Saturday, September 23, 2023 was, apparently, the autumnal equinox, thus the first day of autumn or Astronomical fall. Meteorological fall, I am told, began back on September 1. For us, neither date carries as much significance as September 24 which is today and the 57th anniversary of September 24, 1966. Our wedding day. I know Gail will be proof reading this so if I got it wrong I may need a CARE flight home.
Since we left Ketchikan last evening we have made good time. This morning we emerged into the open ocean south of Haida Gwai. There has been a strong wind and moderate seas. I’m convinced there are pot holes in the ocean too and every so often we hit one and the ship shudders. Looking at the waves beside the ship I can see the foam caps on the waves being blown away as mist. It’s a pretty sight with the sun making the foam and mist almost glow. We move south between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland, most of which is mountains and fjords. The sea appears calmer as we get more shelter from the island. We will weave through an archipelago of smaller islands as we make our way south. Our scheduled arrival in Victoria is 09:00 Monday morning. We are hoping for a nice day ashore but the weather forecast has not been promising but the current forecast is now suggesting the rain will end during the morning.
I have not mentioned much about the Crown Princess, our ship for this voyage. She first sailed in June 2006 but had an extensive refurbishment in 2018. The design of the ship marks its age and telltale signs of her age can be seen in stateroom decor and an occasional bit of rust. She sails well regardless of weather conditions and provides passengers with a comfortable ride. Crown Princess, indeed no Princess ship carries entertainment such as waterslides or carnival rides. The exterior decks feature swimming pools and hot tubs. There is also a large movie screen outdoors which is extremely popular in tropical locations but less so with conditions this trip.
There are three large dining rooms in use for dinner meals but only one is operational for breakfast and lunch when the ship is in port. There is a large buffet area with three serving areas. two of them operate slightly different hours to accommodate changeovers from breakfast to lunch and lunch to dinner. There is a third serving area that seems to provide speciality items. One day it was the “Crab Shack” and today it is serving a huge array of desserts. There are numerous other areas serving food. A burger place, pizza place, Ice cream shop and a cafe serving a variety of sandwiches desserts and fruit. So far everything is included as part the fare for all passengers. Bars serving juice, soft drinks and alcohol are not included but can be purchased individually or in packaged offerings. A Gastro Pub, Steak House and Italian Restaurant are available for a fixed cover charge again, individually or as part of a package of offerings.
On to the staterooms. Many comedians on cruise ships focus part of their performance on staterooms and rightfully so. Staterooms come in several classifications; inside (no windows), ocean view (windows), balcony (windows that open), mini-suites and suites with various sub-classifications depending upon where they are on the ship. Much humorous focuses on the vacuum toilet systems which can be rather surprising if it’s a first experience. The reality on ships (and planes) is that extra weight costs passengers so big pipes are a no no. Thus a vacuum system that sucks human waste from your toilet at mach 1 (that is what it sounds like). Target two is the showers. Traditionally, inside, ocean view and balcony rooms have been equipped with shower stalls. The humour suggests that the only way to use them is to soap up the walls than cram your body in and rotate. It’s not quite that bad bud if you are taller or heavier than average, they will feel cramped. The third target is often water temperature or pressure. Most often water pressure is fine but occasionally not so. Temperature, on the other hand, can be challenging. Princess showers have two controls, one for water volume and the second for temperature. Sounds perfect. Not so much. On this ship turn it up to full volume then adjust the temperature. The temperature is too cool starting from the cold end until you reach 95% of the way to the hot setting at which the flow becomes lobster boiling temp. Now when the temperature knob is turned back to cold the temp stays sizzling until it gets 95% of the way to cold. Now you spend the next few minutes doing from too cold to too hot until you find the sweet spot. Having found it you might expect that turning the water off and leaving the temperature setting alone that tomorrow you would not need to re-adjust the temperature—and you would be wrong!
Ships today have health and beauty spas and gyms with exercise machines and various group classes as well as individual services offered. Trivia is a common entertainment targeting music, theatre, geography and history to name only a few topics. There is almost always karaoke sometimes competitive versions. Almost every bar provides a venue for musical entertainers. Typical complement is a ship’s orchestra of six or eight pieces, a “party” band of three or four, a couple of duos vocal and instrumental plus one or two solo musicians. These groups rotate through the numerous venues. There is usually a main theatre stage hosting guest musicians, comedians, Vegas style shows that includes a small song and dance troupe. Dance floors associated with the bars are becoming less and less common.
On this cruise we came across a lovely husband and wife duo performing as Plus 2. They appear to have adopted us and encourage us to dance. Tonight after a really good steak dinner at the Crown Grill we went to the Wheelhouse Bar to dance for an hour with Plus 2. They made too big a thing announcing our 57th anniversary but we smiled. We also allowed a couple of the ship’s photographers to take a few posed pictures of us. Tomorrow we will see if they are worth taking home.
I have only a few photos of the trip today which I well try to post with tomorrow’s collection.
Edith Wharton
One of the great things about travel is that you find out how many good, kind people there are.
Carl Sagan
I don’t know where I am going, but I’m on my way.
A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was about to happen.
Mary Ritter Beard
Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.
Anthony Bourdain
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn.
Shirley MacLaine
The more I traveled, the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.
Samuel Johnson
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, see them as they are.
Rick Steves
Travel is rich with learning opportunities, and the ultimate souvenir is a broader perspective.
Paul Theroux
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.
George Carlin
Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas and take your next trip in kilometers.
Mark Twain
Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
Susan Sontag
I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
Aldous Huxle
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Michael Palin
Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life.
Bill Bryson
I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before.
Matthew Karsten
Investment in travel is an investment in yourself.
Ray Bradbury
See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream.
Mark Twain
One must travel to learn.
Emile Zola
Nothing develops intelligence like travel.
Augustine of Hippo
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.
Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving
Anita Desai
Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow- mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
Lao Tzu
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi
Travel brings power and love back into your life.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Travel far enough, you meet yourself.
G.K. Chesterton
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad
I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Essays
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
Gustave Flaubert
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Mary Anne Radmacher
I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
…there ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.
Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.
Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings
Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.
Paul Theroux
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Lin Yutang
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
Horace, The Odes of Horace
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
(They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.)
Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Every hundred feet the world changes.
Erma Bombeck
Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?
Roseanne Barr
Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.
J.A. Redmerski, The Edge of Never
I wonder if the ocean smells different on the other side of the world.”
Winna Efendi, The Journeys
Most of the time, beauty lies in the simplest of things.
Paolo Coehlo
This wasn’t a strange place; it was a new one.
Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone’s home and backyard.
Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic
You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.
James Russell Lowell
A wise man travels to discover himself.
Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
There is more time than there is expanse of the world and so any voyage at last will end.
Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
Anthony T.Hincks
I’m here, and now, so are you.
Maarten Schafer, Around The World in 80 Brands
Quite some years ago, I started traveling the planet. I thought this would teach me something about the world we live in. I was wrong… It taught me something about myself. It changed me. And nothing will ever again be black-and-white again.
Jane Wilson- Howarth
A traveller with an open mind grows richer with each journey, with each encounter, with each conversation.
M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Travel can sometimes push us to lose ourselves and find ourselves at once. The shedding of old prejudices, dead skin, and the opening of one’s eyes is far better than what any mainstream news outlet could ever tell you.
Melody Lee, Moon Gypsy
I may be lost, but I’m traveling the right way.
Barnaby Allen, Pacific Viking
A port arrival makes you feel so free …To realize what it is to be a free man, with a world before him.
Rachel Wolchin
If we were meant to stay in one place, we would have roots instead of feet.
Anonymous
Travel with the wit of an adult, and the wonder of a child.
Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battutah
Traveling leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
Lailah Gifty Akita
It is never too late to take another voyage.
Marty Rubin
The secret to being a good traveler is liking a place before you get there.
Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave.
Pat Conroy
Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
Pico Iyer
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry
There are several ways toreact to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina’s first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.
Jawaharlal Nehru
We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it.
Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter
Travel does not exist without home….If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world.
Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
Thornton Wilder, Our Town
Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.
Erol Ozan
You can’t understand a city without using its public transportation system.
Clifton Fadiman
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
Jennifer Lee
Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.
Hans Christian Andersen
To Travel is to Live.
Wallace Stevens
The most beautiful in the world is, of course, the world itself.
T.S. Eliot
The journey not the arrival matters.
Randy Komisar
And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want Lawrence Block on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
Henry Miller
One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.
James Michener
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.
Thomas Fuller
Travel makes a wise man better but a fool worse.
Martin Buber
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Lawrence Block
Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.
Andre Gide
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Mark Twain
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Chief Seattle
Take only memories, leave only footprints.
Henry Rollins
A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.
Herman Melville
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Eugene Fodor
You don’t have to be rich to travel well.
Eric Weiner
Conventional wisdom tells us… we take our baggage with us. I’m not so sure. Travel, at its best, transforms us in ways that aren’t always apparent until we’re back home. Sometimes we do leave our baggage behind, or, even better, it’s misrouted to Cleveland and is never heard from again.
Mark Jenkins
Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self- determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. Theworld the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and- white.
Arthur Frommer
At its best, travel should challenge our preconceptions and most cherished views, cause us to rethink our assumptions, shake us a bit, make us broader minded and more understanding.
John A. Shedd
A ship in a harbor is safe, but it not what ships are build for.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Not all those who wander are lost.
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.
