Monday, October 16, 2017

Day eight SEATTLE


SEATTLE
Day Eight


Looks like we came home to the smoke!
My lungs were doing really good with the week away.

My friends Carole, Annette and I
have mastered the art of selfies.
Not Phil so and I!
Here are our horrible shots.
Feel free to laugh!


Never look up for the photo!

We arrived in seattle very early in the morning Friday
How far from BC to Seattle?
Not Far
You get to schedule when you debark
people have planes to catch and other things to do.
We stayed and enjoyed breakfast,




 Soon we collected our carry bags from our rooms!
Then we reported to our assigned location to wait.
 It turned out to be the ice arena
BURR!
We did not wait in that freezing place. We stood outside of it.
.  We called and checked on Doug Sutton and found they
did not escape the Hurricane!  He had stories to tell.

It takes a lot of guess work to figure out how
 to get to a bus going to the parking lot
where you left your car a week ago!

So glad we had Cindy and Jim to help
 They are so seasoned at cruising it made our vacation carefree.


 It's good the whole ship doesn't leave at once.
It's nice to spaced out
the crowds.
In just a few short hours the next group will arrive and start their
cruise. The staff must be in the ship scrambling to get ready!


Everything is a process
Even leaving the Ship.

At Last the EXIT



Sunday, October 15, 2017

Day 7 Victoria, British Columbia

Day Seven and nearly home again!


Really Victoria or anywhere in BC feels like home to us.
Last night a note was on our bed reminding us to change our time back to Pacific time! 


I'm so glad we arranged a whale watch trip for Victoria.
I was really worried about the heavy smoke and
now that we are in port I can see we would have had to 
breath a lot of smoke in town! 

Looks like they are giving us longer at port, they need to do some repairs or 
an upgrade of some sort.  That means we won't leave port as soon.
People are happy about this extra time.



Once again we work on disembarking
ONLY
this time we are coming onto foreign soil 
Customs here we come!

Look what awaits us on the dock!

The last time we saw the Pepper's we took all 
our kids on a ferry to
VICTORIA!
They are all grown up now and some raising their own families 
This is like a little anniversary. 
 Now we are just couples going to Victoria!

See the smoke load?  Also see all the buses to the many locations in Victoria?



 Lucky for us, no buses,no trains, just walk over to the dock
board the ship and away we go! 

We are all enjoying this trip!  
I have so many good photos of the whale watch it will be
hard to decide what to put here.

This was a great whale watch trip
the staff was really fun & smart.
They could answer any of our questions.
We had nice conversations. 
The boat was respectful in how it approached wild life
I'm so glad.  

There was a circle of boats around the Orca


We share these Orca pods with BC and 
many of whales are well known to us.
This time however we ran into a transient pod, 
Very cool to hear all about how they fit into the area.  
 Did you know some Orca pods are not doing well due to food sources being in shorter supply
YET
the transient whales will eat different foods so they do better.  
I had no idea!  Picky eaters vs we'll eat anything!



Three Orca whales? They are the largest in the Dolphin family!

When the orca pop up like this it's called "spy hopping"


There was a lot of playful interaction between these whales.








We watched the pod for a while then moved on toward the lighthouse for some seal lion viewing and had a nice surprise. 





We saw a humpback feeding!  Rarely do you see this, I hope you can see in my photo, it's his mouth.   




Humpback whale feeding!!
The light house as the fog rolls in

A Canada submarine, interesting place to practice
sea lions, smelly creatures.



When we got back to our ship 
We noticed another cruise line was on it's way it.
Fun to watch it come in to the berth next to us.


The ship has a cute red tug boat helping it in!




 Isn't it pretty at night
We are still docked in Victoria.


 Love the little tug boat.

Thank you to our singing waiters and staff!



Everyone clap for our wonderful waiters!


Here is our wonderful waiter staff!




Tonight we didn't get to any shows, we needed to pack our 
bags and put them outside our cabin door for pick up by 11pm.  
It's a lot harder to pack up again after a week of coming and going.
Echville our waiter amazing!



Radivoj Head Waiter extraordinaire




Christopher Assistant wait always with the bread basket!





Another whale watch photo, 
I can't seem to move it up with the others.    
So here are a few others
look at all that smoke in the air.  
This was our whale watch boat
enjoy looking at the photos on their web site.  










The compression bands for sea sickness really helped 
or this would have been a horrible trip for me.
I'm sad for the journey to end  but really glad to be off the ship!

Sitting on our couch window out to the promenade.






Day eight SEATTLE

SEATTLE Day Eight Looks like we came home to the smoke! My lungs were doing really good with the week away. My friends Carole,...