Vacation Sunday (Aug 14): on the boat

 It took us a bit to get to sleep, even though it was late and we were super tired. Of course, we also
woke up early due to the time change. We lazed around for a while, got a muffin from the lobby,
pretended to take a nap, and were finally on our way.

Our Uber driver was a bit scary. If I had been the drivers around us I would have been rather upset.
That being said, he got us there safely and easily on time. We drove through the port area of Seattle
and while it was a whirl wind and poor tour, it was still fun to see. Coming up from the south Ben and I
were both surprised at how small the Sky Needle looked compared to the other buildings, but once we
were on the boat we saw that it was much farther north and that looking at it from the west made it
look set apart and taller.

Check-in went so smoothly. The only small issue was that an airport agent had ripped off a luggage tag
and the signage for getting new luggage tags wasn’t great. Then Ben had to go through two staplers
because the first didn’t actually have any staples. We had preordered our medallions that let them track
our every movement, and so got to skip a ton of lines.

Now, the app that they use is terrible. I’ll return to this later, but it wouldn’t let me (or Ben) upload my
vaccination card or proof of negative test. Ben was able to upload his stuff. Anyway, that put us in the
“blue” lane instead of the “green” lane. Well, this actually worked out to our advantage because the
blue lane had two groups of people and the green lane looked like it would take about a half-hour. So in
this case the bad app helped us. They verified all our info and said we could get on the boat!

We had lunch right away. I had a calzone with half an apple tart. They were both good, but not
amazing. We tried to watch our safety video through the app but it wouldn’t load. We finally got to our
room (in the very front of the boat) and the beds were twins because the app didn’t submit our
preference for a queen. (Now, we knew this could easily be changed, but again, the dumb app.)
We dropped off the backpack and went to explore. We were both surprised (quite literally) to see Mt.
Rainer. We weren’t expecting to see mountains and then there one was! We enjoyed finding other
mountains around the boat after that.

I ended up taking a nap after our tour. It’s also when Ben realized that our dinner reservations hadn’t
been saved and the person on the phone was very unhelpful. We decided to walk to guest services, and
a nice lady there found us a table at our desired time and we were able to get a reservation at one of
the nice restaurants, which had been completely booked when Ben talked to the person on the phone.
While we wouldn’t have gone hungry, it’s nice to have a reservation.

Dinner…was a bit interesting. The couple two tables down from us was obnoxious. As we sat down they were bickering with each other and then a manager came over and they complained about the wine for twenty minutes. A couple finally sat down between us and things got back to normal. The four of them talked about a lot of things but it was normal conversation topics. The food itself was delicious. A cold pineapple soup and some cod with mashed potatoes, carrots and green beans.

We found a place to play a game while watching the coastline and sunset and headed back to our room
to read. We fell asleep fairly quickly…it had been a long day and we weren’t used to the time
change yet.