Category Archives: Personal Rambling

Almost to Vancouver, and then home!

It’s been quite a journey. Everyone seems both happy and relaxed, and tired. Much sleeping-in to be done tomorrow I suspect.

Thanks for following along! Next vacation is scheduled for sometime between May and August 2018, so until then we return you to your irregularly scheduled blogging.

The map from the TV in our room:

You can see in this one where the ship turned for a short time while the helicopter was operating above the bow.

And in this one you can see that we did go up the straight towards the open ocean, but turned around at about 11:30 to head back towards Seattle. You can also see that we traveled 1772 nautical miles in total this week.

Virtual balcony indicates it is indeed quite dark…

Although that’s not actually true! Here’s the real view from outside!

Couple of shots from the top deck of the ship.

Off to our last breakfast!

And awwwaaaaay we go!

That other ship left Seattle 20 minutes after we did, then went to Alaska, and now we meet again in Victoria…

It’s fun watching the sea planes in the harbor. I’ll travel that way one of these days.

The pilots were off the boat in no time flat. Much easier than the poor guy in SF. The guy driving the pilot boat was having fun getting squirrely and going in circles for… Fun?

Back in the promenade, stuffed animal demo:

Miles to walk, plenty to see…

We’d never seen a “sushi burrito” before, so that was fun.

They have a cathedral here too. Even more modern.

It was quite pretty, but yet still lacks a certain oomph…

On our walk back we were stalked by a seal.

And now the ships horn has sounded, and we’re headed down the channel back to Seattle.

Actually I’m not sure where we’ll go. It can’t possibly take us until 6am to get back to Seattle, so will we just hang about in puget sound? An adventure awaits!

We decided to visit “Canada’s Castle”, Craigdarroch Castle. A nice 2.5 mile walk later we’re exploring the inside of this amazing building.

The lap of luxury, a library with a book holder which includes a candle holder! How wonderfully decadent!

They had neat original radiators which are circular or quarter-circle to fit in corners. Kinda neat.

I think certain types of music would be dangerous to play on a piano with candles perched precariously…

Bevin liked the lamp.

The coal magnate who built this castle had interesting ideas.

Of course, as it turns out, he wanted BC to get annexed by the US so he wouldn’t have to pay tariffs to sell coal to California. His vocal support for this seems to have been why he was never knighted by the queen.

The view from up in the spire. You can see our ship!

There was a piece of art that had what seemed to be quite an odd style. It made not sure what’s wrong with these animals. (terrible picture, I did my best)

The back of the castle from the outside.

It may not be a “castle” in the European sense, but what a place!

Too bad about the guy who won it in a lottery and lost it with poor speculative investments.

Sunrise in the straight of Juan de Fuca.

Backing the ship into the slip is impressive to watch. Such perfectly detailed and exacting control, no tug required…

The pixel ate view from our virtual balcony.

Off we go to explore!

We were sitting in Brian and Julian’s Romo enjoying the view. We went to head upstairs to dinner and I noticed that we seemed to be moving slowly. Turns out there was some sort of medical emergency.

Those coast guard guys really know their work. Very impressive moves on the part of everyone involved. Really wish I had been able to get a better view of the big roping the medic, doing two basket lifts, and hoisting the medic off.

No idea what went wrong, but someone had to get hauled off the ship and off to Newport. Julian says it must’ve been immediately life threatening or they would’ve just kept them on board until we arrived in Victoria.

Sea day has been fun, we hit some weather and actually experienced some reasonably severe movement of the ship for most of the day. Pretty severe wind up on the deck, made it challenging to walk in a couple of places. We seem to have gone further out away from the coast than we did while headed south, seemingly to avoid weather.

Waking up to the ship moving, and going to sleep being rocked back and forth, this feels like being at sea!