Today was transit day. We went to bed at 9:30 last night, and I managed to sleep for 6 hours. I went to the 24 hour food court to get breakfast before heading to the terminal. There were a handful of people crashing at the food court - I guess that’s where you can go if your flight gets cancelled and you have to wait overnight for the next one. At least the ambiance was nice.
We met up with LPCR and her family, then proceeded to Terminal 5, then back out to the air train, which took us to Terminal 7 and we flew out with Alaska. That whole process was a longer walk but all of it was indoors - we didn’t want to walk outside because it was hot and muggy.
The flight took off on time and got to Seattle early. No in-flight entertainment system though, I ended up, listening to podcast reading a paper on Apple’s Foundation Database, die Gansemagdand and die Rübe (which took much longer than necessary since I’m not good enough), and 碧血劍. I took a nap too, which was nice.
We got held on the tarmac for almost half an hour because there was no gate for us to dock at since we were early. But we got off the plane on time at 10:30, and proceeded to baggage claim. There was an Oceania rep already waiting for us, with our names written on large placards to get our attention (which Viking didn’t do). We took a bus to the dock after waiting in a special room in the airport for cruise passengers taking shuttle buses, and after 20 minutes of driving, 20 minutes of waiting in traffic on the waterfront, and 20 minutes waiting in the checkin line, we got on to the ship.
It was 12:30 and we had lunch at the buffet (which was swamped!). After that, we walked around the ship, where many places had open houses. We also fixed up our dinner reservations and excursion reservations to make sure we’d be in the same group. But it was a bit awkward since LPCR and her family had their carry-on luggage with them.
Our rooms were ready at 3pm, and our luggage also arrived, so we spent the next hour unpacking. There was a lot more storage space in the room than it looked; we packed for two different weathers, but didn’t use up all the space. Their bathroom was huge (I’d hoped they had used some of that space for the main living space). We did plan to use the laundry at some point though.
We went out again around 4pm to tour the rest of the ship, and then above deck for the sail-away from Seattle. Along the way we met many interesting folks, most of them had cruised a lot longer than we had. There was this lesbian couple from Philadelphia whose flight, which was scheduled to leave at 6:30pm from Philly, kept getting delayed until it got cancelled at 2am, and the only flight out that would be in time to catch the cruise was from Newark the next morning at 7:30. So they drove in the middle of the night to New Jersey. I didn’t understand how they were still awake at that point.
LPCR joined us a bit later, and then her family a bit even later. We went to the main dining room for a 2-hour dinner afterwards. La Prof. and I went to the evening show that night, which was okay - the singers were at the level of some of our amateur group’s singers.
Seattle skyline at sail-out
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