Shrinking Bucket List: The Cruise

The Holland America cruise from Seward to Vancouver, BC, was wonderful. If I were wealthy, I would live on cruise ships, changing ships now and then and going to different ports all the time. (sigh)

All of the food was really good, but I mostly ate soups, salads, rolls and butter, and desserts. On previous cruises, I have eaten bacon and watermelon for breakfast every day. On this cruise, I reluctantly omitted the bacon. They always had two soups for lunch and three soups for dinner, one of which would be a cold soup. They had big bowls of matchstick-cut jicama and radishes, and I ate plates full of both at lunch and dinner. There weren’t as many different desserts on this cruise, but a choice of 10 different desserts, including ice cream, was perfectly adequate. Susan and I ate every meal at the lido restaurant (buffet), and it was basically the same menus as what was available in the regular dining room – except we didn’t have lobster tail at the buffet like they had one night in the dining room.

The entertainment was fun -- comedians, singers, dancers, lots of music. Susan went to movies while I went to the live shows.

We didn’t go on any excursions. Susan walked around the towns we stopped at. Sometimes I didn’t even get off the ship. I had been on excursions at every port when my sister and I went on an Alaska cruise several years ago. One thing I didn’t do then that I wish I had was to take the tram to the top of Mt. Roberts in Juneau – so I did do that this time – and it was great.

We rode the Amtrak Cascades bus to Seattle. There was also a train available, but it reached Seattle after dark. http://www.amtrakcascades.com/

Just south of Vancouver, I saw mile after mile of greenhouses. A Google search produced the following information: http://www.agf.gov.bc.ca/aboutind/products/plant/grnh_veg.htm On that Web site, it said, “Crops grown in a greenhouse can yield up to ten times as much as crops grown in the field.” Who knew??!!