Star Princess

Last night, the sea were angry, my friends. It has been a pretty smooth trip so far and for most of the time, you could barely feel that you were on the ocean. That changed last night as the winds picked up along with the rain and the ship was moving side to side more than we had felt the entire time. Even though there were visible swells, it still wasn't too bad and that's with neither of us taking any kind of motion sickness medicine. I've never really had motion sickness and with all of the boats we took this trip, I'm not really worried about it as long as the seas aren't too rough. We also saw darkness for the first time in 2 weeks. We either had gone to bed early because of an early morning or it stayed light out so late that we hadn't seen actual darkness for the entire time we've been here. With us approaching PDT and moving south, it got dark around 10 PM so by the time we went to bed, it was actually pitch black out there.

We crossed over into Canadian waters and changed time zones overnight. It was just an "At Sea" day as we approached Vancouver so we only did a few things on the ship. We started out by packing up because our luggage has to be out the door this evening since they are taking our bags on a bus with us to the airport. There was then an ocean-themed watercolor class that we went down for and it turned out it was a team painting. I even got in on it because one of the teams was down a few people; if I do say so, we won the competition. We happened to see Pat and Eileen out and about and set up plans for dinner with a bunch of folks from our tour. As Jess did a card-making class, I walked around and took some pictures of the ship so that we could remember it years from now:

I lost money here.

To combat our overeating, we took the stairs all the time

We ended up eating mostly at the buffet place.

On the way we passed an area where there is more marine wildlife and we did see more Dall porpoises swimming right near the ship. After cashing out at the casino (Jess was even and I...was not), we were going to have dinner with everyone but with Jess's cold getting worse, we decided to not get everyone else sick and so we went back to our room, got our bags out to the hallway and then went to bed before a somewhat-early rise to go to the airport.

I found that the cruise was ok but it's not really my thing as I like to be out at parks and even if we're in touristy areas, we can get some alone time in the car or out in nature. There's so many people always around and most people were rude (cutting in front when in line for no real reason, not saying "Thank You" when holding doors for people. etc.). It also seemed like everything was about gift shops and shopping in general with overpriced crap. The other thing is that everything with the cruise is so cheesy...sure, be a little lame with some bad jokes once in a while but the constant cheese was a bit much after a few days. Case in point: the video that plays on one of the channels was a "Love Boat" spoof with the original actors. But it wasn't even clever! Just like "Love Boat", I guess. I would do one again in warmer weather but it wouldn't be my first choice in the future.

Overall it was a great trip that we'll never forget but I'm ready to be home.

As Jess says after I painted, "That fish was mediocre." Note: She was correct - it was a pretty poorly painted fish.