Catching Zzz’s in Ketchikan

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We awoke, skirting along the coast of Alaska towards Ketchikan, to find dreary inclement weather waiting for us ashore. The revised daily itinerary had pushed our arrival back two hours until noon, and there were a number of morning activities added to the day’s agenda. One was a Team Brain Teaser that we hoped to do well at: We won this challenge with our mother’s in Alaskan waters! Sharon went to mass while I worked on the blog. Later we went to breakfast in the Lido and I had my Swiss Muesli and an eggs Benedict; while, Sharon had her scrambled eggs with turkey bacon and potatoes. Except for the turkey bacon, our breakfasts have been much better this trip in the Lido than in the dining room. The Lido however makes the turkey bacon come out more like turkey jerky; while, they serve it perfectly crisp and delicious in the dining room. That is of course; unless, you happen to like jerky and then the rich smoky flavor is quite good.

We stopped by the Explorer’s Lounge to pick up today’s Sudoku puzzle, and Sharon squeaked out a win on the easy one, and I noticed that she’d barely annotated even a single cell. I still prevailed on the Hard puzzle and I’m afraid that Sharon got a “DNF”. Back in the cabin, we were in port, and Sharon tried to no avail to connect her phone to get 4G service so that she could set up an internet hot spot. We’d received some emails the day before from the realtor trying to sell our house and the bank qualifying us for a loan for the new house that we are building in Las Vegas; and, both emails have attachments. Sharon had had trouble getting to see the attachments when connected to the ship’s WIFI and was hoping to see them now. Not being able to do that, we took care of some old business, doing yesterday’s Sudoku challenge which we hadn’t gotten around to yet. Sharon got to more “DNF’s”. Sharon decided to head up to the Crow’s Nest to see if she could get a better connection there. In the meantime, I had been dealing with a couple of pretty nasty bloody noses, and decided to rest a bit in the cabin before heading up to meet Sharon. Sharon was able to see the pictures the realtor had taken of our front yard, showing the vast improvement due to the weeding that he’d arranged to get done by a high school student at our church. That is in fact how we met our realtor, he was standing next to us as we cashiered at the fish fries and he was serving the fried fish. The bank had sent us a list of “documents” that they still needed… (e.g. proof of insurance for a house that is still a patch of dirt). I guess this is in everyone’s best interest to avoid future meltdowns in the home mortgage industry; but, they’re asking me for a form for a rental property I haven’t owned in over one year: I mean, I have absolutely no interest or involvement with this property anymore!

We met some of our British Team Trivia partners and teamed up with them to form our Brain Teaser team. This Challenge is a timed event with a single test sheet with 16 images on it. Teams have twenty minutes to identify what each image depicts. Since this is a timed event, Jeremy our Cruise Director was very protective of the sheets, even threatening to disqualify one lady who had snuck in behind him to pick up a sheet. She said, “Oh right, like my photographic memory is going to be able to recall what I saw!” The challenge started and the first puzzle showed three sets of letters on three rows: “GEGS SEGG and ESGG” and the woman sitting next to me (not Sharon) shouted out “Scrambled Eggs”. We were off to a good start! She also knew the next puzzle: “tHE sAnD” and blurted it out right away, and I’m trying to keep up she is going so fast. She and Sharon both shouted out the answer to the third puzzle showing the word “MAN” separated by a horizontal line and underneath the word “BOARD”. Obviously a great cruise reference that we hope not to experience: “Man Overboard”. I did catch up with the writing down of our answer and Sharon came up with the solution to “SINOWHEREGHT”. Do you see it? I finally got to answer an obvious one: “Gener____ation”. We only got half credit for “IrightI”. One of the ones that we missed completely was the word “knee” above the word “LIGHT”. I could only come up with “Knee Cap”; but, that wasn’t it. The puzzle with the word “Sand” inside a square was obvious to Sharon and I: “Sand Box”. But our British partners boo-hooed that as meaningless nonsense; but, with Sharon there to back me up we got them to reluctantly agree since they could come up with nothing better. When Jeremy was going over the solutions, he said that he would accept two answers for this one; either, “sandbox” or “sandpit” (the British equivalent). No wonder, our teammates had never heard of a sandbox! I managed to come up with the answer to the word “WEST” inside three increasingly larger “D’s”. Jeremy claims nobody has ever answered the last puzzle correctly; although, the winners in this challenge managed to get partial credit. It showed two letters, separated by a space “J K”. Underneath that, appearing to form the base of a pyramid in the way the letters appeared were “10 Q A”. We’re all thinking things like straight or royal flush; and, this is completely off base.

We chose to remain onboard today due to the weather and not go into town to look for halibut fish and chips for lunch. Instead we went to the Dive-In and I got the Cannonball burger and the Sauerkraut hot dog and French fries with Dive-In sauce. I’ve had the French fries plain, with melted cheese and now with Dive-In sauce, and I think I prefer them plain (or “Naked” as they appear on the menu). Sharon had the plain burger and fries as well (of course) and we both ordered a Coke from our Soda Card. We thought that we would have no trouble using up all of the drinks on this card; but, at a $1.75 per drink (including tip) it’s not easy to consume that much in one week for us. Okay, Sharon is ordering mostly Sprite. I don’t think we’re going to make it. I ordered 3 Cokes for dinner last night (instead of San Pellegrino which isn’t covered by the Soda card) and I’m pretty wired right now.

Our teammates for trivia all had shore excursions; so, they would not be joining us at 3 PM in the Crow’s Nest. We did meet up with another Canadian couple and hoped to repeat as Trivia Champs. We knew that we were in trouble when the first question was “What is the first name of the character who played the Great Gatsby?” I wrote down “Jack”; and, I didn’t miss the correct answer by much! We did know the year that the Berlin Wall came down and the decade that Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile. I’ve noticed that they ask a lot of Berlin Wall questions and Roger Bannister questions in these Trivia Challenges; and, Olympics questions as well. Sharon says that it’s my job to learn the year and city that go together for each of the modern Olympics. And I did know that the juniper berry is used to make gin. But what national flag is the only one to depict the Bible on the flag? Jeremy gave everyone a clue saying that nobody on his cruises had ever gotten this one right; which, at least told me that our answer of The Vatican was probably not right. It is in fact the Dominican Republic. And we missed the tech question: “What does ‘DVD’ stand for?” And I missed the tennis question (there seem to be quite a few of those in these challenges as well). “Who is the only player, male or female, to ever with a Grand Slam tournament event without dropping a set?” Does it help if I give you the clue that this happened over 30 years ago? It rules out players like Serena Williams, Pete Sampras or Rafael Nadal. What if I tell you that it was a man, eliminating players like Stephi Graff or Monica Seles or Billie Jean King or even Martina Navratilova? It was Bjorn Borg.

We headed to the room for a bit to work on the blog and enjoy some time on the balcony since the sun had come out and it was quite pleasant.

Tonight we had to dress up again, and I donned my dark blue suit and Sharon got dolled up in her aqua/turquoise formal blouse. This was the surf and turf night; so, I get to enjoy two lobster tails…one of the many advantages to being married to Sharon. My filet was thin and much more on the medium side than I would have preferred; but, the lobster was done very nicely. I also enjoyed the creamy sweet potato soup and we both had the flour-less chocolate lava cake; although, I added a scoop of vanilla ice cream to mine. We sat with a table with another American couple, who noted, that we were the first Americans that they had dined with on this cruise, and a couple from Alberta. It is quite interesting having so many cruisers doing partial land tours onboard, that our combined cruise experience is quite different.

We went to the show to see Recycled Percussion, a four member rock-and-roll drum band using drum sets put together at their local Home Depot for under $20. It’s never a good sign when you enter the theatre and you’re highly encouraged to take the ear plugs to enjoy tonight’s performance… I’m just saying. The audience got to choose what color they should root for from purple, blue, red and green. Each of the performers was outfitted in one of these and you were supposed to cheer madly for your guy. The show started when the lead performer walked into the audience and got a man in the front row to give out his best and loudest rock-and-roll yell, and his effort clearly impressed the performer (and me) because he exclaimed “Now that’s what I’m talking about.” Still, I don’t think they group reached the level of mania that they must achieve when they perform in Las Vegas. As the performer noted, “When our agent approached us about doing shows on a cruise ship, I thought, Heck yeah. The Caribbean, hot babes in even hotter bikinis, sign us up.” I don’t think Alaska with us old fogies is what he had in mind. Some of the performance left Sharon and me shaking our heads (like, what’s the point in spraying sparks on a cruise ship in unison to rock and roll music. And how do you clear something like that with the ship’s safety officer? Sharon and I will probably not be seeing their show in Las Vegas.



The other answers to our puzzles were “Head in the Sand”, “Nowhere in Sight”, “Neon Light”, “West Indies” and “Hijacking”. If you were LOL at our missing “Digital Video Disk”, don’t laugh too hard because while that may have been the original definition for DVD it has morphed into “Digital Versatile Disk”!

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