes and need to find out if I am able to get financial aid for less than full time or do I simply pick up a class like bowling in order to get financial aid. A fun class would allow me to relax a little and get some exercise maybe. I wasn’t serious about bowling, but maybe there is something else I might enjoy. Dad suggested a business class, but I’m already so extended with the three classes I will be taking that I would need a no brainer type class to enjoy and not stress over if I want to stay sane and keep up the GPA, so I’ll have to think long and hard about what I will take. I only have 4 weeks to decide so hopefully I’ll have a quick revelation.

For our survivor night most of the kids had to leave early so it was a little weird to do mystery food at 9 pm when usually it’s the last activity at 9:45. I have two great boys this week though that really wanted to do it before going home for the night so I revamped the order of activities for them. It ended up being girls night after that so we ended on Eye Q test with picture puzzles and snack and they seemed ok with that. Yay! :)

Saturday July 28th: Skagway, AK

Today I planned to go to Haines, AK on the ferry and spend the day there taking pictures. The weather was supposed to be nice for once and I was really looking forward to it. I woke up though with some gastro problems and had stomach cramps and really didn’t feel up to going. During out monthly General Drill I felt unwell and so after I relaxed until 11:15 am when I was to meet Rebecca to go to the ferry. I prayed about whether or not I should make the trip, I didn’t want to be too far from a bathroom and also knew I wouldn’t fully enjoy the trip and my prayer was answered. When we got to the ferry terminal it was closed with no mention of whether or not there would be a ferry that day anyway. Turns out in my frenzy to get ready while not feeling completely 100% I also forgot my wallet, so it’s a good thing we didn’t go.

On the dock we saw an amazing sight that made up for missing the ferry. We saw harbor seals playing about 20 feet from us in the water. I guess playing isn’t really what they were doing, they were hunting salmon. I watched for about an hour as they stalked their prey and herded it to the place of no escape and dived for the prize. At one point two of the seals started fighting cuz I guess one got the other’s prized fish and they had to “take it outside”. :) They were quite cute. Many said they were sea lions, but they were definitely harbor seals. Sea lions have little flaps at the ear canal that look like little ears and harbor seals simply have flat holes in the sides of their heads. I’ve included a few photos of them in my collection for this week.

After watching the seals for a while James from Shore Ex came over and talked to me again for a bit. I am convinced that he is trying to take his chances with me again after a bit of a reprieve. I honestly haven’t done ANYTHING to encourage the guy, but he’s now asking me to dinner again. I keep politely changing the subject, but he just doesn’t get it. I will unfortunately not be able to ever look at him the same again either after talking to him on the pier with a huge wad of chewing tobacco in his bottom lip. I was so repulsed I thought I would vomit right there on his shoes but kept a stoic face out of kindness. Thankfully I only run into him occasionally and don’t actually work in his department.

Country Carnival was a sweeping success tonight. It truly was about the most fun I’ve had at a carnival this summer. They kids had fun, behaved quite well, and really appreciated what we did for them in preparation and execution. I really honestly like this week’s kids even though I was a little skeptical at the beginning of the week.

Sunday July 29th: Glacier Bay Day

It was overcast with low hanging clouds in Glacier Bay National Park today. This actually was ok as the temp was decent and the air was only mildly misty at times. The tweens and I hung out at the railing for a full half hour watching some amazing avalanches cascade down the face of Marjorie. It was truly breathtaking and I was so glad to have been able to witness it. One of my guys had wanted to go in and then all of a sudden a huge crack and boom was heard and a good 10 second avalanche and he no longer wanted to go in but rather stay out even longer than we were able. :) It just takes some cool sights in nature to pique a child’s interest.

For movie night we watched Cheaper by the Dozen, the new version with Steve Martin, while the kids sat and talked and quoted the movie. Normally I would have been shushing them but no one seemed to mind not being able to hear so why get my “britches in a knot”. I had already seen the movie and wasn’t missing anything, so I ate my popcorn and enjoyed spending time with the kids. After the movie ended we played spoons. This weeks kids are spoons fanatics, fine by me because the game is really fun! We play whenever there is down time between activities.

I went to the fellowship meeting tonight, but was unable to sing again this week due to laryngitis. Instead I shared about how despite the fact that I couldn’t sing praises to God I could still PRAISE God with every breath that was in me. Praise Him in any way that I was able to. There were a handful of visitors there this week, guests who’d been invited by our very bold Lido friend Prayudi. More than one of them piped up to say that being in our fellowship was actually the highlight of their cruise. Wow. You just never know when and how you might be a blessing to someone else. Keep that thought in mind this week.

Monday July 30th: Ketchikan, AK

Well, sadly I must report that I had 3 bouts of the “runs” between 12 am and 2 am and so I decided to not attend my excursion that I was scheduled to go on. I do at times have episodes after eating certain things, but usually they happen within an hour and usually within about 20 minutes of ingesting the offending cuisine. I hadn’t had anything since about 9 pm last night so I don’t think it was related to that, but who knows. I decided to lay low and just rest and catch up on sleep.

By 4:40 pm I still had a lot of gurgling going on but hadn’t had any new episodes, but Liz said that I had to go to the Health Services anyway to be cleared to work. I didn’t want to go there, because it was only those few times and such, but if I should have the dreaded N virus that will remain nameless it would not be good if I spread the contagion to other crew and guests. So, I went and saw the doctor and was promptly placed in 72 hour quarantine in my cabin. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Thankfully the 72 hours began at the time of my last episode, so I’ll be back to work on the first sea day. So I am now looking at 2 full days locked in my room to rest, relax, catch up on e-mails, watch tv, and not have anyone bother me. I feel really bad though for Liz because now we are short a Club HAL staffer, but thankfully I don’t room with anyone from Club HAL or we’d be down 2. There is an upside to that.

I received phone calls from a few people wishing me well, and of course a concerned “please let me know if there’s anything I can do” call from James and then it was blissfully just me. I know this sounds bad, but I’m grateful for the 2 days off.

Tuesday July 31st: Final Sea Day

Today I was awakened by the room service guy calling to see if I was ready for breakfast. Sure, why not. I ordered a bagel and jam, fresh fruit and grape juice. Unlike last year in isolation (when I was the well roommate) I ate like a queen. This summer I’m not enjoying the privilege so much as I’ve now gone the opposite direction gastro-intestinally speaking and am not really that hungry.

After breakfast and an hour of television I went back to sleep until about 3 pm. I guess I really did need a break and am thankful to have this opportunity to get rest. My sinuses are acting up again, causing my laryngitis, but I’m hoping to not have to go back on antibiotics but rather rest and drink lots of fluids and hope and pray it dissolves on its own.

I ordered lunch around 4 pm and then caught up on a tv series I’m watching on DVD per a friend loaning them to me. Thankfully I’d gotten them prior to my isolation so that I’ve had something to do. I also finished a long novel in the past 2 days. It was a suspense novel that actually kept me in suspense until the end without the usual disgust at suspecting every plot twist and turn. Maybe it’s my film training and knowing what makes a successful script, but this plot was actually suspenseful and I was glad for that.

Hopefully tomorrow will be restful and enjoyable as well because then it’s back in the trenches full force on Thursday.

Hope you had a good week. This one certainly went differently then I had planned, but it just goes to show you that He is in control and His timing is perfect, how ever crazy that may seem.

Be blessed and be a blessing,
T

Week 9 of 14: July 18 - 25

2007-07-26T00:18:00.000-06:00

Wednesday July 18th: Vancouver, B.C.

Today I don’t have gangway until 2 PM, but we have a new crew member coming on board for both Club HAL and the Explorations Cafe so I will be showing them around and getting them oriented after about 1 PM. Until then I intend to find my way to Stanley Park. Last week James from Shore Excursions told me how to get there and that it was only about 30 minutes away, so today I’m going to find it.

The weather in Vancouver today is lightly rainy, so I’m going to wear quickly drying clothes and grab an umbrella. I desperately need to wash my hair anyway before wearing my gangway uniform, so it really doesn’t matter if I get wet or even soaked. The air isn’t too cold so I’m simply going to brave the elements and get out there.

Walking to Stanley Park took me about an hour this morning. It wasn’t further than I anticipated, but my route was quite scenic. I followed the sea wall instead of taking direct streets, so I wound my way through all sorts of lovely condos and apartments - the kind that you’d expect near the waterfront and marina. There were a couple parks along the way as well as a really nice bike / walk path that leads all the way to the Park. Once I was there I found where the Aquarium is, I hope to get there maybe next week, and then it was time to start walking back already. On the way back I stopped at one of the parks that had a pond and saw ducks splashing in the water. After taking their picture (not very good though cuz I only brought my small camera with limited zoom out in the rain) I noticed there was also a heron (or is it a crane??) standing in the water along the side. I definitely took its picture a couple different ways. I was caught off guard as it was so unexpected! :) I then made it back to the ship taking the shorter route and it took much less time then going there. I enjoyed the walk but on the way back it started to rain harder. Actually I made it back just in time, as I got to the gangway it started to come down much harder. The sky was dark and heavy and overall gloomy. Thankfully we saw the sun yesterday or I’d have been really depressed by now. We haven’t had nice weather in weeks.

The two new crew girls, Rebecca and Peg, arrived while I was on gangway duty so I was not able to take them around right away. After my shift ended though I caught up with them and we began the process of orientation. I am excited to have them on board - unlike our previous new crew member these are two responsible intellectually capable girls who will do a great job in their respective areas. Peg is from Chicago and Rebecca is from Dallas.

Our meeting at 5 PM went well, we had about 20 people there and the kids all seemed really nice. I look forward to this week being pretty fun. Last week’s kids were great and hopefully it’ll be two cruises in a row of fun kids.

The first night’s party was a blast. My 12 year olds are really fun kids and so far they all play really well together (from 8 - 12 years all together). Crystal came up again to hang out with the kids and they have such a fun time with her I love it when she helps! The energy is just right when she’s there - she gets the kids grooving to the music and laughing and playing. She leaves in 2 weeks and I’m really sad about that.

We had after hours baby-sitting tonight for a family that is staying on deck 7. The family is super nice and uber rich, so it’ll be interesting to see what this week brings.

Thursday July 19th: First Sea Day

Today was a partly sunny sea day with calm waves in the gorgeous inside passage. I’m learning to really enjoy sea days to their fullest this summer as they provide the only sunshine we see in Alaska. We took the kids outside for a bit to run around and enjoy the fresh air and they enjoyed it. This week the kids won’t be playing Ghosts in the Graveyard like last cruise - much too active - but that means they’ll enjoy games like tag!

Rebecca is fitting in nicely. We all really enjoy her a lot. She’s super sweet and friendly and really catches on quickly. She can already find her way mostly around the ship and it’s only the second day. Yay! She came up while we were running Bingo and helped our 4 year olds with their cards. Bingo is always quite the challenge when half the room doesn’t know how to read large numbers like O75 or B15 on their cards.

Raid the Arcade was a hit as was fusion beads and funky frames. The kids love to do crafts maybe even more than video games, surprising but refreshing actually. :) By the time we had Ice Cream Frenzy on our schedule for this afternoon we only had about 9 kids left and by the time we made it out the door we were down to about 6. Prior to that we had about 13 little ones and about 11 big ones, a little crazy being all in the same room. Six is a much better number for a field trip to the Lido.

After dinner it was Spy Night. I only had 6 kids, three girls and three boys, show up so we paired them girls against boys for the hunt. They did a really great job and their manners are amazing. I’ve never had kids who were so rules conscious and making sure they were doing only what is right. If they keep it up I’ll love them immensely this week.

We once again had after hours baby-sitting, one of the girls from last night and a little girl from a different family. The girl who came last night and tonight (Erin) loves us so much we’ve already been told that most likely she’ll be there until midnight every night this cruise. Normally I might groan inwardly a bit about that but she is such a great kid (and the extra money never hurts either) that it won’t be a problem. A little less sleep for sure, but not in anyway stressful.

Today was our Captain’s birthday as well as a crew party celebrating our passing the USPH inspection last Skagway. The party was held on the mooring deck with a free bar, food and music. Julie, my supervisor, was so excited that it was on the mooring deck so that I could actually show up as the smoking situation would be better than when parties are in the crew mess where I choke due to my allergy. I decided that I would actually show up, really only because it was the Captain’s birthday and because my friend Crystal was going to be singing. I don’t really enjoy standing all herded together with drunk people en masse, never have been anything but a party pooper in that sense, but I went. Unfortunately (fortunately?) the smoking situation was still bad enough that I put in about a 10-15 minute appearance and had to leave before Crystal started her set because the smoke was causing me to have breathing problems. I didn’t want to have a full blown anaphylactic reaction so I left before it got that bad so I missed hearing her sing. I was really sad about that, but other than that I didn’t really miss out on anything I wanted to be at.

Instead I watched a couple of episodes of TV on DVD that the crew has been passing around. It’s so great to have whole seasons of shows on DVD’s these days as I never get to actually watch normal television when it’s actually airing. Then I went to bed to get ready for Juneau day. Unfortunately it’s going to rain AGAIN tomorrow in Juneau for about the 6th straight week. It may have been even longer than six weeks? The last time it was sunny was way back at the beginning of my contract when I got really sick and slept through Juneau instead of getting off the ship. I am really wanting to see sun soon here because I want to do excursions again. It has been steady rain for weeks so that I don’t have the desire to do any. I hope to be able to before summer ends. It seems strange that I only have 6 cruises left.

Friday July 20th: Tracy Arm scenic cruising and Juneau, AK

This morning we were doing activities in the kids room and the captain came on the speaker and announces that due to fog and rain in Tracy Arm (mixed with icebergs in the water) that we would not be actually cruising through there today. Normally we can steer safely through the icebergs, but with fog to hinder navigation the captain decided to be safe rather than sorry. We certainly appreciated that! He is such a great captain.

We will arrive in Juneau at 12 PM instead of 2:30 PM so hopefully we’ll get off the ship sooner and be able to have a bit more time for shopping at Fred Meyer. Normally I have to really rush and only have about an hour, but today we should have about 2.5 hours. I’m going with Rebecca because she wasn’t told anything about theme wear and needs to find some costume items and Fred Meyer has absolutely everything. I also need more Bonine motion sickness medication as I’m now out of it and definitely need to have it. Because of Bonine and the wrist bands I’ve now gone 9 weeks without incident beyond my very first sea day. Yay!

We had to wait an hour for a bus, that was sad and a waste of our precious time, but unless you hit it just right you have to wait. With it raining quite steady here I didn’t want to walk over to the other bus stop and Rebecca wanted the express and not the long bus. Express bus gets to the valley in about 15 minutes and the other in 45. The only advantage of the regular bus would have been getting on sooner and being out of the rain but she didn’t want to ride the bus for 45 minutes. Thankfully both cost only $1.50 each way so we waited. She found basically everything she wanted except a pirate sash and I found all of the stuff that I wanted, so it was a good trip.

We had to ride the long bus back and we were riding sideways and both Rebecca and I felt very motion sick after the ride. I came back to my room and ate some ginger snaps (another must that I discovered as they have real ginger and are very snappy - Nabisco brand) and took a half Bonine tablet and then laid down until it was time to get up for work.

Brave the Night theme night went well, even though I only had 3 kids tonight. Crazy! They are all older kids though, so I wanted to keep them with me instead of going into the kids room where they had 11 or so little ones doing camp night.

We had after hours again tonight, not a shocker at this point, with the same two girls as last night and also the second girl’s brother who is 10 from my room. We also found out that tomorrow we’ll have to stay on the ship for in port activities ALL DAY until 5 PM. Because it’s Country Carnival night I’ll have to be back on the ship by 6:30 at the latest so I’ll get a whopping’ 1.5 hours off the ship. Oh well, rain is predicted for all day tomorrow. This is great napping and tv watching weather and not much else. I really want to be able to do another excursion soon and it’s just not working out at all. Ok done whining.

Saturday July 21st: Skagway, AK

I slept in this morning until 10:30 AM because I won’t be getting off the ship as I have to help with in port activities. We have two girls on board - the two in after hours baby-sitting each night - that have been on 4 cruises and know that Holland America offers baby-sitting while in port. Bummer. We do not receive compensation for this at all and it is our time off so we do not relish this task at all. Thankfully I did not have to do the morning shift, I’m going to work at 11 AM. The only upside is that it is once again raining in Skagway, only not foggy today like last week, so there isn’t anything I want to do in this port anyway. Skagway is my port to go hiking. Everything costs a lot here due to its remoteness so I tend to hike and then get back on the ship after making phone calls, but because of the rain I don’t desire to do either as I’d just be getting wet.

The girls watched 2 movies in a row and then we played a game briefly and then went downstairs to get some lunch. Some of the other families were very upset with us that we wouldn’t take their children off their hands as well because they were bored and excursions had been canceled, but IPA is something that needs to be signed up for ahead of time. So we simply told all of them that we were doing private baby-sitting for that family and weren’t actually “open”. It was the truth, but we just called it something other than in port activities because we try our best to NOT advertise it so they won’t leave their kids in the next port. I know we’re terrible but it is the only real time off we get. Otherwise we’ve been putting in 16-17 hour days and we don’t get paid any extra for the overtime.

The parents came back at 5 PM and then we went to dinner and had to get ready to work again by 7 PM to set up for Country Carnival. The night was a success and afterwards we again had after-hours baby-sitting with 4 kids tonight. Each night we’ve simply popped in a movie for them and they seem to enjoy it enough to keep coming back the next night for late night baby-sitting.

I was supposed to be leading the Sunday night fellowship meeting and singing a duet this week, but we already found out that we have after hours tomorrow for sure so that’ll have to wait I guess.

Sunday July 22nd: Glacier Bay National Park

The sun is shining and it is warm outside in the sun today!! Yay!!!!!!!!!! I haven’t seen the sun since the first sea day and then it was partly sunny, that was three days ago. Today though is gorgeous and I’m so glad. I actually had some guests say they didn’t care if every single port rained they came on this cruise just to see Glacier Bay - so for their sakes I was thrilled we had such gorgeous weather.

The kids this week are being so excellent. They are having fun with our activities and they have great manners. I LOVE them and want to keep them!!! We had 3 guest speakers in the park and for the park ranger talk it was so beautiful outside we actually relocated outdoors on the tennis court. The other reason though that we went outdoors is because the kids room is only 17.5 C, which is roughly 58 F? Something like that. It’s COLD in there. I guess the temperature sensor in the room is reading at 25 C which is plenty warm and so the air kept trying to cool off the room. Hopefully it’ll get fixed soon because we wear lots of layers and wrap up in wool blankets and still freeze. I knew that it was really cold because the second I walk in the room the tip of my nose starts to freeze. Yikes. That’s not healthy for little kids at all. The good thing is that the Chief Electrician’s daughter is four and in our care this week and so he saw first hand what was going on and resolved then and there to champion our cause and get it fixed.

On ships it definitely pays to know the right people. Don will fix our AC problem, Megan’s friend the Chief Officer Tom got our shower fixed instantly (it had been broken for 4 weeks when I came on board and for the first 2 that I was there until she came), our friend Linda the Lido Restaurant Manager ordered all the arts and crafts supplies the former manager wouldn’t, etc. I believe it’s important to treat everyone with kindness, not just to get favors but because it’s the right thing to do towards others, so I’ve noticed that most people on the ship tend to respond positively towards me in return. Amazing how that works out! :)

Movie night was fun, the kids watched “Cars” and the tweens watched “Open Season”. I hadn’t seen that film yet so it was even enjoyable for myself. The kids that came were cute. We had 4 stay again for after hours, so I didn’t go to the fellowship meeting - which I’d thankfully already warned the others that I probably wouldn’t be so they wouldn’t be shocked that the speaker wasn’t there and could plan accordingly.

Monday July 23rd: Ketchikan, AK

Today it is not just raining, it is pouring. I slept until 9 AM, and then had the responsibility of going upstairs to put out the sports equipment but because of the rain I didn’t. I don’t have an umbrella out there and I refused to get soaked even if it was my responsibility so I just opened up the Playstation room and then had Brendan the internet manager look at my internet problem. We figured out that Google Mail needed to get reset in the internet portion of the mail program, it wasn’t something on my computer causing the problem, so I can now send AND receive mail again, YAY!! So, if you send me mail I will try really hard to get back to you. My hours this summer have been slightly crazy, but I’m going to try. Just so you all know, I do think about you even if you don’t hear from me.

Tonight I had only 3 kids show up for the scavenger hunt and they are fun kids. They decided to take on pirate persona from “Pirates of the Caribbean” even though the little kids were doing pirate night and not them. They were super funny and extremely well behaved. Have I mentioned that I want to KEEP all of them??!

We had after hours baby-sitting again tonight - what a shocker I know. :)

Tuesday July 24th: Final Sea Day

There was definite motion in the ocean today. I took half a Bonine pill and I’m so glad that I did or else I would have “tossed my cookies”. I forgot to wear my wristbands and so I felt nauseous. I thankfully had the other half of the pill in my pocket and so I ended up taking it about 2 hours after the first half and then by lunch the seas were calm again.

The cooking class was fun. We had about 6 kids there of different ages. Chef Valentine was gone now, we have a new guy who isn’t as good. I’m hoping that he’s just shy and will warm up to the kids, it was fine overall just not as good as when Valentine was there. He was REALLY good with the kids. We’ll see how it goes in the future. Teresa the party planner helps and I help and we get the kids all motivated so it’s still a fun class.

The last sea day afternoon is really easy. We color a farewell banner, write letters to the captain, watch cartoons and then after 1 hour it’s time to close and get ready for Build a Bear. We had 2 girls build bears, I got to build one too and bring it “home” with me. So now my moose from last summer has a Club HAL cousin to hang with in Milwaukee.

Our final party was fun with all the kids and then we ended up with about 8 kids in after hours baby-sitting. It was crazy how that all worked out this week, but here’s the really crazy part: we earned $390.00 collectively between tips and baby-sitting fees this week, so each of us took home $130.00 Normally I don’t get into stuff like that in detail but I am so shocked I had to share. :) I will be able to buy a couple more internet cards with that money! Yay. It’s all working out in that department which is great.

Well, this cruise is over and it was super fun. Even though we had more kids than last week these two weeks were very relaxing and great. It may be my midsummer reprieve (like I got last summer when I spent a day in the infirmary because my roommate had Norwalk) in order to be able to handle the last five cruises of the summer, but hopefully it is simply 2 fun weeks in a row and 5 more fun ones ahead. We’ll see. In two weeks time I’ll be training in 1 to 2 new crew members and taking the lead in Club HAL as the senior staffer. Maybe by that time Rebecca will want to step up, but I think most likely it’ll either be me alone or we’ll split the tasks evenly. She’s very competent and catches on quickly, so I trust that she’ll do great once we all leave at the end of August and she’s doing it by herself until she goes home in November.

Hope your week was sun powered as well as Son powered. My batteries need recharging, but I see on weather.com that it is supposed to be beautiful in Vancouver tomorrow.
I will write again soon!

Luv,
T

Cruise 8 of 14: July 11 - 18

2007-07-20T15:13:00.000-06:00

Wednesday July 11th: Vancouver, B.C.

Today was gorgeous, hot and sunny in Vancouver. I had to work at 1:30 pm today so I got off the ship for a while in the a.m. and wandered around near the terminal a bit. Thankfully everything in Vancouver that I NEED to get to is within a 10 minute walking radius and everything that I WANT to get to is within about a 45 minute walking radius. So that makes it very easy to get off for a quick jaunt to the store or whatever.

I so needed to get off the ship after this past cruise. I needed some time to unwind in the sun and unwind mentally and emotionally. It was great to just leisurely stroll around. The temp was about 80 F too, compared to our average range between 46 - 65 F that we’ve been experiencing in AK. I snapped some pics with my big camera that you can view in my linked album for week 8.
On the gangway I am ashamed to admit that we didn’t promote Club HAL to anyone who didn’t eagerly come to our table. This week there is a projection of 88 kids on board and after last cruise we are literally wiped out. I am so tired I can hardly think straight and so we are hoping that by only encouraging those that really seem to want to be there that we’ll have a nicer group of kids show up.

Boat drill was great. I had two families with infants that weren’t wearing a mandatory lifeboat wristband. Normally I wind up with grumpy parents that think the bands are silly when their infant “won’t be leaving their sight”, but I try to remind them that in the event of an actual emergency anything could happen and we’d want to know where their child belongs. Well, anyway, this week both families were very understanding and extremely good natured about it which means this week is already off to a good start! :)

Our parents meeting at 5 pm yielded all of 4 kids and they were all 8-12 years old. The kids all seemed really cool, so we’ll see what happens tonight at our Welcome Aboard party.

The party was a blast. Our Crow’s Nest singer, Crystal, has been coming up on the first night to play games with the kids (she’s a really big kid inside despite her years and I think has even more fun than they do!) and she really livens up the party. We played Domino Races, Musical Chairs, Four Corners, In the River/On the Bank, Find Monty, and Mummy Wrap. She was so competitive it was hilarious. The kids loved her so much, we are so happy that she loves coming up to play with us too because the first night Liz is registering everyone in the reception area so I was usually left in the room by myself to play with the kids. It’s great having such a fun energetic person to play off of with the kids. Crazy enough though we only had about 9 kids total! This may be a sign of good things to come for this week. It was all girls too, which was great and they were all really quiet and well behaved. “WOW!,” (To quote my favorite kids book “Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse”) “That’s all I could say, WOW”.

Thursday July 12th: First Sea Day

The sea today is super calm, eerily so, and the temps are still super warm and the sun is shining brilliantly. I hope that it stays this nice all week because it’s been pretty rainy lately overall. We only had about 6 girls this morning and it was nice and quiet. We had our Del Sol coloring contest and awarded the prizes instantly. The older girl winner received a really cool frisbee that changes from a clear plastic light orange to a deep shade of red. Pretty cool! The younger girl won a cloth beach bag that changes from all khaki with black outlines of cartoony scenes from Alaska to be all colored in. We never knew what color everything turned before, because it’s either really cloudy the day we do the contest or because we couldn’t go outside to test them out, but today with so few kids we opened the emergency door and HAD to make an emergency trip outside (every few minutes or so) to test out the Del Sol rings and prizes. Too fun. :)

I’ve been napping a lot lately and can’t seem to ever catch up on sleep. I sure hope that this passes. I napped after lunch today for 30 minutes and again after dinner for an hour and 30 minutes and still felt tired for the photo scavenger hunt (2 girls showed up for it and I sent them out together to find stuff). I went right to bed after late night baby-sitting was over. One of our moms went to the Crow’s Nest tonight so she left her girl there and we watched a movie.

Friday July 13th: Tracy Arm/Juneau, AK

Tracy Arm was quite lovely and partly sunny. The clouds rolled in though as we neared Juneau and I wouldn’t have even bothered to get off the ship if I didn’t need to go to Fred Meyer to get some things. It was raining pretty good. I took the bus to the Nugget Mall and then walked to Fred Meyer and by the time I reached the store I was soaked and sloshing in my shoes. It was a warm rain though (probably in the upper 60’s) so I really didn’t mind. I knew I’d dry eventually. :)

I needed to find a way to store my summer photos, the reason for the trip to the store, and went there with the intention of picking up a flash drive to transfer photos in 4 GB chunks to burn to DVD’s from my roommates computer. A 2 GB flash drive cost $79.99 and that was pretty pricey for my budget and it was rather discouraging as I have about 20 GB of photos on the hard drive. Between the transferring and 4 GB max DVD’s I would have been going at it for a really LONG time trying to get everything backed up. Thankfully I found a better solution. There was a portable palm sized hard drive that is MAC/PC compatible that was only $99.00 for 80 GB. For $20 more I get 76 more GB of storage space. I am terrible, horrible, insanely awful at math but even I could figure out that the $99.00 was a much better value for something that I had to have (hard drive completely full, no more space period). My mom would be proud at my solving this story problem! :)

I took the bus back to the ship and the whole time completely panicking. I forgot until I was ON the bus that I didn’t have Juneau off completely, only until 6 p.m. because I had switched IPM to Megan for the afternoon. Normally my bus doesn’t get back until about 5 to 10 minutes after 6 p.m. but I simply prayed that the Lord would help me get back to the ship on time so that I wouldn’t get in trouble. “Strangely” enough there was zero traffic in intersections that normally take a good 10 minutes to make a left turn into, not many transfers or stops requested and even the drive was amazed at the fact that we arrived at the dock by 5 minutes to 6 p.m.!! I thanked God the whole way running up the gangway and I clocked in with a minute or so to spare. Whew! Funny thing is when I got back to my room Megan came in right behind me and let me know that she’d taken my IPM on for the entire day that day so I panicked for nothing, but God worked it out anyway so that I didn’t have to worry. It’s true when the Bible says “don’t worry” but I too often forget that He has everything under control. :)

Tonight we had 3 kids in Club Hal. We combined Camp night and Brave the Night into one theme and the kids had fun. It was so laid back that we didn’t really even do that much and all three were my tweens, so the games didn’t go completely over their heads like usual on combined night. They LOVED mystery food as well, as messy and gross! I love it too. He-he. It is so nice to have nice kids that are fun and want to be there and are not out of control. Love it!

Our teen staff member didn’t show up for work tonight. He was out “socializing” at the Viking (a crew hangout in Juneau) until after he was supposed to back on the ship at work and then realized (thankfully) that he was in no condition to be working with children and so didn’t come upstairs until he was a little more in control. We, Liz and I, were furious with him as we are always at work an hour or so before we open and he is always late and now didn’t even show up at all. Well, he will be dealt with and will end up with extra IPM for sure (they can’t fire him because he was out with the rest of the supervisory positions from the Entertainment Dept. and they were “socializing” just as much and should have also been on the ship.).

Saturday June 14th: Skagway, AK

I didn’t have to get up this morning until 9 a.m. to get dressed for raft drill. When it was time to haul my body out of bed I was curious as to the weather conditions and such for the day so I turned on the trusty TV channel that has a 24 hour camera off the Bridge in the front of the ship and couldn’t see anything but dark stormy looking skies. Yuck. The temp is in the mid 60’s and it is RAINING. If this part of AK could thunderstorm I believe that today it would have because it was so dark and gloomy. When we went to raft drill I was shocked at how foggy it was. Skagway has such high winds I never thought it would be that eerie. With the fog socked in like it was super calm and we could only see a few feet off the stern of the ship, couldn’t see up into the mountains and across the water as it was mostly foggy as well. I took a few photos of this to show you why I couldn’t take out the big camera today to do more. It was a very low contrast, hard for the camera to focus, wet kind of day. I also didn’t get photos in Juneau because of the rain and not wanting my $1,000 equipment getting ruined. Yikes. Raft drill was quite entertaining and then I got off the ship. I decided that no matter what the weather I was going to go and get some exercise and buy an Odwalla B Berrier juice drink. They are delicious and full of antioxidants and they are at my favorite cute little train depot natural foods store at the end of town. I then began walking laps around the town by going all the way up the 16 blocks one way and back down another street. I need more exercise cuz none of my pants are fitting well at the moment. Oh dear!

I decided that today would be a great day to phone as many people as possible, because it is Saturday so I can reach most people and also because of the eery lack of wind. I reached everybody I had hoped to and chatted for a good while with each of them. After last week and an incident that we had happen this morning with a family I needed to talk to friends. It really lifted my mood in a great way, I believe that one family actually prayed for me after the call because I instantly starting feeling better and better for the rest of the day. It’s so nice to have like minded friends that will pray for me and care about me like that.

I got back on the ship with enough time to grab some snack food and rush up to Country Carnival to get set up for tonight’s festivities. We had a good number of kids there, considering how few are actually registered this week. We started with a horse race and then we moved on to face painting. Even my boys that were “too cool for school” caved and had me paint their arms. I painted balloons on one girl’s cheek that turned out super cute. They were all quite pleased and then excited to move on to playing the games. We played the carnival style games for about 20 minutes and then stretched out the prize redemption portion for another 10 minutes until the kids got picked up. At the beginning of the night, right at eight o'clock, a family signed her kids in for after hours baby-sitting. That’s fine with us because it means extra cash, but these kids decided they didn’t want to be in baby-sitting (they were 7, 11, and 12) so they tried to do everything they could to be “bad enough” to get sent home. It was annoying but actually quite comical. I could tell straight off that they weren’t actually bad kids because even in the midst of “acting up” I told one of the boys to put on his shoes cuz the odor was knocking me out and he immediately went and put them on without argument. Another time they threatened to leave the room but when I glared and said they had to stay in the room they walked away from the door and pouted. Any bad kids would have actually acted quite differently and run in three different directions at the same time to make me crazy. So, to repay them for annoying me for 2 full hours nonstop I gave mom and dad a FULL report on the nights activities and accompanying behavior and did they ever get in trouble. I received a full apology and the parents told the boys that their Club Hal days were over. No PS2 video games, nothing. Well, they did deserve to be corrected but hopefully they won’t be totally grounded because they weren’t mean and nasty, just overly annoying and slightly rude. The 7 year old was an angel though and I impressed that highly on the mom. He did everything he was asked and had a fun time with me. Yay. Well, the little ones usually do always like me and the big ones like me if they give me a chance.

Sunday July 15th: Glacier Bay Day

Well, unlike yesterday’s weather today in Glacier Bay I can once again report gorgeous sunny skies and warm weather. It is the perfect day in the Bay and I’m so glad that these guests can see AK at its best. :)

Our guest speakers in Club Hal were very good today, well prepared and carefully guarding their mouths after last week’s fiasco, and only about 4 kids participated in the talks and sing along. Oh well, the four that were there were sweet.

We had movie night tonight with only 2 kids that were super fun to have around. They laid in the paint bucket wrapped like burritos in wool deck blankets (because the kids room is only about 55 degrees) watching the movie while I sat wrapped in a deck blanket across the room trying to stay awake and stay warm. All in all, couldn’t have asked for a better night!

After we finished, and didn’t have baby-sitting, I grabbed my stuff for the fellowship meeting and headed upstairs. I walked a few laps on deck 3 because it was so warm and then went upstairs to the meeting. It was very nice to spend time with friends in Christ and relax and be my true self for a couple of hours. We sang some great worship songs and met some friends of Norm and Moira (even though they are no longer on the ship) and then after it ended I stayed for about 30 more minutes for a jam session with the guitarists. I love to sing, so very much, so I was racking my brain for the best songs that I loved and one of the guitarists (I think his name is Natal - from Indonesia) and I harmonized for a while. Because of this I have now been instructed to prepare to be the special music for next week (granting that I don’t have baby-sitting - which I won’t know until 10 p.m. Sunday evening for sure) and also that I will be giving the message. So, if you read this before next Sunday please say a prayer that I will not have baby-sitting and that I will speak words that my friends may be blessed by hearing. For God is truly the one I seek to glorify and not myself, so may they be His words for my friends and not my own. I enjoyed the singing and now I have to find all the words to the song that we are going to sing. :) That’s my homework for the week!

Monday July 16th: Ketchikan, AK

It is raining really steadily here today and is dark and gloomy like Skagway. I feel REALLY bad for the passengers as I have the opportunity to simply say, this week is rainy so I’ll wait until next week to ...” but they only have this one chance and every port this week has been really rainy. They have been such good sports about it though. I really haven’t heard complaining. This goes to show you how good a cruise this is this week.

I got off the ship to go to Wal-mart. The perfect rainy day location to hang out in as I needed a few items there. I decided to be brave and walk back to the ship as well. Just like in Juneau it was fairly warm today, despite the rain, so I didn’t worry about getting soaked. I have to shower anyway before working tonight so it doesn’t matter if I look terrible by the time I reach the ship. :) It was a really nice walk overall and the exercise again is only GOOD for me right!

Tonight’s theme for the kids was pirate night. We had exactly one kid show up, Breanna our really funny girl, so we had one to two ratio of kids to counselors. She really wanted to stay and didn’t care what we did while she was there, so we dragged her out on a pirate treasure hunt (meant for 3-7’s and she’s much older) decked out in pirate face paint and such and she was such a good sport about it :) I love Breanna.

Tuesday July 17th: Final Sea Day

Today was warm and gorgeously sunny again. How strange that all of our ports have been so icky but our sea days have been wonderful. It was so warm out today that we actually played a game on the sports court where you have to lay super still and the first person to move is out, you try to get everyone out by the way, and the last person out gets to be the next judge of movements. We laid there without moving for a good 30 minutes in the sun enjoying the warmth. That was the best game ever and the kids themselves requested it.. I know some really mischieveous adult created the game, but kids love it and today I LOVED it as well :)

The afternoon was very quick, we closed at 3 p.m. for the kids and I took the 2 tweens to the PS2 room and then down to eat ice cream. Torture. The evening pillow/pj party was fun. We had about 10 kids max and they were so fun. I was really sad when the evening ended because this has been the most relaxing fun week this summer. The kids were so easy to please and had such low expectations of how to be entertained. They simply loved being there to hang out with us and didn’t care one bit what exactly we were going to do. Loved every minute of it. I’m feeling so refreshed and upbeat at the end of this cruise compared to how badly I felt at the beginning. Yay!!

I hope that your week was as joyous and relaxing as mine was. Please write me really soon friends :)

Luv ya,
Trisha
ps. I’m having internet problems. I’m not getting all of my messages in my Mail program and have to stay on the internet to read everything on the very slow server so I apologize that I haven’t replied to several of you that emailed me after last week’s plea for friendly mail. I WANT to get back to all of you, but without my Mail program working I’m using up the expensive internet cards every 3 days or less. Yikes.

pps. I typed this update at 1 a.m. so if my sentences don’t make sense at times please email me to correct it because it all sounds right in my head, but my head and hands don’t always match up :)

Cruise 7 of 14: July 4 - 11

2007-07-13T01:08:00.000-06:00

Update 7/14/07: I purchased an 80 gig portable HD yesterday at Fred Meyer for $20 more than buying a 4 gig flash drive. So I will now be able to transfer off the photos and add more to my hard drive as I take them. Yay! This week has been terrible for weather. If the rainforest we are in could thunderstorm it would be doing that. So, today is a perfect day for working on photos from weeks past :) Have a great day.

Important note 7/13/07: I don't have any pics this week yet because my hard drive is completely full and I don't have a DVD burner to take photos off. I brought CD's to burn but am discovering that I've been so gung ho on photo taking that each day has between 250mb to 2.1gig of content and I've got 7 weeks worth on this computer so far and a whole week still sitting on the camera. I've got to figure out how to get them safely off my computer and to secure storage so that I can continue to take pics in these upcoming weeks. Yikes! No worries though, Juneau is supposed to rain again this week as is Skagway so I'm not too worried about getting out with the camera anyway unless I do an excursion. We'll see. I need to find a portable hard drive or something so that I can burn these folders to DVD or something, I don't know. It's so tricky in AK when I can't just run to Circuit City to pick up what I need and ordering takes so long to actually get the item at some port in the future. Yikes.

Wednesday July 4th: Vancouver, B.C.

Happy Independence Day! We are in Canada today, but thankfully the ship is still decorated really nicely for the 4th!! I have 55 tweens this week on board, so it’ll be interesting to see how many of them come to programming.

Well, I didn’t have to wait long to see that I did too good of a job promoting myself on the gangway to the kids. By quarter to eight this evening I had 22 kids waiting to break down the doors and pile in. That hopefully isn’t a sign of things to come.

Our new staff member is having a hard time adjusting to ship life so we’ll have to see how long he lasts. We did have a couple of entertainment staff crew come up to play with us tonight and I’m SO GLAD they were there. With the combo of my kids and the little kids we had over 30 in the tween room for the welcome aboard party. Yikes! That’s all I can say is YIKES!

Thursday July 5th: First Sea Day

The seas were quite calm today so I felt fine this morning for activities. It was good not worrying about feeling ill while having so many to program for. A bunch of them slept in, but I still had at least 12 off and on, maybe more, I forget. The new guy had a safety meeting and some other meetings that he was supposed to be at today, but he missed them and it’s looking like he may actually be disembarking tomorrow. We thought we were desperate for staff, but maybe not so desperate after all.

These kids this week are very loud and very hyper. I am trying to get their attention for games and such and they simply sit there and talk to each other with their backs turned and ignore me. I’m really glad that they all made friends, but I’d appreciate a little respect as well. We’ll see how the week pans out.

Tonight’s theme: Top Secret Assignment was a disaster. The photo scavenger hunt had so many kids participating that I broke them up into 4 teams in the fairest way I knew how, but because they didn’t pick their own teams they were miserable and taking it out on each other. They screamed while out and about the ship, went running through the library multiple times, etc. The Chief Security Officer and my roommate had to talk to them multiple times. Because of their bad behavior I’m going to have to cancel all of the rest of the fun scavenger hunts for the rest of the week because they can’t seem to handle themselves unsupervised. Oh and I almost forgot, to make the night even better -- about 4 of my boys tonight on two different teams got beat up by two teenagers while on the scavenger hunt. Of course that went over well with all of us and especially the parents of the boys. I felt terrible that that would happen while they were signed into my care, but unfortunately there wasn’t anything that I could have done to prevent that. The parents are mad at the boys and disappointed with me. I did tell them to contact security and file a report, because they will be better equipped to bring the culprits to justice if we can track down who they are. I didn’t see them, so hopefully the boys themselves will point them out to an adult as they see them around the ship.

Friday July 6th: Tracy Arm, Juneau, AK

At the end of our morning programming Liz and I went to hang with Steve in the Loft for a moment as he was finishing up a movie with the teens. As I was sitting there a boy with longish hair came in with a plate of fries and another boy came in a moment later and stood next to the post I was sitting against. All of a sudden one of the moms of my tweens that got beat up last night runs in and points out these two boys as the ones that did the beating. We now have our culprits and they will be dealt with accordingly.

Our staff member left today without so much as a goodbye. We are not too sad to see him go to be quite frank. I hated that it didn’t work out, I want everyone to have a chance to prove themselves, but in this case it is for the best that he left sooner than later. Now we can calm down and get back to work.

The weather was rainy again, so I didn’t get off the ship. I wanted to go up Mt. Roberts tramway or go to Mendenhall Glacier but with the bad weather I’ll save my money for a sunny (or at least not rainy) week. It was pretty foggy this week too so I wouldn’t have been able to see much. I am still exhausted this week and am napping every second that I can. I think all the drama that has happened since last Ketchikan (that I’m purposely not being too detailed about) has simply worn me out. Not to mention the really atrocious kids we have this week. I thought a few weeks back the kids were misbehaved and rude, this week tops that and then some.

Brave the Night theme night was a royal disaster. Out of 10 games we did 3 plus snack. I spent the entire night trying to get the kids attention. I simply should have given up and told them to go home for all the good my efforts were doing.

Saturday July 7th: Skagway, AK (today is 07/07/07)

Skagway was a bit overcast this morning. I got off around 10 or so and wandered around. I didn’t really have any ambitious plans today because I’m so tired and feeling burned out. I DID walk on my favorite trail and saw baby eaglets that were flying around above my head. I tried to get high enough up the hillside to see where their nest was exactly (I had a general location) but couldn’t so in the end I came back down and enjoyed watching them circle around.

By one o'clock it was blue skies and sun with high 70’s for the temp. It was a beautiful day, but windy as usual. I always have to “hang on to my hat” and also my lens caps! so that they don’t blow away in Skagway.

I tried to contact my friend Kristin today but her cellphone was now disconnected from the Davenport, IA number and I didn’t have the updated info. Thankfully her parents haven’t moved since I’ve known her so I called them to get the updated info and chatted with her dad for a bit. That was nice and then I called Kristin’s house and talked with her for a bit as well. It’s so weird that she’s back in MN close to Amee, but great too!

After calling people on the phone I went to the Kone Kompany and had a dish of real lemon sorbet that was like tart frozen lemonade in a cup. It was SO DELICIOUS! I also took a few pictures of the town as Mom and Dad have requested more building shots. I personally find building shots a little boring and touristy snapshottish, but if there is a demand I’ll try and meet it. Hopefully I’ve captured a few interesting angles to please the parentals as well as my own artistic sense :)

For the Country Carnival tonight we had over 30 kids attend the first part, but then the behavior got out of hand and so we had to ask a couple of them to leave. We had an actual playground type fist fight tonight (the kind where the kids all circle and cheer on the bully) between two brothers while Liz and I were dishing out snack around the corner. One small boy comes running over and says that so and so is crying because such and such happened. Oh dear. So the bully was kicked out of Club HAL and I’m not sorry. As soon as he left all of the older kids left as well and so by the time we actually played the carnival games there were only about 12 kids left and they had a fun time.

We found out tonight that the boys who caused all the trouble beating up my tweens have indeed been brought to justice. I don’t know all the details, but suffice it to say they had to make formal apologies to crew and kids and further actions were taken by the crew and parents. I’m glad that’s over finally.

Sunday July 8th: Glacier Bay National Park

We had a slow morning with only about 4 kids between 3-12. I’m so angry over all the bad behavior I’ve seen this week that I purposely held all of my programming in the little paint bucket room because this week’s tweens are “way too mature for that room”. Well good, then they won’t come and cause problems today on the longest sea day of our itinerary. :) I figure two can play their game. They want to disrespect me and waste my time I can play with 3 year olds and not say a word about moving back to the “big kids room”. When they act their ages we can resume programming for them and otherwise they can join the little bitties.

This afternoon was another disaster - this time due to crew mishap. We have guest entertainment and education all afternoon and one of these parties messed up their bit and actually used the F word and J#$% Ch#$% quite loudly and well pronounced right in front of the children. It was awful! When children get mad at the person and say “you shouldn’t use bad words” you know it’s bad. What else can happen this week.

Let me tell you! Three of our 4 hammocks in the teen hangout outside, the Oasis, have been ripped so that the centers have big holes in them. This causes the teens to fall out, very hard, when they swing the hammocks in full 360’s. Yep, you heard correctly, they are trying to flip each other around in full circles. Well, obviously not everyone has this much talent and so when they fall they have gotten quite seriously maimed. One girl’s eye is so bruised it has swollen almost shut and her face looks like someone beat her up. One boys arm is swollen by the elbow to midway up his arm in both directions. Where was the supervision you might wonder? Well, the geniuses that designed the Oasis didn’t provide any sort of permanent doors to this area of the ship. So, every time we kick the teens out for misbehaving (we can hear them in the paint bucket room as it’s so loud we think the ceiling will surely fall in this time) they immediately sneak back up about 10 minutes later. We have no way of blocking off the area to prevent this and spend all day chasing them away. They of course have now latched on to this fun game and laugh at us for not having control - they have taken control. It is clearly the most fun thing they can possibly think of on this glorious cruise to Alaska.

The damage to Club HAL in general is so bad (did I mention that the fire alarm got busted off the wall in the Playstation Room as well as cabinet door locks being broken clean off in the teen room?) that we are now on complete lock down and security as doing extra rounds as often as they can to try and help us out. Things are being broken, stolen, etc. at such an alarming rate I am ready to throw them off the ship tomorrow in Ketchikan. In all of my 20 cruises now to AK these are by far the worst group I’ve ever encountered. Can it get any worse?

Monday July 9th: Ketchikan, AK

Today I treated myself to a haircut in the spa. My layers were getting too long to have any lift in this temperate rain forest climate so it was time to get it chopped. I took off a good 3 inches from each layer and now it’s cute and bouncy again. Yay! My hairdresser is from Melbourne, AU and was very good at her job. I’m quite pleased.

After the haircut I got off the ship with Moira (this is her last week on board I’m SO SAD that they are leaving!!) and we walked to McD’s for a McFlurry and then I bought my Nabisco brand ginger snaps with real ginger and real molasses. I’ve tried a lot of brands this spring and believe me these are the BEST ever if you like a LOT of kick in your snaps. These things get me through the rough sea days when I normally don’t eat anything. I will have a handful of these babies and my half Bonine tablet and I’m good to go. :)

Afterwards we walked back to town in the rain, it was quite steady rain at this point, and went to a wonderful store called Ketchikandies. They have the best homemade candies and chocolate covered oreos there. So good! I bought a box of them for Liz for all the extra hard work she does for Club HAL without any remuneration of any kind. I really appreciate her so much. After buying the candy I went back to the ship. With the rain and cold it was so dark and yucky I was really tired. I went back to my cabin and ... napped of course. As if you thought I’d have done anything else. Why am I so tired? The staff member tired me out, the kids tire me out and something I haven’t mentioned until this point -- we’ve had late night baby sitting every night as well this week for a little “angel” and haven’t finished up until 12:30/1:00 am in the morning. So, I’m getting a maximum of about 6 hours of sleep at night, but usually more like 4-5 hours. That takes it’s toll when having to be so active during the day.

Tonight’s theme was supposed to be another scavenger hunt night, but the kids lost that privilege the first sea day. So, last night it was girlie movie night (to keep out all the misbehaved boys) and tonight is little kid movie night (to keep out all the older tweens in general). Again, two can play their game and I’m beating them at it without having to be mean or say a word. They have the choice to come to the “fun” activities I’m providing for them or not, and most are choosing to NOT. :) I’m SO BAD!

Tuesday July 10th: Last Sea Day

This morning we had hang time in the Loft for an hour and chilled out to some cartoons. Because the kids are now not in the habit of attending (after my antics with their schedule the past two days) we had 4 well behaved kids show up only. Awww. Then we went into the Playstation room and played for an hour (that room has been on permanent lock down since the fire alarm incident) and again not many checked in and so they missed it. Awww. I feel so bad for them :) Then they didn’t come to the cooking class they signed up for and we made such delicious snacks and got to eat them. It was a great day.

This afternoon I once again combined with Liz for activities and sure enough it kept out all the kids that definitely didn’t want to be there. Ohhhhh noooooo. For the final party we were combined in the tween room and a bunch of my kids showed up, but they didn’t get to do many games because they refused to listen. So, finally I asked a whole group of them to simply sign-out and go away because I was tired of their rudeness and it took me about 10 minutes to get them to vacate the area. They didn’t want to leave, they just preferred talking amongst themselves to listening to me. Finally they left and we finished out games, cleaned up and boogied out the door by 11:30. I plan to get to bed quickly now as I will have a little bit of time in Vancouver tomorrow to get off the ship in the AM before working gangway at 12:30 pm. The forecast for tomorrow is hot and sunny - YAY!!!! I NEED NEEED NEEEEEEEED to see some sunshine, I’m so deprived in AK overall. I am thankful that Skagway had some sun this week or I’d have gone crazy.

Well, I don’t have to deal with these kids any more. Tomorrow they’ll all be off the ship by 9:30 am and I can wash my hands of them and move on. Tomorrow will be better, it’s a new day and a new cruise with new kids. They certainly won’t be worse than this week so no worries.

I certainly hope your week was better than mine. I need to unwind and de-stress before tomorrow.

Blessings to you,
T
ps. I haven’t heard from anyone out there in a LONG time. If you’re reading this blog pleeeeeease email me. I need some fun emails to read in my “spare” time. :)
tlbuster75@gmail.com

Cruise 6 of 14: June 27 - July 4

2007-07-04T19:49:00.001-06:00

Make sure to check out the links section on the left and click on Week 6 Photos to see the complete online collection :)

Wednesday June 27th: Vancouver, B.C.

I mentioned the goings on of this day last blog, so I won’t rehash other than to say that this week we will be running all three ages with the three of us and LOTS of kids on board!

Thursday June 28th: First Sea Day

This morning the sea was very calm for a sea day. Several of our kids stayed in their rooms because they were not well, but overall everyone was feeling well and doing good. Last night we had a large number of registrations come in for the 3-7 year olds - so far my age group only has about 9 registered - but this MORNING, oh my goodness. We had 22 of the 27 kids on board in our little paint bucket room. It was very very busy in there. I stayed in the tween room with my few because they are older and more mature than the kids have typically been and so combining with the little kids would turn them away completely this week.

I’ve been napping a lot lately trying to get over this respiratory illness that I’ve contracted. I’m on the antibiotics and today I woke up with no sore throat and I actually did have a voice. After last night I was so sore I didn’t think I would actually have a voice this morning, but praise God I did. :)

These kids LOVE arts and crafts projects. That’s great for us because we have so many of them. We have a project called fusion beads on the schedule for an hour in the afternoon today and the project lasted 2.5 hours and they still wanted more but we had to take them down to eat ice cream. While we were trying to get out the door we had even MORE registrations in the age groups. Yikes. I think kids now has 25 of 27 registered. It’ll be a very busy day and week.

Top secret assignment night (spy night) with the little kids didn’t go over too well. There were way too many of them and they were acting totally crazy. My kids went out on their photo scavenger hunt and the girl’s team couldn’t get it together. They kept getting lost and frustrated. They found 3 of 12 items whereas the 2 boys teams found 7 or 8 of 12 items. One of the girls is extremely bossy and it’ll be interesting to see how the week goes with her there.

Friday June 29th: Tracy Arm and Juneau, AK

Today is a beautiful day in Tracy Arm. The sun is shining and the air is warm. I took my kids outside this morning for an hour to burn off some energy and I loved just being out there in the nice weather looking at the glaciers in Tracy Arm. After lunch I rested for a brief bit because my nasty cold is still keeping me pretty out of it. I have just the right amount of oomph to do my job and then I fizzle out between shifts. But, I only need what I need and I’m not asking for extra. I am content.

I was able to get off the ship in Juneau and I decided to go to the Nugget Mall in the Valley and then back to Fred Meiers. I love the convenience of the express bus in Juneau and the cost can’t be beat at $1.50 per trip. The mall was small, only about 10 stores or so, but they had 3 really nice clothing stores, a Payless Shoes, a Joann’s, and a GNC. Considering this is the only mall and it is the capital of Alaska on a landlocked peninsula it was slightly shocking, but oh well - it is Alaska after all.

I walked from the mall to Fred Meier’s and it took me about 15 minutes or so to get there. At the store I discovered that it is a full grocery store as well as a full department store. The store is literally larger than the mall and has way more stuff to offer. I picked up a few snacks and I also needed a new LCD screen protector for my pocket size camera (my previous piece of plastic was all scratched so it was hard to see if the pictures were in focus or not. They had everything that I needed and the prices were only about $.50 to a dollar higher than back home. I couldn’t take the express bus back to Juneau, so I had to sit for 45 minutes on the bus waiting for it to get to all the other stops along the way, but because I’ve now ridden it a couple times I looked like a pro pulling the cord to request a stop before the driver called out my location. Yay me!

Our theme night was slightly crazy. No one even really showed up until after 9 pm, so we only got to do about 3 games, one being my favorite called mystery food. My bossy girl has been very faithful in attending and she is grating on the other kids nerves, but I do have a couple of kids that are SUPER cool. They are 10 and 11.95 (the .95 is very important to him!) and are so so cool - Dylan and Tyler. They are so gentle and helpful towards the younger kids and nice cool fun guys with kids their own age (heartbreakers for some lucky girls in the future). I wish I could adopt them, but the parents are super cool too so I don’t think they’d let me. :)

Saturday June 30th: Skagway, AK

I have IPM this week in Skagway, but the weather isn’t that great overall so I’m not going to be missing too much. I managed to trade the morning hours to my roommate so that I got off the ship until 1:15pm, but instead of getting off the ship at 8 am I slept until 9 and got off by 9:20 am. I just don’t have my energy back yet to be up and moving rigorously on port days. Hopefully soon.

I took a few pictures in Skagway and then went to the waterfall and just hung out in the woods looking for interesting picture opportunities. It was very enjoyable and brief but it was cold and very windy (go figure that I’d encounter wind in Skagway!). On my way back to the ship I saw a car wash that you could only say you'd see in a SMALL town like Skagway in the summer. :)

At 2 pm I jumped back into my day uniform and headed upstairs to put out sports equipment and then came back to my room to work on pictures and typing out this blog for last week. I lost a whole week due to lack of energy and being so ill, so sorry for the delay. I didn’t finish typing before dinner though because I had to also do a 5 pm teen activity in the Loft that no one attended. I caught up on my teen gossip magazines and then went to dinner.

Tonight was Country Carnival and if you can believe it we got even more new kids tonight. We drop off and pick up guest in Skagway that are also doing a land portion to their vacation up in Denali and we lost 4 kids and gained about 12. Most of them were all in my tween group, so now we have a full group of tweens on board that WANT to come to Club HAL.

I had after hours baby-sitting tonight as well for 4 kids, so I made $20.00 that was nice - internet card here I come! - and the kids were fun. We played UNO and Sorry.

Sunday July 1st: Glacier Bay National Park and Canada Day (celebrated like our July 4)

Happy Canada Day! We saw the sun in Glacier Bay today for the first Sunday since I arrived on board. It was warm and beautiful and I managed to snap a couple of photos, but I didn’t have my big camera so I could only zoom so far. I was thrilled to take any photos at all in sunshine though!!

Our Huna Tlingit Cultural Interpreter this week was the supervisor, Bertha, and not the new trainee. I hope we didn’t totally petrify her last week, but thankfully we did have a knowledgeable person this week and the kids really got into asking questions and such.

The park ranger, my favorite gal Adrianna, came this afternoon and it was great that the majority of kids there were actually my tweens and they seemed really into her talk and asked some really great questions. That warmed my heart :) Afterwards we had our guest naturalist Chris come up to do a sing along with the kids and they also really enjoyed that. Yay, my tweens love Club HAL. It always makes me so excited when they are having such a great time.

For movie night we actually separated the kids and tweens tonight so that the tweens could watch a little bit older aged movie. We ended up watching Cats and Dogs (where the cats are trying to take over the world and the dogs are secret agents with really cool spy gear - cute flick that I recommend for the family) but our sound system is still just as bad as last summer so we could hardly hear it. I’m going to ask Steve if next week we can change rooms for those two hours so we can watch a movie in the Loft and actually hear what the dialogue is. Hopefully he’ll agree!

We didn’t have late night baby-sitting tonight. We had thought me might and then I wouldn’t have been able to go to the Fellowship meeting. It was very interesting tonight. Mixing different denominations is very different. The theology was a little mixed up, but the spirit and intention is genuine so we all have to learn to get along and be open to each other and not judging our differences. They are really trying hard to encourage me to lead a meeting in the future, they seem to have latched on to me very strongly and feel that I would do a great job, but I keep trying to explain to them that I don’t set my own schedule and that I don’t know until a few minutes before hand if I’ll be baby-sitting or finished cleaning or anything by 11 pm. I would hate for them to count on me and not be able to follow through. I did agree to sing a solo for the praise song “Draw me Close” because if I’m not there I’ll simply sing it during a week that I am there. I don’t feel so bad about that. It was really nice fellowshipping with the other believers and I’ve starting having conversations more often now in the Lido and when they come to clean our bathrooms in Club HAL etc. It’s nice.

Monday July 2nd: Ketchikan, AK

I am so tired today after staying out late last night and being on medication. I am starting to feel a little energy return though so that is good. We docked in Ketch at 10 am, but I didn’t get off the ship until around 12 pm. I still had a good 5 hours off the ship and I WALKED. The roads in Ketch are like San Francisco or Duluth, MN. If you can imagine what I’m talking about and then stack them 3 times higher. It’s like going up a steep staircase without the stairs to help you. I walked up a road such as this and then walked along the sidewalk on the top of this bypass road so that I could see the whole Ketch valley and it was really beautiful. The day was really cloudy and would occasionally spit rain at me, but I’ve learned to take photos regardless of the weather because in AK any day that isn’t actually raining is a good day. It’s also interesting to see the interesting clouds on overcast days - they hold their own splendor.

After walking high up on the bypass I came down slowly and stopped at McD’s for a PB cup McFlurry and then set out again for another hike. This time I walked to the opposite extreme of town and went on a road that lead me to a very funny house. In their front yard they had a donkey, a goat and a shetland pony. I had to take pictures because I couldn’t believe how close I was to these animals in town in a residential area. I called out to the goat and captured a funny expression as he turned his head around. Walking past that house I took a road that I didn’t realize would lead me ALL the way back UP the mountain to the height I was at earlier in the day only this time with no access to back down except the way I’d just come. At that point it was too late to make it back to the ship and I was nervous about not making it back in time. I certainly couldn’t have walked it, but thankfully I had my trusty cell and I have the cab companies on speed dial for several of the ports and put in a call to get picked up. The friendly driver came about 10 minutes later and within five minutes I was back at the dock to board the ship with 10 minutes to spare. Whew!!! Call that cutting it close! I wasn’t ready to be fired for missing the ship, I NEED this job.

We got another new staff member today. Kind of weird to get a staff person at the end of the cruise, but he flew in to Ketch today and got on board. We’ll see how he works out. Let’s just say he isn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree and literally gets lost trying to find his way out of a paper bag. Hopefully in a couple of days he’ll come around, but he has never been to college - lives with mommy and daddy - never had any responsibilities and so far only thinks of himself and no one or anything else. That doesn’t really work in this line of work so hopefully he’ll shape up.

Tuesday June 3rd: Last Sea Day

The seas were slightly large today, but nothing too horrible to handle. I’ve started taking my 1/2 Bonine Tablet the night before right before bed so that I am already medicated by morning when the seas could be swelled and rolling. That seems to be a good thing!

Cooking class went well, we had 5 kids sign up and we made delicious cheesy pretzels (soft pretzels that have the consistency of homemade biscuits), blueberry granola (great over ice cream - hot and gooey), and ice cream sandwich cookies. Yummy. :)

We had some drama in Club Hal between some staff today and everything hit the fan to the point where one person seriously threatened to get off the ship when we dock in Vancouver tomorrow. I seriously hope that doesn’t happen because I can’t run Club HAL by myself with the people we would have left. Please pray for our staff, we need some resolution of some issues. I appreciate it.

The pajama party and after hours baby-sitting were fun. We then had some crew bonding time afterwards with a few of us and we ended up staying up until 4 am. Not the best thing to do when you don’t get days off, but we needed to spend some time together. Thankfully I don’t do that every night!

Tomorrow is embark day, so I need to go to bed and get ready for the new children. :)

Hope your week was blessed and please don’t hesitate to write when you get a chance: tlbuster75@gmail.com

Luv you all,
Trish

Cruise 5 of 14: June 20 - 27th

2007-06-29T01:31:00.000-06:00

Cruise 5 of 14: June 20 - 27th

Wednesday June 20th: Vancouver, B.C.

This morning I handled debarkation on the gangway starting at 7:30am. I didn’t mind as I am then able to get off the ship until my shift at 2:00pm. After saying goodbye to the passengers I changed clothes and went out into bustling Vancouver. It was partly sunny and in the low 70’s.
I walked up Howe St. to the mall and discovered an Orange Julius! I love their 3 Berry Blast and after last week needed a pick me up. After enjoying my smoothie I continued walking around and saw the local art museum, some native indians residing in Vancouver were also having a sidewalk sale of their handmade items. It was relaxing and I enjoyed a leisurely stroll around the city until it was time to return to the ship to get ready to work gangway at 2:00pm.

The kids tonight were quite hyper and excited to be on the ship, but different than last week’s kids. Two of our girls are Jewish and keep strict Kosher, so that will be interesting to see how we handle their food restrictions and such. I know some details of kosher, but not the specifics in depth. The younger of the two is adorable and very shy, the older is very much a show off and bossy. I think we’ll get along fine though, at heart she is a kid and just wants people to like her.

Thursday June 21st: First Sea Day

The seas today were relatively calm and the weather was nice and sunny and fairly warm for cruising at 19 kts per hour. We took the kids out on the sports court and they played tag for 2 full hours before we brought them back in. It was nice to get them out and running around.

I’ve been napping a lot due to being sick, but thankfully after naps I’m able to keep on going. With only two of us on staff I can’t stay home sick and recover, but God’s grace is sufficient and He strengthens me with just what I need for that shift to do a good job in that moment. I never have more than what I need, but I am thankful to receive just enough. It forces me to look to Him as my source of strength and remember not to rely on myself.

For our theme night tonight we had spy night. With a fairly decent amount of kids showing up we decided to split the group and send the older kids around the ship in a team and the younger ones stayed together with Liz and went around the ship looking for the same clues, but with her help they finished much sooner than the older ones. :)

Because of the high numbers and only 2 staff we decided this week to have only movies again for the teens, but unlike last week we are running the movies from 8-10pm to coincide with our Club HAL kids hours instead of during their regular 9-12am hours. This allows both Liz and myself to get home at a more decent hour instead of close to 1am each day.

Liz has now caught the bug as well as my roommate. I feel terrible to be spreading my germs, but there’s nothing I can do about it when I work and live with them so closely. I only hope they start feeling better really soon.

Friday June 22nd: Tracy Arm and Juneau, AK

Today we had a mandatory all crew customs inspection. Each department had a specified time to show up and present themselves to the custom’s officials. I got in line at 2:30pm and was done in about 10 minutes. When I got to the front of the line the agent stares you down and asks “Where are you from”, “What do you do on the ship” etc. and are somewhat intimidating. When I got to the front and said I was currently from Milwaukee, WI the agent sitting next to my “interrogator” breaks out in a big grin and says “I’m from Steven’s Point!!!”. We chatted briefly and my agent shoos me away without any other questions. I guess the other agent was vouching for my honesty! :)
No crew shore leave was granted until the conclusion of the inspection (at least 4 pm) so I decided to change into my “going ashore” clothes and take a quick nap. That was around 3 pm and I got up around 6:45 pm in time to change into my Camp Night theme wear and get upstairs around 7 pm.

So much for Juneau this week. I’m unfortunately too sick to care about getting off the ship right now.

Saturday June 23rd: Skagway, AK

I slept in this morning until 9 am and then we had a General Drill where I had to grab my lifejacket and prepare to “save the children”! Save them I did and then thankfully our Cruise Director remembered to send us to our rafts so that we didn’t go down with the ship! :) Our new captain was involved in the drill and all the crew surrounding me were astounded at how hand’s on he is. I think it’s great. He actually eats meals with the fellow crew, greets guests on the gangway during embarkation, and is highly visible around the ship. It really is a boost for crew morale as he is a very nice man and always smiles and waves at the crew.

After the drill I was tired but decided to get off the ship anyway to get a little fresh air and exercise after being cooped up since Vancouver, but really since Ketchikan. I walked on the main road towards the edge of town and stopped at the store “You say To-ma(e)-to we say To-ma(a)-to” - parenthesis added by me to help you know what it sounds like. They have great juices there and I bought a Raspberry, blueberry, lime juice bottle. It tastes like tart lemonade and I love it. It is all natural and chock full of antioxidants which I feel I need right now as well so it was well worth the expense.

I walked out of town as far as my legs could carry me and I stopped often along the way to capture wildflowers at their best. I’m running out of things to photograph, so this week I mainly shot flowers. I really enjoyed the time I spent shooting them. It has also been overcast here the past couple of weeks and today was no exception, so perfect soft lighting for shooting flowers. Landscapes and scenery are best on sunny days, but portraits and detail shots are great on bright overcast days.

Coming back in to town I called home as soon as I had a strong enough signal. The wind was proving to be to much for my poor phone so I walked as fast as I could and eventually stopped behind a 2 story building and finished the rest of my conversation in a bit of shelter from the wind.

After arriving back to town it was pretty close to the time I needed to be getting back on to get ready for Country Carnival night but I missed dinner because it was after six pm, so I stopped at my favorite deli in town and ordered a BLT to go and enjoyed it thoroughly on my freezing cold, atrociously windy walk through Skagway. The tide had come in by the time I returned to the gangway and so getting on the ship was interesting. It was blowing about 22 kts and the incline of the gangway was almost literally up and down. The stewards that kindly ask you to wash your hands upon returning to the ship were actually helping to boost people going up the ramp. My immediate thought was...why didn’t they simply open the tender platform entrance on A Deck and put the gangway there as we did in Victoria each week last summer??? It would have made too much sense I guess. Hopefully no one suffered too much stress climbing the steep ramp. Yikes!

Country Carnival was a success and the kids really loved face painting. We got a new boy tonight named Chris and he is a really fun kid. I’m glad he joined us, but his initial reaction to the group of kids was, “wow these kids are wild”. Yep, they are wild, but thankfully nice wild rather than naughty wild like last week.

Sunday June 24th: Glacier Bay National Park

Today it rained AGAIN in Glacier Bay. I really wish I could have seen the sun even once this summer in this place. It was actually so yucky today that the clouds hung about 13 feet above the water so until we got right up to the glaciers you couldn’t even see anything but the water and the bottom of the rocks at the base of the mountains. Too bad for the guests that don’t get multiple takes like me, this was their one opportunity and it was once again yucky.

Our Hoonah Cultural Interpreter this week was new and had NEVER talked to a group before about her culture. The supervisor thought our kids would be a safe way to start her career, but the poor girl was so nervous she completely clammed up and couldn’t remember anything she wanted to talk about. I felt so bad for her I kept asking her very leading questions, while looking inquisitive so the kids wouldn’t catch on, to help her remember things they’d be interesting in hearing about. :) She apologized later and thanked me for my interaction. She said that I probably actually knew more about her culture than she did at the moment but was hoping to do better as she got more practice.

We took the little ones out on the sports court to watch the calving of Marjorie and of course their attention span was about 2 minutes. So then they started running around playing tag. That was totally fine, but all of a sudden I heard a really loud boom and wondered what it was. One of the little boys grabbed my arm and said “Look there’s an avalanche over there!” Of course it was Marjorie calving big time and I missed it as I had been watching the kids. I’m so glad that he saw it though as he had told his mom that morning it was the one thing he wanted to see on this cruise specifically. That was pretty cool for him and for him to see it first made him feel really proud too. :)

The afternoon went well. We sent the older kids out on a couple of scavenger hunts and they did really well together, as there were only 4 of them and I split the boys and girls into 1 each per group.

Tonight we had movie night and the request was for the latest Disney/Pixar flick “Cars”. It’s a very cute movie and I highly recommend it for kids and adults alike. It has good messages for all ages in it.

After we finished cleaning up at 11 pm I dashed down to the Queen’s room for the International Christian Fellowship meeting. I had been invited my first week on board but hadn’t made it previously for various reasons from seasickness to after hours babysitting. I am so glad that I went. I realized that most of the really sweet guys that work in the Lido restaurant are believers and now they know that I am as well. They were so surprised but excited to see me there. It was so great to actually spend time in prayer and singing with other christians. Some of the guest were there as well and one of the guests was a Baptist minister and he gave an impromptu message. We had such a great time together. I am really looking forward to next week, hopefully I’ll be able to attend.

Most of the crew there were Indonesian and then there was a girl from Austria that works in the Spa and the Security Officer Norm and his wife Moira. The group used to be called the Indonesian Christian Fellowship until we all started showing up and now they sing in English for us and encourage us to bring any others that are believers regardless of nationality. Unfortunately I don’t know any other believers, which is why I’m so thankful to have met these people.

Monday June 25th: Ketchikan, AK

Ahh Ketchikan. It was at its best today bestowing liquid sunshine on all who came to visit. Just sprinkles though, nothing serious. I needed to get off the ship today and get some exercise, I’m once again eating way too much because it is so readily available (and I have absolutely no willpower - one of the exact reasons I’ve never tried alcohol) so I need to burn a few calories.

I walked once again all the way to Saxman Totem Village, taking pictures along the way of various wildflowers and such. It is so interesting to see the impact that the wet rain forest climate has on the structures in that city. The buildings rot so quickly and demolition is too expensive so things just become abandoned where they collapse. It’s really sad. There used to be several major business operations in Ketchikan that have since closed causing many families to relocate to other islands or the lower 48. There isn’t really any landfill in Ketchikan either for old cars and scrap metal so people tend to accumulate it in their yards. Both Ketchikan and Skagway both look run down and cluttered with junk when you go to the areas where people actually live (getting away from the glitzed up tourist areas).

The totem village was nice, I didn’t spend much time there though as my taxi driver a few weeks back had done such a nice job narrating about the poles for me. I actually knew more from that driver than I learned today. It was a good walk though and so I decided to also walk back to town. By the time I got back to town I was cold and tired so I decided to get back on the ship and take a nap before work at 7 pm.

Even though our kids have been separating for some of our activities we joined together tonight for pirate night. Most of the regulars are 8 and 9 years old and they love to play, so I knew they’d want to be pirates more than do a scavenger hunt again. They did indeed love being pirates and we had a fun evening with them.

Tuesday June 26th: Last Sea Day

The seas weren’t as rough this week as they were last week, so I had my faithful buddy Chris come running to Club HAL right at 9 am. Liz and I were shocked. We never have kids the last day until around 10:20 am and therefore we actually never intend to actually DO the activities scheduled prior to that. We had to get out the supplies and conduct the activity when, after losing an hour the night before, all I really wanted to do was veg and watch cartoons like usual. My cough has gotten very thick and my throat is very sore. I have been getting steadily worse these past couple of weeks and I don’t have the energy to do much of anything.

The day went smoothly over all and the night ended without a hitch. Funny enough, this week Liz was expecting tips from several of the different families and we were only tipped by the one family we never would have thought would do so - you just never know. I was grateful for the bit of extra that came my way as I’ve spent more time on the internet this week while not feeling well. Some people eat chocolate when not feeling perky, I surf the web. So it was well received and appreciated.

Oh, NEWS. We finally have an additional crew member coming to join us in Club HAL next cruise. His name is Steve and he’s worked on this ship before, so we are looking forward to having a functional teen program again. :) Hopefully we’ll get another staff member before too long so that there can be 2 in the kids room instead of just one. Next week our kid count goes over 100 so we won’t even be legal as HAL’s policy is 1 for every 30 kids (crazy I know).

I have late gangway tomorrow so I’m planning to get off in Vancouver and wander back up to Orange Julius. With my throat feeling this sore that’s the only thing that sounds good to me.

Hopefully I’ll be feeling better soon, but again God has given me just the exact amount of strength that I’ve needed for each and every day and I feel blessed.

I hope that you have been blessed this week as well.
'Til next week,
T

Cruise 4 of 14: June 13 - 20th

2007-06-20T17:33:00.000-06:00

You have all been waiting so patiently for an update, and just to let you know I'll probably do them in Vancouver (Wednesdays) from now on so as to get a full week on one post -- seeing as how the free internet opportunities are slim to none on this schedule this summer. So, here is my update for the previous cruise.

Week #4 of 14: June 13-20th, 2007

I had many things to say for this particular cruise but thankfully I didn't post them. My mother taught me, and my father reminded me, that if I don't have anything nice to say I shouldn't say anything at all. So for this week I'm going to be horribly brief.

In a nutshell:
We had 50 children on board this past cruise and thankfully only about 10 of them were regularly showing up to Club HAL. They were all sick and by Friday the 15th I caught a horrible sinus cold from which I still suffer at the end of the week on this the 20th.

Because I was sick this week I didn't plan any excursions, it seems that I've been doing them about every other cruise. Instead of excursions I did some light errands, walked a little bit in town and otherwise caught up on laundry, updated some albums on Facebook, added the links feature that I promised to this blog (so that you can click on the photo albums without having to scroll for them in the weekly posts), and napped. Yep, this week I had to give in and nap.
We still have only two staff and so this cruise Liz and I worked from 8 am to 12 am and I believe that is why I became sick, so resting when I could was a blessing.

I would count your prayers a blessing, if you get a chance and think of it. It looks as though our department may remain at 2 regardless of kid counts, so I need prayer for health/strength in order to keep going strong.

I still am enjoying what I do, look forward to each day with its new adventures and try to see the world with fresh eyes and a willing spirit.

Til next week,
Trish

Cruise 3 of 14: June 6-June 13th

2007-06-14T01:09:00.001-06:00

Cruise 2 of 14: May 23 - June 6, 2007 Cont.

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

Cruise 2 of 14: May 23 - June 6, 2007

2007-06-05T01:37:00.000-06:00

Tuesday May 29th: Day 7 - At Sea

Each week I will post a link from my Facebook site that can hold up to 60 pics per album. I will still post my few favorites here on the blog.

For an album of pics for this cruise go to:
http://uwm.facebook.com/album.php?aid=26149&l=4e92f&id=705660152

This is our final sea day for this first cruise, I can’t believe how quickly a week goes by when you’re having fun. I’m so glad that I work here instead of simply vacationing, because then my cruising fun is just beginning rather than already ending.

I took my seasickness combo of half a pill and wore my wristbands again today and it seems to really do the trick thus far. Yay!

The kids had a cooking class with Chef Valentine in the Culinary Arts Center today and we watched them made creations from dough that are then baked and displayed. Things like iguanas, snakes, baskets of flowers, turtles, and my favorite the frogs, were really not that difficult to make and they turned out so cute. These items are baked until they are hard as rocks and then a light glaze put on them to make them shine and used for decoration on the serving lines. The kids each got their own bits of dough to make stuff with as well and then we made ice cream sandwiches from scratch and of COURSE got to eat them. The parents were so happy that we had those delicacies right before lunch too!

The evening theme night was PJ night farewell party. We wore our PJ’s and name tags, had a pillow fight and played lots of fun games. As I was going to work tonight I heard a guest make a very disgusted comment about how people just don’t care how they go out in public anymore, just look a grown adult wearing their pajamas like it’s no big deal. I didn’t say anything, as they had already passed me, but simply chuckled as we are so often so quick to judge what we don’t know. She didn’t know that that was actually my UNIFORM for the night :)

Cruise 2 of 14: May 23 - June 6, 2007

Wednesday May 30th: Day 1 - Vancouver, B.C.

This morning, being the cheery morning person that I am, I had the distinct privilege of helping the guest as they were disembarking at 7:30 am. I enjoyed the job and the guests appreciated a smiling face on the gangway at that hour of the morning. Many others stay out until all hours at the bar and then groan over morning gangway. Seeing as how I am dead tired by the time my 10 pm shift is over and go straight to bed I am able to get up and be perky in the early morning. This worked in my favor as Vancouver was in the 80’s and gorgeously sunny this week and after my a.m. shift I was able to get off for several hours before heading back for gangway duty at 2 p.m. for embarking passengers.

I walked around Canada Place, the cruise terminal and shops, but didn’t venture too far today as I didn’t know where things were. Most things that I will need shopping wise are within a few blocks of Canada Place, which is nice because Seattle was a 10-15 min. cab ride from the terminal to downtown.

I stopped at a small corner bakery cafe and grabbed a delicious breakfast of fresh fruit, granola and yogurt. I then went around and took pictures of Canada Place and it’s sails and other things of interest in the immediate vicinity. In the future I want to venture further away to Stanley Park and Kitsilano Beach (where the movie actors live!). Both of those destinations are quite close to downtown. The park I believe is within 2 miles and I can walk there, the beach is a short cab ride away across a very long bridge that spans the channel the ships all come in to port under. I don’t know if pedestrians are allowed on the bridge or not. I may be able to ride the bus there as well, but you have to have Canadian money to do so (much cheaper than a cab though) so I may need to exchange a little bit of money and grab a bus schedule.

Oh yeah, I managed to find a lens cap for my camera lens, after my original one blew into the water in Skagway on Saturday. That made me feel better and willing to take my camera out and about again.

Gangway duty went smoothly, I really really like this terminal building in Vancouver, so much nicer than Seattle’s. Boat drill was a blast, the people all stand huddled so tightly together for about 20 minutes in misery so to the dismay of the boat commanders I livened up the crowd as I was searching for any children without safety number wristbands. Each time I walked up or back I’d incite them to do the Wave or crack jokes. This relaxed some of them a bit and helped them to smile in a claustrophobic environment.

We met a few kids during our welcome meeting, but there just aren’t that many kids on board this week. It’ll be interesting to see how many actually show up in Club HAL and what their ages are.

I had exactly 2 kids show up tonight for the Welcome Aboard party from 8-10pm. One boy is named Isak from Puerto Rico, he’s 9 and his English reading and speaking skills are impeccable. I was super impressed and he is a really fun kids so far. Another girl showed up, 11 years old, named Cate and she was really nice as well. She will be getting off in Skagway to continue her vacation via land tour up to Denali. That is the weirdest thing about this itinerary is we have people going and coming half way through.

Thursday May 31st: Day 2 - First Sea Day

I knew from last week to plan ahead this week for seasickness. I am working all alone in my room this week and couldn’t be down for the count, so I used my so far successful remedy and took the half pill as soon as I got up. I now know it takes my body 30-60 min. to fully appreciate the effects of the pill so I allotted an extra half hour before needing to go upstairs. I took the pill and then laid on the floor in my room for 30 minutes before getting ready for work. That took the edge off enough to get ready. By the time the kids were coming up for activities at 9 am I was feeling pretty perky overall. The seas on this itinerary tend to calm down from about 11:30 am to about 9:00 pm which works out perfect so that I can eat lunch and dinner and only have to clean basically when it starts in again and then I go to bed. Tonight though having taken the pill I was in much better shape then last week and made it through with flying colors. :) Yay!

Friday June 1st: Day 3 - Juneau, AK

I am on IPM today so after running activities for the kids this morning I did a load of laundry, went up to the Oasis deck for a little while and enjoyed the warm sunshine, then went into the Loft (teen room) and caught up on emails. I found that if I typed everything that I wanted to send off and then prop my laptop in the porthole long enough to get a dockside wi-fi signal to send I could go back and forth getting some stuff updated that I wanted to do. That worked pretty slick. I didn’t want to sit and prop it there the entire time, so being able to work on stuff and then just put it up there to send/receive worked out just right. Thankfully the windows are slightly tinted from the outside or the guest walking by the railing would have thought it a little odd. I didn’t care, after using an entire internet card last week I needed to grab a little free wi-fi when I could. :) Oh, and to clarify, my donation statements last week were meant to be taken as a joke (Mom thought I should clarify that as she claims my years working for the Salvation Army were a little too ingrained and she thought I was serious!!! he-he-he!). Hopefully you thought it lighthearted in the manner in which it was written.

I got to host the guest artists this evening when they came on board from 5:30-8:00 pm. That will be a weekly job for whoever is assigned to IPM in Juneau. They were very nice and host classes on different things from making native Alaskan ceremonial costumes to beading or culture of the Tlingit tribes in the area.

Club HAL’s theme night tonight was Brave the Night. I revived that from last year as it was my favorite night. The kids have to do different challenges like on Survivor and the team with the most points wins and they get a prize. We had five attend and that was a pretty good turn out. Last night was supposed to be Mystery Spy Night and only one girl showed up so we did different card tricks and such for each other. For the theme tonight I needed some different items from different departments and managed to use my positive attitude and smiling face to get each of the things I needed. It’s amazing how far a smile and kind word go in this world, more people ought to try it--they’d be amazed by the results.

Saturday June 2nd: Day 4 - Skagway, AK

Today was a weird day, we were the only ship in Skagway (last week we were one of three) and so the town felt sort of deserted. I got off the ship around 9:30 am and didn’t have any definite plans other than to go for a nice long walk and see what I could see. On the way out of town (7 blocks long and 4 blocks wide) I stopped at the original Skaguay depot building which is not an organic and natural food outpost. I bought a most delicious nectarine and it was very very juicy and sweet. Organic produce always is so amazing compared to non-organic in flavor. I then just started walking. I walked past the garden and restaurant I went to last week. I walked about 6 miles around curvy bends and up a steep 2 lane highway that leads to the next town over. I was hoping to get up high enough to have a scenic lookout. After walking for about and hour and a half though I didn’t want to go any higher and not be able to make it all the way back to the ship. Skagway is so small they don’t have cabs if you get to tired to walk, so I would have had to make it back somehow. So at the point I knew I shouldn’t climb any further I turned around and had a downhill trek back to town - much much easier and less tiring of course.

Along the way I saw a tree growing out of the side of some sheer rock. I call that photo “Determination”. I walked through a small cemetery to learn the stories of the local folks and saw some interesting things there. Walking back into town I was getting really hungry and love to try local flavors, but Skagway residents earn all of their annual income during the summer months so the prices were totally outlandish. Well, ok not outlandish compared to going out for a really nice dinner in a metropolitan area (seafood, steak, etc.) but when halibut fish and chips costs $18.50 there is something wrong. I knew that they would be serving salmon for dinner on the ship and so I grudgingly got back on, careful not to lose any camera parts on the way back inside, and put on my uniform to go have dinner in the Lido for free. It was good, probably as good or better than anything I would have had off the ship so it turned out fine.

Tonight’s theme was Country Carnival, so after dinner I donned my country outfit and went upstairs to set up the room with games and such. One of my older tweens came up early to see if I was around and helped me set up. Her name is Cassie and she has 2 younger sisters also in my room and she likes to find time away from them when she can. The youngest is 5 and so she ends up being the obligatory big sister/baby sitter quite often it seems. We had a good time together and then the other kids came for the carnival games a little later on.

Each night after I clean up I take the leftover snacks down to the P.O. bar which is for the international crew (Filipino and Indonesian, plus all other crew can hang out there too but most others hang out in the Officers Bar or OB). Because we get such great snacks in Club HAL I hate to waste them and so when the PO guys see me coming they get excited wanting to know what snacks I’m bringing them. Last night I had a really nice fruit platter with kiwi, strawberries, grapes, melons, etc. Tonight I have bags of popcorn and a really fancy cheese platter, the dancers on board saw the cheese and went crazy. We really get the munchies when food is only available during set hours, unlike home where you can grab a snack whenever. It must be psychological because at home I hardly ever snack but on the ship I get ravenous.

Sunday June 3rd: Day 4 - Glacier Bay National Park

Glacier Bay is always such a beautifully scenic day, this summer I don’t get to really appreciate it though. We keep the kids indoors doing morning activities and then during lunch, when I would go and take pictures last summer, we have our planning meeting for the upcoming cruise. Oh well. These past two Sundays have been raining anyway. If we hit a gorgeous day with blue sky and sunshine I need to skip lunch and just go out on deck and grab a few photos. Hopefully I can do that before all the snow melts, because it is so much more awe inspiring with all the glacial ice in the water and snow on the peaks.

I had a parent get mad at me today because I wasn’t specifically paying every second of attention to her 4 year old child who has the attention span of about 2 minutes and is then ready for another activity. We’ve tried to patiently explain to her that Club HAL isn’t a daycare or baby-sitting service, it is organized group activities. If a child cannot participate in a group setting or isn’t interested in a particular activity on the schedule then they should come at a time when they can participate or do want to do an activity. It isn’t fair to the rest of the kids who are there for the planned event to have my attention constantly drifting to the one child who wants to do his own thing. She didn’t really like that, actually she was quite disgusted with us, but Dad got it and hopefully will get her to understand that we aren’t being mean or discriminating against her children.

I got to perform in Master Chef Dinner again this evening. It may be the last time I do it this summer as our kid counts are going to soar after next week. Next week I have 14 tweens and 9 kids on the roster and there are 6 teens on the roster. So, if the teens start showing up for activities then I’ll have all the young’uns to myself. We are discussing moving mature tweens up in programming if we don’t have 16 and 17 year olds coming to activities. If it is mainly 13 and 14 year olds then it isn’t a problem to include a few 12 year olds and possibly 11 year olds so that the programming geared for 3-7’s won’t be too young for them. I try hard to balance it according to the maturity level of the majority of kids and this week it’s gone pretty well over all. The oldest attendee has 5 and 9 year old sisters, so she is already used to doing stuff with young children. The other older tween likes to still play like a kid, so it works out good.

The kids got to watch the newer Disney Pixar movie “Cars” while I was doing the Master Chef Dinner. I really like that movie. It has stuff in it for every age and I find myself crying at the end even though I’ve seen it now more than once. It has a lot of good messages geared for different ages and it is a good pick for whole family viewing.

We reordered our theme nights this week so that Pirate Night is tomorrow night. That works out good so that Pirate Night and Dessert Extravaganza in the Lido aren’t on the same night. Our treasure hunt clues tend to disappear when it lands on Dessert Extravaganza-Not COOL. Another benefit to having Master Chef and Pirate night on two separate nights is I only have to wear my uniform two nights during the cruise for night time programming. I always love wearing something besides Khaki, navy and white tennis shoes. Thursday I wear black spy clothes, Saturday I wear jeans and plaid country clothes, tonight for Master Chef is black pj/exercise pants, comfy black slip ons, and the chef hat and jacket, tomorrow pirate wear which is also comfy, Tuesday night I’ll again wear pj’s and my comfy slip ons. Got to love that!

Monday June 4th: Day 6 - Ketchikan, AK

We don’t dock (no tendering this week!) until 10:00 am, so I got to sleep until 9 am this morning. That was good, I was so tired after having a full sea day and doing Master Chef Dinner that I fell asleep around 11 pm and woke up at 9 am, so I got around 10 hours of sleep. I need to get a lot of rest because at least three of the crew are down with Norwalk like symptoms and are on quarantine from the Engine Dept. Yikes. So far the count isn’t high enough to bring us into Code Red and we are sanitizing everything extra carefully to hopefully stay out of Red. That is NO FUN! The sick crew are also going through extra long quarantines, 72 hours after the LAST time they got sick, instead of 24 hours from the 1st time they got sick, to ensure that others aren’t infected if possible.

I got off the ship at 11:15 am with a lady named Moira who is married to the Chief Security Officer. I may have mentioned her before, she is from Calgary Alberta Canada. She is a dear and I am so glad to have met her. We went around looking at things in Ketch today and then she got back on board at 2 pm to meet up with her hubby for his couple hours off in port. I then went and looked in some of the shops. She is specifically wanting an Alaskan made sun catcher with a Forget-me-not, the Alaska state flower. Strangely enough you can find Eskimos, Huskies, Norther Lights, etc., but no Forget-me-nots. After wandering around in the shops I went for a long walk about 4 miles out of town.

I decided after dropping off Moira that I wanted to find Saxman Totem Park. It is one of the destinations for an excursion and I remembered last year people telling me how to get there. These small landlocked cities are really hard to get lost in as the road only goes about 8 miles one direction, 18 the other and there is only one main road each way with a few side streets up in the hills. I did in fact find the Totem Park and it was very interesting. I didn’t spend any time looking around when I got there though as it was raining all day and was getting later in the afternoon. I called up the trusty cab company, they have very nice cabbies in Ketch that love to also play tour guide as they drive, to get me back to the ship on time. I had two hours but after walking all day I was pretty tired and didn’t want to have to worry about getting an overuse injury in my knees (been there done that and it’s no fun - couldn’t walk properly for 6 months because of one over strenuous hike summer of 2005) so I called for a ride and 7 minutes later they pulled up. Now that I know where it is it won’t seem so far next time, so if the day is nice I’ll walk that way immediately and then have plenty of time to enjoy the park and walk back to the ship. I think it’s either as far or maybe even closer than Walmart, which is 5 miles the opposite direction from downtown.

Tonight’s theme was Pirate Night and it was so nice to have a good pirate costume this year. The week before leaving Milwaukee I went thrift shopping and found some amazing deals at a 1.99 store. I needed khaki’s for work and also searched for theme wear. I found the perfect shirt for a pirate shirt, a striped sash, I already owned black pirate pants and black shoes, the pirate patch elastic strap needed lengthening with elastic from the craft store, and I owned a bandana. When I walked into the Cruise Director’s office this evening they all thought I looked super cute. Yay!! How fun.

The kids looked cute too in their pirate hats and face paint. We went on our treasure hunt around the ship, but there actually weren’t too many people out and about to say “Aaaaargh” and “Ay ay Captain” to. Oh well, next week! :)

That is my update for this week. I’ll fill you in on the last sea day and Vancouver in the next entry. Tonight is hour forward night as we always gain an hour going into Alaska and lose an hour coming back to our home port. So I’ll sign off now as it is 12:32 am PST Thursday morning after hour forward adjustment in time.

I hope that you had a joyous week, miss you all.
Be blessed,
T

Cruise 1 of 14: May 23-30, 2007

2007-05-28T21:26:00.000-06:00

Wednesday May 23rd: Day 1 - Milwaukee, WI to Vancouver, B.C.

This year I had two full days to prepare for departure, and did I need it! I had ample time to clean, pack, shut down my house and visit friends before time for departure. I got up on Wednesday at 3:40am and was out of the house by 4:30am to get to the Milwaukee International Airport.

My Northwest Airlines flight was leaving at 6:30am and I knew that I needed to allot extra time to get myself through security and baggage. Last summer I almost missed my flight because with all of my luggage I was selected for extra screening. This summer I breezed right through (except I forgot to declare my water bottle and the scanner picked it up-after explaining about my Sjogren’s Syndrome and showing my Sjogren’s “club membership card” they allowed my water to go through the check point. Hey if you got it you might as well use it to your advantage -- Sjogren’s is otherwise a pain, but in this type of circumstance has its advantages!!

I got on the plane in plenty of time but I couldn’t fit my laptop backpack (the “purse you’re allowed besides the carryon) in the overhead bin or under seat area. The stewards were giving me a very hard time and the desk personnel kept threatening to deplane me, complaining that I was holding up the flight. There was absolutely no way I could miss this flight or else I would miss the ship and it would be my fault. In that instance I would have had to pay my whole way to Juneau, AK which I WASN’T going to do. Thankfully I had all of my loose stuff in ziplocs and such, so after hauling a few of those bags out of the backpack and stuffing them in the seat pocket in front of my the bag fit snugly under the seat. Yay!!! :)

I arrived in Minneapolis 15 minutes ahead of schedule and made my way leisurely to the next gate. There I met lots of passengers preparing for cruises departing from Vancouver (I mean, why else would people be flying from the MSP airport to Vancouver if they WEREN’T going on a cruise right!! ). Several of the families were even going to be on the same line I worked for, just a different ship. They were in fact going on the ship my friend Wendy works on, the Volendam. I gave them my name and told them to say hi to Wendy from me, we’ll see if they do. That was quite fun.

The flight was very smooth and relatively short into Vancouver. We were warned of turbulence, but it was quite a good flight. We arrived on time in Vancouver and then the adventure began.

Customs was backed up over an hour with numerous transatlantic (think non-english speaking) flights arriving at the same time as our flight and the tour groups were trying desperately to stay together. The “queue” was so long that they opened up a holding area that was as large as the main queue for overflow, but thankfully I was in the very front of that group. We slowly snaked our way up to the customs officials and I made it through quickly and without any hitches. I now have 3 stamps in my passport!!! I also found my luggage quickly and in good condition. I was nervous the whole flight as I had to check a bag with very expensive camera equipment right at the gangway of the Milwaukee flight and I’ve SEEN how well they take care of precious cargo! :P

I could barely move my baggage at this point as I had been traveling with it all day and was exhausted. I had gotten a few hours of sleep thankfully, so I was mentally alert, just had sore muscles from carting 4 heavy suitcases and a formal dress all over timbuktu.

After the airport I grabbed a taxi and headed to the ship. I was so thankful to be going to the same ship, when I saw her I felt like I was coming home. The porters gave me a cart on the gangway and I headed into the terminal building. The Vancouver terminal building is quite nice compared to Seattle and very easy to navigate heavy objects. I didn’t have to go up a crew staircase, merely haul the bags along an indoor ramp. It was a lot like the “Love Boat” where you just kind of walk across the gangway into the ship without having to go outside. Very Nice!

The night before I had received an email from my former Zaandam roommate and I was able to see some of her pictures from this past year. I deduced which person was a girl named Liz, that I’d be working with this summer, and sure enough there she was on the gangway waiting for me by the Club HAL table. I waited 10 minutes for her to finish her gangway shift and then she helped me get situated in the ship.

My room this summer is the same size as last summer, has carpet, a working air conditioner (I am glad I brought my heated blanket again!), working toilet, etc. It is also very conveniently located across from the wi-fi hotspot so I am able to use the internet in my cabin without going out into the hallway-NICE. Actually it’s very nice because I’ve got an “in” with Shore Excursions and they put me on several excursions in ports this week that have kept me from having any free port wi-fi time. The only downside is that the internet costs me $20 for every 200 minutes. If anyone wants to help in the continuation of this blog this summer with donations towards internet cards I’d be SO grateful!! Don’t all volunteer at once though, feel free to spread it out throughout the summer. I’ll give you a byline - “This week’s blog brought to you by.....”. I’m kidding of course, this blog is free, but I certainly would never turn down any donations if you really wanted to contribute! :)

Club HAL is much as it was last year, the rooms are the same and the girls I’m working with currently are very nice. So far so good!

Thursday May 24th: Day 2 - First Sea Day

All my hopes were dashed in the area of the less rocky route from Vancouver. It is the same. We actually had very NICE weather today, so I hate to imagine a bad weather day. We’ll see how the summer progresses though, I know that May and Later in August are the worst, so hopefully it will be at least a little better this summer than last.

I had my safety training this morning and then I got the privilege of selling bingo cards in the Mondrian Lounge. This year there is no cruise staff so the Club HAL staff gets pulled to do all the jobs that don’t have anyone to cover them. Overall this is actually fun, it gives me new experiences I didn’t have last year :)

The kids this week are super smart and funny. Adrienne, our five year old, is in kindergarten and can read/write/spell/do math/etc. at 2nd grade level. She is a gem. The other kids like Jordan and Ryan are perfectly in line with their age but the three get along beautifully. We have several other families on board with kids who come occasionally and they try to pull the “I’m too cool to be in a room with a slide for kids” routine, but always manage to have fun-even when they are trying hard not to show it! :)

We have an orthodontists international convention on board and so several of our kids are from South Korea and Hong Kong and don’t speak barely any English. This is quite humorous, but they are great kids and we have a lot of fun with them.

Our big theme night tonight was “Spy Night” and with the kids this means we have a little scavenger hunt in the room and down in the Lido Restaurant and they have to make all their spy gear before the hunt begins. Creating all the stuff took most of the evening, but when the kids are on a roll you go with the flow.

I was thankful for the end of the shift tonight though as the ship is gently rolling side to side continuously and so is my gut. Hopefully I’ll get my sea legs really soon. :)

Friday May 25th: Day 3 - Juneau, AK

I LOVE this itinerary. It is so much better than last year! We pulled into Juneau last year around 11:30 and it was a mad rush to get everyone through the food line and out the door to their excursions. This year we don’t arrive until 2:30pm (approx.) and so we all ate a casual lunch, had time to change clothes and relax for a few minutes, and then get off the ship. We still ended up with 4 hours off in port, which for Juneau is plenty after you’ve been there 14 times the previous summer already!!

I got on a whale watching and wildlife excursion!!!!!!! I had SO MUCH fun! I saw some really amazing whale behaviors that are completely unusual for Alaska. The first thing we saw was cooperative feeding or group feeding. This means that the usually solitary whales were all congregating in a particular area because of an abundance of food right there. We saw “lunge feeding”. This is where the whales fly up out of the water with their mouths wide open, drink literally an olympic swimming pool amount of water, and dive back into the ocean. The baleen, the teeth of a humpback whale that is made out of keratin like fingernails, then strains the water and leaves the food. A whales gut can expand (like a pregnant belly holding septuplets) incredibly large, I couldn’t believe it. We also saw bubble net feeding where the whales all group together to blow bubbles and this “net” traps the fish so that they can’t escape. Then the whales perform the lunging behavior to eat those fish.

I saw groups of 6 or more whales at a time diving, lunging, flipping their dorsals...it was amazing and beautiful. And THEN, if that wasn’t enough sea lions decided we had been ignoring them for too long and came over to our ship to show off. :) Too cute! I loved this excursion, even though it rained the whole time it was definitely a once in a lifetime experience to see all the types of social behavior that I saw today. Normally the whales are only social in Hawaii where they mate and concentrate solely on feeding in Alaska, but with the abundance of fish here, they were all eating in the same area and it shocked even the excursion leaders.

After arriving back at the pier I called home and talked to Dad for a while and then had to come back aboard to get ready for work.

Tonight's theme was Camp night. When I arrived in the room the paint bucket had been transformed into a tent and we had s'mores, and a little fake campfire that lights up and blows tissue fire upwards. Fun. Then the kids get to create the theme of the camp, draw a map of our camp, create rules for the camp and tell spooky stories in the tent before eating their s'mores and going home to bed. We had fun with the four kids that showed up.

Saturday May 26th: Day 4 - Skagway, AK

Today I didn’t have to work at all until evening programming. I had to be up early though because I was going on a scenic railway car excursion that took me all the way to the Yukon province of Canada! Wow, I’m a world traveler!

The historic railway winds its way up 3000 feet of treacherous terrain and across narrow trestle bridges before making its way to the top. Today the weather was rainy and overcast and we were literally “in the clouds” at the top. I was traveling with families from Tennessee and Australia so it was fun to see their reactions to the cold and snow. I am now a much heartier (not quite the wimpo I used to be) Milwaukee native and would venture outside with a short sleeved shirt and zip-up sweatshirt and they wore parkas and ran inside to stand by the wood stove. Yes, our train was old fashioned with a wood stove, very cute and fun. The conductor and brakeman wore old-fashioned outfits from 1800’s.

Carrying around a 70-300 mm zoom lens on a camera that also has a vertical battery grip arouses a lot of interest from fellow passengers and sparks lots of conversation. I got to talk a lot about photography, of course I’m always asked to take people’s picture, and opens up the communication in a fun way. The scary thing about being asked to take people’s picture comes when I can’t operate their point and shoot cameras. I always tease the group by saying “Yeah, all this high tech stuff I just don’t get!” It always gets a laugh cuz I’m holding a huge pro camera with big lens and i can’t operate there little teeny point and shoot!!

After the train I walked around Skagway and went across the bridge to the other side where I didn’t venture last summer on my one day in Skagway. There was a very adorable garden and luncheon room with a very cute sun room where I enjoyed a private lunch of smoked salmon quiche, fresh organic greens from the garden and homemade vinaigrette dressing, foccacia bread and herbed oil dipping sauce, and delicious fresh garden rhubarb granola cake/bar dessert. Ymm, good.

Our theme night tonight was Country Carnival. After all day in port it was really fun having an active theme night with games, dress up clothes, face painting, etc. I love carnival night. The kids had a great time too.

Sunday May 27th: Day 5 - Glacier Bay National Park

I’m loving everything about this itinerary so far. The spacing of port days and non port days is perfect. Today we slowly cruised around in Glacier Bay and I got a morning off. With so few kids attending we ended up with three staff with only 5 kids so I didn’t have to come in until 10:30. I had a fun surprise waiting for me as well -- I got volunteered to perform for Master Chef dinner in the Rotterdam dining room. I’d never been in the Rotterdam and had never done Master Chef dinner, but I was certainly game to try something new. If you know me at all you know how I love being “on stage”. Well, I of course had a fun floppy chefs hat and chefs coat that I got to wear and was quickly oriented on my part in this dinner production that turns each course of the meal into a musical number. It was a blast, really long waits in between courses and dinner hours, but overall a fun experience. The guests loved it and I totally hammed it up. If you have to go and make a fool of yourself you might as well have a blast doing it so that the guest laugh along with you instead of AT you!! :)

I didn’t get up to Club HAL until just about the time all the kids were leaving and they all had to tell me that they saw me in the dining room dancing with their dinner, they are so cute.

Monday May 28th: Day 6 - Ketchikan, AK

Another first for today, tendering in Ketch. We must have pulled the short straw because our ship was anchored out in the bay along with two others instead of pulled up to the pier like usual. Thank GOODNESS this is the only week we have to tender because if it could go wrong it did. The poor guest were getting so MAD at me because I made them wait in line for almost 2 hours to get a tender ticket to get off the ship. People on excursions were scared they’d miss their excursions and after paying a ton of money for the trips I don’t blame them for their anger and anxiety. I only don’t appreciate it when they take it out on me. It was so nice when one of the guest got up to me in line finally and said “finally a smiling face” (meaning one in a sea of upset guests).

It turns out that one of our tender platforms wasn’t working at all so we thought there were two platforms in operation when in reality only one was. So this made everything take twice as long. As soon as that was remedied by opening up both tender platforms on the aft deck we quickly depleted a line of 300+ people in about 10 minutes....whew! Everyone made their tours and hopefully were able to have a great day despite a rocky start.

I receive kudos from the Cruise Director, my supervisor and the Hotel Manager for my stellar customer service in the face of chaos (it was ME against the masses for most of the morning!). I had a couple moments of frustration, but otherwise smiled and talked with the guest to help them relax in line and get their mind off the wait. It seemed to work and most were appreciative of not being crammed into our small movie theater where they were supposed to be waiting. I instead left them all out in the hallways snaking halfway around the ship (very unorthodox but NOT 100 degrees with no place to sit - that would have been a heart attack waiting to happen). So, for our one time tendering this summer it went as well as could be expected with the given circumstances.

I finally got off the ship and walked in gorgeously sunny and 65 degree Ketchikan to my friendly neighborhood walmart where I purchased a pillow (I’m allergic to ship pillows) and laundry detergent. We have free laundry on the ship but have to provide our own soap. I then took the free shuttle back the 5 miles to the ship tender spot and boarded the ship an hour and a half before sail away.

I have not been neglecting to update the blog, just really busy and today was my first real opportunity to work on it. As you’ve read I’ve had a few adventures already and if this is indicative of my summer I will have many more stories to tell in the upcoming weeks!!!

So, until next time I look forward to hearing from you.

Snail mail/packages (or blog donations!!) may be mailed to:

Trisha Buster - Youth Staff
ms Zaandam
Cruiseline Agencies, Juneau
1130 Eastaugh Way #4
Juneau, AK 99802

0r

Cruiseline Agencies, Skagway
#1 White Pass Plaza
Skagway, AK 99840

0r

Cruiseline Agencies, Ketchikan
1249 Tongass Ave
Ketchikan, AK 99901

Welcome to my blog!

2007-02-25T16:34:00.000-06:00

I want to welcome you to what will be my weekly journal as I once again take to the High Seas in the panhandle region of Southeastern Alaska from late May-August.

This summer I will embark in Vancouver (not Seattle like in 2006) and cruise to Tracy Arm/Juneau, Skagway, Glacier Bay National Park, Ketchikan and back to Vancouver in 7 day round-trip cruises.

This particular itinerary doesn't attract very many kids, so the Club HAL staff will consist of myself and one other staff member until late July when we have a few more kids on board. At that point HAL will send out additional staff to assist us. That means that one staff member will run the Kids (3-7's) and tweens (8-12's) program jointly and then the other staff member will run the teen (13-17's) program. Thankfully last summer I had extensive training in the tweens room, with equal experience split between kids and teens, so I feel like I will be able to do a good job handling a room by myself. We'll see!

Also, a definite benefit to this itinerary for me is that the entire cruise takes place within the protected inside passage. I look forward to a summer of nausea free cruising over last summer's weekly "episodes of fun". Cruising from Seattle requires a day's journey in the rough open waters of the Pacific Ocean, so when I found out that my onboard supervisor was now my placement coordinator at headquarters I did request Vancouver as my home port. Yay!!

I am very excited about seeing more of Vancouver, B.C. each week and also spending more time in one of my favorite ports of Skagway. I am sad that I will not be going back to Sitka at all this summer, but thankfully I enjoyed that port 10 times last summer.

Same as last summer I will be making a weekly post with all the activities and photos from that week. I don't know yet exactly which day that will be, but check back and see :)

So, welcome to my summer 2007 blog and I hope you enjoy reading about my journey at sea!

--Trisha