Our "Why are we doing this" cruise weekend

Friday night 9/18 - we're off. This weekend features a one night cruise, followed by a two night cruise. Given the chaos of leaving a ship, we wonder why we do it. But where else can you get lunch, dinner, a room and your choice of one or more evening activities (dancing, shows or movies) for under 300.00 for 2? And, it was cheaper to fly to Seattle than Vancouver.

So here we are in our hotel room in Seattle. Our good friend picked us up, and we had dinner near Seattle airport - it was a barbecue specialty place, but we ordered fried brie with raspberry sauce and cranberry chutney. Yummy. Then it was a quick ride to our hotel. In the morning, the hotel will take us back to the airport where we'll meet other friends going on the cruise with us.

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Hello from the Golden Princess. It's been quite a day. We woke up around 9, and went back to the airport at 11 to meet our friends. While waiting, we met Sam and Kathleen, other friends of our Seattle friends Joe and Della. Della arrived at about 11:45 sans Joe. Apparently he had to go run some errands, so we were going to meet him at their sons house. Driving out of the airport, Joe called, and said that he was running late, so we went off to Trader Joes to buy wine. Called again, running later. So we shopped around for a while. Then, he needed a sandwich, so over to Albertsons. Call from Joe - on the way to his sons. We're heading over. Della decided to show us this really cute street along Puget Sound. As we're driving down the street, I asked Glen if he'd been on the street before. He said yes. Della asked him if he knew how to get out of the neighborhood. Glen's advice - head uphill. We did and eventually made it to the son's house where Joe was waiting. It went smoothly from there - drop Joe at home in Queen Anne hill to pack, and a drive to the new cruise terminal. You leave the main road and it's sort of winding under and around, but there are drop off lanes.

The terminal looked like every other terminal. In this one, there was a line to check in, but we were able to go to the preferred line and get checked in quickly. Sam and Kathleen were ahead of us going in, because we checked luggage, but we got ahead of them because of the preferred line.

We headed to our inside cabin:



It's pretty, shall we say cozy? We were hoping for an upgrade, but no such luck.

Sail away was fun - I did a bit of line dancing, and enjoyed the views of the Olympic peninsula.

We met our friends for our first, and probably last, Anytime Dining dinner. Anytime is a Princess concept where people can opt for a restaurant like experience, rather than traditional dining. In this case, there was a buyout of the traditional dining room, so it was pretty chaotic. We were told there was a 45 minute wait - and then everyone would be seated, turning it into a more traditional like dinner. Our friend Della was eager to get to the Ballroom Blitz activity, so she wasn't happy. About 10 minutes after we got there, the Maitre'D of the traditional dining room arrived to take a batch of us to that room. Apparently he did that throughout the evening.

After dinner, we did some dancing, sampled a hot tub and headed to bed in our very dark room. We were being kicked out of the room early, but nothing we could do about that.

On Sunday morning, we got up and out of the room and headed to the dining room reserved for the higher echelons of the loyalty program. After a breakfast of coffee, juice and pastry, we decided to leave the ship and go to our hotel. There was about a 5 minute line to leave the ship, but customs was a breeze, just walk through the terminal, hand the customers declaration to a guy checking the passports and voila, we're in Canada.

Arizona trip 2 of 4

I'm sitting at the airport, waiting to leave for my second of 4 trips to Phoenix before Thanksgiving. Usually Beth goes with me, but this is a quick trip - back fast enough that I've already checked in for my return flight. It also kicks of my mega-travel fall - out of town for all or part of six straight weekends. Two Phoenix, one coastal cruise, a trip to NY spanning two, and the San Francisco 3-day. I'm looking forward to Halloween at home.

Arizona this time is for a crew meeting. We felt it was important that one of us go (as crew captains) and today is Becky's birthday, so I go. I think this is the first time I've flown on September 11.

So far, flight is on time. More later from the end of the trip.

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The meeting on the 12 went well. The flight home - not so much. I get to the airport about an hour and a half before my flight. It's going to be two hours late - so much for my dance lesson. But wait, there's a flight leaving in 20 minutes. Maybe I can get on that. Run throough security. No gate information. Turns out it's on US Air in another terminal. So much for that. In the meantime my flight is canceled. What then happened was about 35 minutes of trying to get home. At one point, it was through Denver. Only about 1500 miles out of the way. While the agent was calling US air, I was on the phone with United and they were telling me I could get on a 4pm on US air direct to San Francisco. The agent was saying that she called, and there were no more seats.

Finally, she told me to run to gate 3 and they'd put me on a flight to LA. From there, getting home is easy. That flight was about 15 minutes late, but that was OK - I had a 3 hour layover. Got to the airport, and found I'd just missed a flight. However, my flight was at 8:15 and there was a 6:20. I was able to go standby on that, and was home at about 8. Did I mention that my day started at 6 am? It was exhausting but other than getting home a good weekend.