Day 1: Flight to Vancouver and embarkation day

Today in a word? Wow. Just wow.

I'll start with the end of the day and then backtrack. I am sitting right now on our balcony. At 8:20pm it is completely light outside, but I can see the orange glow of twilight beginning to streak across the water. We just came from a wonderful dinner (vegetarian ragout for me; prime rib for G) in the dining room and, interested in nothing else but the scenery passing by my room, I am foregoing any further evening entertainment.

We are cruising in the Georgia Strait, a mostly north-sound passage between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia. The ship is probably cruising at about 12 knots, and the water is mirror smooth. The temperature is so warm that even dressed only in my nightgown, I am perfectly comfortable on the balcony. I have my feet propped up and am leaned back, enjoying the scenery and typing this post. Every couple of minutes the scenery is so staggering that I am using my iPhone or picking up my Nikon camera to take a photo. The mild, dry breeze is like a balm on my weary body.

Life is so very, very good.

So now that I've explained where I am, let me tell you how we got here.

When the alarm went off this morning at 4:45am, I had had just two hours of sleep. In fact, at 2:30am I debated sleeping at all or just pushing on through the night. Finally exhaustion must have won out, because I did get some rest. I don't know why my body does this; whenever I know I have to get up early for a trip, sleep eludes me at the time I need it most.

Luckily, excitement is good adrenaline, and so we managed to complete the items on our "last morning" checklist of things to do in a peaceable manner ('cause I can get pretty grumpy when I haven't had enough sleep) At 5:45am, Martha arrived and told us our limousine was ready. ;-) Now, that's a true friend!!

Since we were taking an international flight, check in at the airport needed to be completed a full hour before flight time, and took a bit longer than usual due to extra checking of passports. By the time we got through security and to our gate, we waited just a few minutes before we boarded our plane, a 64-passenger Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) 700 for the three hour flight to Vancouver. Not my first choice of aircraft for a 3-hour flight, but its non-stop service won out over larger, more comfortable planes requiring two flights.

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When we booked this flight, seat options were limited, but we managed to get two seats together one row ahead of the last row on the plane. We definitely wanted seats that reclined. When I did the preliminary check in online yesterday, I confirmed our seats and noticed that, while the seat numbers were the same, we were now in the last row of the plane, right next to the restroom in seats that didn't recline.

Ruh-roh. This didn't look good, but furtively hoping it was a mix up, I tried to distract G with "extra leg room" seats for a $44 a piece upgrade. No dice. So I decided to hope for the best. When we boarded the plane, it looked like the luck we've had with this trip had just run out- we WERE in the last row next to the restrooms. I asked the flight attendant standing there if the flight was full and she thought it was, but she would check when she did her headcount. We sat tight and didn't settle in too much...since we were in the last row we weren't holding anyone up. Finally she came back and said, "Row 9". Thinking there was one seat available, I told G to take it. The flight attendant then leaned over and whispered that there were two seats together. The luck returned!

Mt.  Rainier  from the plane

It was immediately obvious what had happened: the last row of four seats had been removed and two or three rows of seats mid-plane had been moved a bit further apart- the "extra leg room", extra $44 seats I had told G about. We were in one of those rows! This small victory kept me fueled through the flight, and although we arrived in Vancouver 30 minutes late, the friendliness of everyone at the airport kept me going.