Spotting Inside Passage Sights

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The week has come and gone but the passage of our Alaskan venture has not hit us as our fellow travelers are readying for their journey home. In one sense, this week came and went with the knowledge that we would be back shortly. The weather looks better this morning than our first sea day. We had breakfast in the Lido. Sharon found the Lido better for breakfast on this cruise; which, has not been the case on previous cruises. I tend to agree. It seems that the dining room may have gotten dinged in the comments on the previous cruise for not serving food that was hot enough. Just about every dinner the server and often a supervisor would check at the end of the meal whether the food had been hot enough. The food temperature was fine for the meals that we received; still, it was clear that an issue was being addressed. For us, service was a little slow for a couple meals. Notable was the first dinner which seemed to take twice as long as normal; but, with the delays getting people onboard and everyone hitting the dining room at the same time and late, this was perhaps to be expected.

Sharon had gone to her final mass before breakfast while I finished the previous day’s blog. Then we went up to the Crow’s Nest for some Movie Trivia. We met two of our regular trivia team members and partnered with them and two others. We did fairly well, getting 11 out of 13; but, we would have needed 13 to win. We should have gotten 12 right but our teammates from Britain were insisting that the name of the movie was “Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington”; so, since there were four of them and just two of us I changed “Smith” to “Deeds”. When the answers came out the lady that insisted that the correct answer was “Deeds” said in typical British tone of addressing a class, “Well, now, ‘Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington’ was the name of the book, wasn’t it?” My contribution was the Tom Cruise move about car racing and the Julie Roberts movie where two Supreme Court justices have been murdered. Sharon said she didn’t recognize any of the movies except the one that had been her first husband Jim’s favorite movie (the farce on thrill disaster movies and “Airport” in particular). These movies were of course “Days of Thunder”, “Pelican Brief” and “Airplane”. When the answers came out, the Aussie team that won disputed the “Airplane” answer, saying that when released in Australia the movie was titled “Flying High”. Nick, the show host told them that they could count that right if they wanted to.

We recommended that our British teammates should try the Dive-In for lunch. We should have taken our own advice because we went to the Lido. I went for the fish cooked with chilies that looked pretty good in the display dish. What I got was an overcooked dried out piece of fish with none of the chilies. Sharon got the pork belly; but, it was mostly fat and too chewy. We met up with our whole team for Trivia at 1:00pm and the lady said that she doesn’t normally like hamburgers; but, what they had at the Dive-In was their favorite meal so far on the cruise. Our teammates were pretty good at providing most of the answers that we got right during this challenge; which, would have been pretty darn good except for all of those darn answers that we got wrong. Sharon said that she should have come up with the answer of which musician sold more records in a single day than any other musician. Our teammates were lost, and the best Sharon could do was Michael Jackson, who as it turns out was number two on this list the day after he died. Sharon worked at Penny’s when Elvis died and remembers the run on everything Elvis but didn’t think of that. We thought that New Zealand was the country that Green Peace was founded in. Imagine how we felt when Jeremy told the room that we were currently in the country that founded Green Peace (not the USA as we were cruising down the Inside Passage). I came up with the answer to the Shakespeare question, knowing what family Juliet belongs to… all you need to remember is her name and her family name rhyme: Juliet Capulet. But they wouldn’t listen to me, understandably, why trust a Yank about Shakespeare. It took them a bit to come up with the other family name: Montague. And they then chose Capulet as well. They came up with the company that made Steve Jobs a billionaire. He was CEO of Apple, then started NeXt and also Pixar, and then returned to Apple; but, he became a billionaire when he sold Pixar to Disney. We didn’t know what body of water the Great Barrier Reef is in. I’ll give you a couple of hints: It’s not the Indian Ocean; nor, the Pacific Ocean. Congratulations if you came up with Coral Sea. We did (finally) get the bonus question right: How many people are depicted in Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper”? If you need help, the answer is one of these: 12, 13, 14 or 15! (The sum of the wrong answers is 41!). We ended up tying and had to go to a bonus question which was a Woman has a 1/375 chance of living to 100 so what is the chance for a man. We were going between 1/500 and 1/650 so ended up putting 1/575 while the other team guess 1/625 but the answer was 1/1400 so we lost. Jeremey gave us the Alaska Pins anyway.

We stopped in the Vista Lounge to watch Dancing with the Stars at Sea as cruisers learned the Cha-Cha. The couple that had been warming up with their two year old held at times by both parents ended up winning over the judges and both of them wound up advancing to the finals. I decided to head back to the cabin and start packing. Sharon went to the casino. She’s been playing “Jackpot Party” and she got quite a bit of action. When she returned to the cabin she was beaming saying that she was now ahead for the cruise. Then she handed me a dime and told me not to spend it in one place: She was up ten cents! But that’s better than I did at the blackjack table.

We’d decided to go to the Pinnacle for dinner on the last night. Sharon’s friend Ruth will be happy to know that I’m still happy to eat the complimentary amuse buche. Tonight’s delicacy was a piece of smoked fish with two caviar eggs. I ordered the jumbo shrimp cocktail with spicy cocktail sauce and enjoyed the three large shrimp that I was served; although, the sauce could have had more horse radish to really bring the heat. I also ordered the lobster bisque and they do a nice presentation with the mound of lobster standing in the bowl while the bisque itself is poured over the lobster from a hot pot. We both had the large filet mignon. Sharon ordered hers plain while I chose the garlic butter sauce. What I got was a pad of garlic butter that wasn’t a sauce at all. We ordered “shareable sides” and got the mashed potatoes, carrots, Brussel sprouts and mushrooms. Let me just say this about that; while, all were excellent, but they really weren’t all that shareable. The mashed potatoes would barely satisfy Sharon! We enjoyed our dinner, and I ordered the chocolate lava cake for dessert and Sharon had the Baked Alaska with Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. We both miss the chocolate soufflé; but, our desserts were great.



We’d planned to go to the Marriage Game in the Vista Room and follow that with the Dancing with the Stars at Sea finale. I however chose to call it a night and finish packing. Sharon went to the first show and said that it was hilarious. The three couples were a younger couple married just 4 years, another married for 40 years (they had been celebrating in the Pinnacle while we were there), and an older couple from Australia married for 56 years.

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