Pappa Hardy's Musings on Life.

A large cruise ship like the Golden Princess is like a miniature city. We have approximately 3,000 passengers concentrated in a boat with 15 decks, a numerous number of staterooms, and lots of places to roam. If you book a cruise with your friends, you expect to run into them during the weeklong stay on board.

The last two cruises I have taken we have gone on our own. I somehow, despite my experience about this world, thought I would avoid seeing someone I knew. However, I ran into a long ago Cheyenne acquaintance, Kelcey Webb, from Cheyenne, Wyoming, during my August 2009 cruise.

I saw this guy walk by, knew I knew him from somewhere and he also starred at me. When I walked by his table a few minutes later, we starred at each other and then started asking questions. Sure enough, it was him. It was an interesting experience. I had been wondering, no more than 10 minutes earlier, whether I would end up knowing anybody on the cruise, and there we go, out of a nation of 300 million, I knew a family on this cruise. It was an interesting experience.

Well, I have now been on enough cruises that I can believe that different cruises seem to attract different kind of cruise people. While this observation might be considered trite and easy to have resolved, I am still amazed that the Mexican Cruises out of Los Angeles tended to attract the yuppies from the LA area (along with some arrogant older professional people). The Caribbean cruise attracted a lot of the cantankerous New England and New Yorker types. There were a lot of rude people on that cruise. The Alaskan cruise attracted a lot of the down to earth Frontier types, sprinkled with a varied assortment of Orientals (mostly Chinese). It has been interesting observing this. What is the common link that I am somehow bringing to this phenomenon?

Bonnie and I now have made 4 cruises. 3 of these cruises were on the Golden Princess. Two of those were to the same destination and one of those was with her mother Shirley and a cruising companion. The interesting thing is that there are some really different things on this cruise and some that are the same. For the most part, the ship is the same. They have renovated some things, moving the casino from the 6th deck to the 7th, making it bigger and opening it up to outside windows on the Promenade deck. They have taken some space away that was accessible to all passengers and made it a limited access and you have to pay extra (that sucks). They have added a movie under the stars movie screen which is nice. You can sit up on deck under the stars, which a wonderful movie, have a blanket to cover you and keep you warm, and have some popcorn. That is great. The biggest negative change is the entertainment. The original entertainment to me was world class. This trip, it is much harder to get new and different entertainers in to perform in the evenings, and the ones that are here are uninspiring and we have them every night. I have been disappointed in that, but that does give us more time in the evening to do what we want like read and wander the ship. All together, not a bad new ship. I probably will always follow where the Golden Princess is traveling around the world.

My wife can be so predictable. In our cruise stop at Ketchikan at the Rainforest Wilderness Sanctuary, the guide started the tour off by telling us what to do if we came across a black bear during the tour. Given the scarcity of wildlife we had seen up to that point, I am sure that Bonnie was thinking that nothing was really going to happen.

Imagine my wife’s reaction when within 5 minutes of starting our tour, that someone spotted a black bear through the underbrush. Sure enough, there was a black bear. I looked at my wife, to find that her eyes were wide open, her shoulders hunched up, and her body wanted to let out that scream that the guide had warned us not to make. She wanted to run that you could tell that it was tormenting her. To her credit, she did what instructed to do, and we had no problem with the bear, which was no further than 30 feet from us. There was black bear terror for her, but she handled it admirably.

Tonight my whale watching finally paid off, and very much by accident. Whale watching is a hard job. When they say it is a whale of a job, that means it is hard work. Whale watching hasn’t been much different. I spent a lot of time trying to see them, and up till now have only been rewarded by a fin here, a blowing of air there, but nothing more than just a little bit of flesh.

Tonight we were sitting waiting to go to dinner on Deck 5 in a bar (now don’t think anything bad, I was drinking a Diet Coke) when I noticed everyone looking out the window. I looked out and saw not only one, but several whales surfacing and moving around. I immediately notified Bonnie and we saw them, and a lot of fish. It was really quite a site. Then, that was finished off by seeing another even bigger animal surface and show its stuff. It was really cool. It has been a long hard week and finally it has paid off. I have seen my whales. It has been a whale of a time.

Today we docked early in Skagway, Alaska. Skagway in the northern most stop on the Inside Passage of the Northwest. However, it’s greater claim to fame is as the doorway to the Yukon Territory and the jumping off point for thousands of miners who were trying to strike it rich in 1898.

They discovered gold in them their hills in 1897, just as the nation was coming out of a big recession, and many people came to make it big. We visited the city of Skagway, current home to about 1,000 people, but in those days, home to up to 20,000.

We visited Liarsville, the home of newspaper reporters among others who because they didn’t want to go up the canyon and die, they wrote the news as they heard it from others. It was a fun time to visit with those people.

We then drove up to White Pass. In just 3,500 feet, we reached a point where the tree lines had come and gone and there was nothing but rock and lichen. It was really quite interesting to see the great northern wilderness. It is amazing at just how much variation there is in the world.

This morning I went up on deck to find that it was raining quite hard. It was interesting to see that the horizon melted into gray and that the end of the ocean couldn’t be seen. It is a little disheartening to see rain on this trip, but then, this is the great Alaskan wildnerness we are going to see and rain may be part of it. I hope not, but we shall see.

I love vacations. I particularly love a vacation with my beloved spouse. However, I miss family and sometime I think that it would be great to have the family along on all of the vacations. That thought sometimes lasts a long time, but also lasts a short time when I think of the challenges. Luckily, the good overcome the bad.

In the Star Wars universe, you had Jedi Masters who had learned the discipline of the Jedi and who understood the Jedi universe and all that was part of that. When you go on a cruise, you sometimes meet someone who has been in 50, 60, or even a 100 cruises. To those of us who have only been on 2 or 3, they are a Cruise Master. The first thing one does is ask which cruise line they like the best. You next ask which was their most favorite cruise, and deep inside, you vow to become a cruise master yourself. After all, you want to become a Cruise Master like them, sailing the seven seas and becoming a master of all the water that you can see.

We pulled out of the harbor at St. Thomas today. What a beautiful island. The amazing thing was sitting for over an hour watching the scenery glide by and noticing all of the islands that appear to be deserted or not inhabited. Not being the bashful kind, I turned to Bonnie and indicated that perhaps we should buy one of those islands for ourselves, build a huge house on it with our own private dock, and call the island St. Hardy. I don’t think she thought that was as good an idea as I thought. Perhaps if it also had a helicopter pad….