Random Nuclear Strikes

Yesterday I spoke how the alcohol flowed like water onboard ship and made mention of a very special purchase I made at the Duty Free shop.

Check it out

Not only did they stock 4.5Liter bottles of Johnnie Walker Red and Black, the store also had Johnnie Walker Green Label and, as you can see in the above photo, the infamous Johnnie Walker Blue.

It has been nigh on a decade since I have seen the Green in Washington State’s government controlled liquor stores. I don’t frequent them but a couple times a year, so I could be just hitting them when they’re out of stock, but with the price they ask for a bottle of the Red and/or Black, I seriously doubt if they would carry something that expensive. Which is also the most likely reason they don’t carry the Blue. At what would probably be a $250 price, I cannot ever remember when they carried the Blue Label. Having questioned friends who make weekly stops into the stores upon my return, neither can they.

I know you can skip the guvn’r and pick this stuff at the Ft Lewis PX; but really, going onto base just for Scotch shows signs of either a real disdain for the guvn’r or alcoholism.

I don’t know when I’ll actually be cracking this bad boy open, seeing as how I still have a two-thirds of a bottle Cragganmore, but when I do, I’ll let you know. Who knows, some of you might even be there?

I also mentioned yesterday that I would think about getting behind the setting up of a blogger cruise. Mr. Completely mentioned that he’d like to see a gun-blogger cruise going to Alaska.

Let me know your thoughts on either of these.

On a related note; one of the thoughts I couldn’t get out of my head during the trip was how easy it would be to set up an air-rifle competition in one of the 200+ yard long hallways. I don’t think for a minute that any cruise ship company would ever go for it, but it is a nice thought.

One last bit of funniness; I was sitting at a table in the buffet area, waiting for the wife to finish loading up her plate and join me when the woman sitting at the table next to me made a complaint to her husband about the mashed potatoes.

She said “These potatoes aren’t very good. I don’t even think they were made from real potatoes.”

She’ll probably never know how right she was. I saw that the wife had some of the potatoes on her plate and after the woman left I asked the wife what she thought of them. She said “You mean the polenta? It was pretty good.”

Cruise Week 06 has come to a close and my sealegs have, for the most part, gone away.

The first thing I’d like to say is that the wife and I have already started planning another one of these for next year.

The second thing I’d like to say is that you have to take one of these trips at least once in your life.

In the post below this one I have included cruising tips and items of note, but in this post I want to focus just on the trip itself. I’m not a very good photographer, but I’ve posted a good selection of the photos I took up. I also have nearly 70 exceptional pictures in a file totalling around 28MBs that I’ll email to folks who want them and whose email programs will handle that size of file. The pics in this post have been shrunk to a size that WordPress will accept, the others in the collection are nearly twice as large. Check the new link near the top of my links section in the sidebar for the email addy.

We boarded shortly before 1400 on Monday. This pic was taken from Deck 11, starboard aft.

At 1700 we set off north out of Puget Sound. Unfortunately, it was dark by the time we were cruising past Whidbey and the Orcas Islands and there wasn’t much to see but some house lights in the dark.

Since I work nights and hadn’t quite converted to a daytime schedule I awoke very early every day of the trip. Our arrival time at Nanimo, B.C. was supposed to be 0800, but we arrived much earlier. This was taken at around 0630. This pic was taken from deck 12, midship starboard. Nanimo is in the left margin.

Neither myself or the wife went into Nanimo, mostly because getting from the ship to the town required ‘Tendering”, which is a fancy word for getting into a motorized lifeboat, having the boat lowered into the water and being floated into town. Not exactly my idea of fun. Plus, we were only going to be in port for four hours, which isn’t a lot of time to go exploring, so we stayed on board.

At noon we set sail for Prince Rupert, B.C.. Our arrival time wasn’t until 1400 the next day, but luckily for us the weather was exceptional and our ship was cleared by the Captain to take the “Inside” Inside passage route to Rupert. This pic was taken on Deck 7, midship starboard.

The scenery was spectacular and there were many times when I could have tossed a baseball off either side of the ship and hit the shore. I literally couldn’t decide which side of the ship to stay on for the best pics.

We arrived in Rupert right on time and the wife and I disembarked shortly thereafter to wander around town for the afternoon. Rupert is a friendly and “real” place and not at all a tourist trap like Victoria. If I hadn’t cropped it out of the pic, the bottom right corner of this pic would contain a fish processing/packing plant called Porcher Seafoods (it’s in a different photo of Rupert).

That pic was take on Deck 12, miship starboard.

As dusk fell the wife and I retired for the day and went to the “formal” dinner with my mom, step-dad, brother and sister in law. By the time dinner was done, it was dark and no more phots were taken.

But the next day we spent the entire day weaving around the islands Inside Passage. If it wasn’t Canadian territory, I swear, I would have jumped ship and stayed, it was just so spectacular. I’m sure the wife would have had a thing or two to say about that, but swimming in cold sea water make males of the human species temporarily deaf, or so I have heard.

This pic was taken from Deck 12, midship portside around midday on Day Four as we were cruising about. We saw numerous Killer Whales and someone said that they saw a few Grey Whales as well, but I couldn’t tell. Sadly, my camera was never fast enough to get pictures (chalk one up for old-school 35mm film cameras).

Once again, Day Four was mostly spent running from port to starboard and back again trying to take pictures. If I were a better photographer, I’d probably still have 140 photos on file, though if you think about it, the 70 decent ones I have isn’t a bad number either.

Once again, it was dark when we were sailing through US waters and I didn’t get to photgraph anything until we entered port. But I think the ones I got if downtown Seattle and the Port of Seattle at dawn make up for that.

Deck 11 Aft at around 0530. The best of the bunch from that morning. We docked at 0700 and were off the boat by 1030 and on the road home.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, you need to make this trip at least once in your life. Feel free to ask questions in the comments or email them to me. If I can help people do this, I’ll be quite happy.

I also wouldn’t mind thinking about helping set up a blogger cruise sometime next year, if folks have suggestions……

Spending a week on a pleasure boat takes a certain things that other forms of travel and other types of vacations do not. It is here that I would like to point these out for you. As we get along into this, you’ll find this page about the ship quite handy, and yes, there’ll be pictures.

And so we begin, below the fold.

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