We were hot and the air was smoky. We were a week into August and dreading the rest of the summer. Although we usually plan a trip for our anniversary, this year the date was just a month away and we had no plans. The Delta variant of the coronavirus was raging, too many Americans had turned their backs on a safe and free vaccine which would have nipped this whole surging pandemic in the bud, nothing was safe, and everyone was going about their business as if their friends and neighbors weren’t clogging the hospitals and morgues. Camping destinations were full to overflowing. Air travel was hellish. California, a favorite vacation destination, was on fire, under drought conditions, and experiencing their own Covid surge.
What if we went north to Alaska? Where it’s cool? Do we fly there? Ugh. Drive there? That means days of driving. What about a (gulp) cruise? Yes, we just watched that documentary about that cruise ship that got stuck in Japan at the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic. Yes, being on a cruise would mean being stuck on a boat with a couple thousand of our closest strangers. But we’re hearing good things about the first post-pandemic cruises.
The ships are cruising at half capacity with a full crew. They are requiring vaccinations and tests. The ports are happy and relieved to have the cruisers back after 18 months of no business. Maybe now is the perfect time to cruise - especially for crowd-averse travelers like us. Maybe this is the perfect time to see those glaciers before they recede out of reach. We take our credit card out and leap. We choose a cruise just about two weeks away. The earlier we can get up north, the better.
We had to hunt down a place that would test us for Covid 19 in a three-day window before the cruise started, however, the cruise started on a Monday, so two of those days were weekend days. The most accurate of the tests would take three days, so that was out. We opted to go to the Redmond urgent care clinic and get the $85 results-while-you-wait test. With our results in hand, we headed for Vancouver to drop off the dogs with our patient and saintly daughter-in-law, and then drove the final leg up to Seattle to embark on our Plague Cruise.
The cruise parking was ABSOLUTELY HIDDEN AND UNFINDABLE. Luckily for me, I wasn’t trying to find it, Drew was. With no help from Google Maps or signage (or me), he managed to hunt it down.
We are cruising on Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas, which normally sails with 2,146 passengers and 884 crew. On this cruise, the passenger manifest is about as long as the crew roster - about 850 each. The ship is 22 years young. You can see the evidence of rust and its constant removal and maintenance, some cloudy windows, and a refreshing lack of wave pools and water slides.
We had our passports, Covid test results, overnight bags and cruise tickets in hand and masks on faces. No lines. At least one dozen cruise employees guiding us step by step.
Our balcony room was surprisingly roomy with a couch and desk/vanity combo, a queen size bed, and plenty of storage. The bathroom was fine in a no-wasted-space sort of way.
The view from our balcony as we waited to get underway.
The view of Seattle from our balcony was industrially beautiful. We are excited. I’m disappointed that the scenes in every episode of The Love Boat where all the passengers are leaning over the railings, throwing confetti and whooping while the ship sails away are bullshit.
We tour the ship, masks on indoors. There are a lot of empty deck chairs, Some small but tasteful swimming pools, one outside, one in a warm, humid “solarium,” and one in the nearly abandoned kiddie space. This is a cruise to Alaska glaciers - there are practically no children aboard.
We could drive a small SUV around this deck and not inconvenience one passenger.
At our first onboard dinner, we meet our dining servants, Bokang, our head waiter and Mikhail, our assistant/beverage waiter. We will be needing both, apparently. They are very attentive. They have very little else to do. The food is good. Mikhail sweeps the crumbs from the table between courses.
Tomorrow we will be motoring up the Yukon toward Sitka.