If you’re a returning reader of this blog, thank you (!!) for joining me once again. I really missed you guys! If you’re here for the first time, or just to get some information about the startup cruises to Alaska, welcome! Please know that this blog is first and foremost my diary, not a travel journal, and certainly not a travel guide. My writing style is purely conversational, and people who know me say I write exactly how I talk, but hopefully you’ll be able to glean one or two nuggets of knowledge from what I post.
Doesn’t the past year and a half just sometimes seem like a bad dream? What the what just happened? Is still happening? I remember like it was yesterday, sometime in mid January 2020 on the Majestic Princess, discussing our mutually growing concerns about the virus with the most traveled guests, who were basically living on board the Majestic as it cruised up to Asia and then moving to the Sapphire Princess for several more months in Asia. And I often think about the passengers who flew all the way to Sydney to board the Majestic Princess at the start of our final cruise to Tasmania, intending to stay on as the ship sailed up to Singapore. That trip was aborted about a week after we disembarked. And I’ll never forget G and I talking about this in hushed tones over breakfast on the Majestic Princess in early January 2020. Right from the start, he thought this was going to be a really big deal. “You mean like an epidemic?” I asked. “No, bigger than that. What’s that word?” Well, neither one of us, in that moment, could think of the term pandemic. Yeah, that will never happen again, will it?
Still, for most of the subsequent 18 months, I may have been alone in the world in not chomping at the bit to travel again. We spent the majority of 2020 trying to get refunds of money that Princess owed us, not related to cancellations, but to normal cruising business, and I was, simply put, burned out by the effort. Since I do most of the cruise planning, and I was not overly anxious to return to the sea, never did I ever imagine we’d be on one of the first Princess cruises out of the US when cruising began again. But I was won over in an instant when it was announced in late May that the Majestic Princess cruises to Alaska were going to be fully vaccinated cruises, that ours would probably be the only ship in each port (it’s like the old days!) and that the Majestic Princess would most likely not be sailing full (ditto!). After some of the antics that we have observed/endured since this whole thing began, the opportunity to be with like-minded people was just too good to pass up, and it seemed appropriate to bookend our COVID break with Majestic Princess cruises. We also thought it was prudent to see what we think of Cruising in the Age of COVID. We have final payments for a few other cruises due beginning in early September (still in the negotiation stage at our house). It will be nice to know what we’re getting into before we jump in feet first.
But, us being us, we had a change of plans (you’re shocked, right?) just yesterday when we added a cruise BEFORE our planned cruise on the Majestic Princess. That’s right…we’re doing sort of back to back cruises. We’ll be boarding Holland America Line’s Nieuw Amsterdam in Seattle on Saturday, then the following Sunday we’ll board the Majestic Princess at (I think…I haven’t yet figured out all the details) the same pier. This is what happens when you wake up one morning, already tired of the heat and the smoke and the haze and the unrelenting sun. By noon it was a done deal.
Of course that also meant a change of flights, and what really sealed the deal was when we could book non-stop flights on Southwest just three days in advance for about $100 each. The hours since then have understandably been busy ones; however, prepping, packing…these are different sports when we’re only leaving for 15 days. No finishing up projects around the house after dark, no emptying the refrigerator and pantry and addressing Christmas cards in July. I’d forgotten how easy short trips are…
…which is a good thing, because Princess raised the degree of difficulty of the pre-boarding check in process to a new high. Oy vey, what a challenge the Medallion App has been for most of us. We were unable to do anything in the app until we staged an intervention with the Ocean Support team, and even since then it’s been shaky at best. I tried to phone Ocean Support with our issues as they arose, to make sure they were aware of them, but when wait times regularly exceeded an hour, I gave up. Listening to that hold music over and over again was a sure fire way to harsh my mellow. Someday, hopefully, it will work for everyone in the way it was intended. I think it will provide some wonderful functionality when it does.
Meanwhile, for those of us who like visual aids, this is the amount of time we’ve spent getting our pre-cruise check in done with Holland America:
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And here’s how long we’ve spent working on our Princess pre-cruise check in with the Medallion app:
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Yeah, it’s been fun.
Finally, it seems horribly insensitive to glibly end this post with my usual “Life is Good”. Life right now isn’t particularly good, not even for the luckiest ones among us. We’ve all endured so much loss…of loved ones, of trust in the previously sacrosanct, of mutual respect. But I have a goal to find some good in every day. And, for right now, I’ll take that and be very, very grateful.
It’s time
