See that black and white ship there. That's OUR damn parking space.

After cruising around some other inlet for a bit, we arrived in Juneau about an hour early and I can see why schedules are so big in this industry. The Juneau port had five ships in and two of us waiting for them to get out. We had travelled 4,000 miles from New York to get stuck in the waterborne equivalent of the Cross Bronx Expressway. On the other hand it’s really fascinating to watch them play chicken with 70,000 to 100,000 ton chunks of metal that have no brakes and still get it all right.

Back in Juneau we hit the Tramway and to me it was the best thing we have done so far. Getting in a cable car for a 1500 foot ride straight up a mountain allowed me to indulge my other strong visceral response – acrophobia -- without any of the motion sickness, a real win/win situation.

One other thing we learned on this leg of the trip was don’t use Horizon Court for lunch. There is some real talent involved in making fifty different colors, textures, food groups and presentations ALL have the exact same taste - which is none. I had the steamed veggies, wife had the pasta and friends had other combinations but we could easily have switched at random with no change in the outcome. We could have played Blind Man's Bluff with this stuff and nobody would ever win.

This is Petra, our unanimous BIS for the entire week.

We were ten minutes late getting back for the dogsled tour which was my wife’s primary objective for the whole trip. The Princess rep radioed the bus and had them wait while they drove us out to it, and off we went. I think missing the dogs would have been much worse than missing the glaciers so the Princess efforts were HUGELY appreciated on this one.

We didn’t get a lot of time in the town itself and I think we may have made a rookie mistake of overbooking on the tours. On the other hand, I don’t see how we could have skipped the railroad or the dogs so maybe we just need to come back someday just to visit the town. For sheer numbers of things to see, Alaska is hard to beat. We could easily stay onboard on a B2B of the same cruise and never do the same thing.

Back in the cabin I decided to recover from the day and then call room service at about 8:45 PM. The staff was proper and courteous and the food came up right at the time they gave me. Unfortunately, we had two completely different meals and both of them were like biting into a dry sponge. This is the first time we have gotten something truly inedible on the ship and it wasn’t a tough order or weird hour. One of my friends pointed out that you should definitely not be able to wave goodbye with a potato chip that flaps in the wind. Oh well, another lesson learned I suppose.

We’re due in Victoria in a couple of hours so the main mission for me today is Verdi’s Pizzeria which has been unapproachable so far. As Yogi said, "Nobody goes there 'cause it’s too crowded".

GOT INTO VERDI’S for lunch today and it’s great. Trust me, as a 2nd generation Italian, I am not all that enamored with pizza in the American hinterlands (which in this context includes Connecticut) but this stuff is really good. PLEASE Princess, consider making Verdi’s a 24 hour location and flush that horror show upstairs on Deck 14. I’ll even pay for it after 10:00 PM and be very happy.

Victoria is a neat little city of 400,000 (in NY terms that’s 48th Street between Madison and Park Avenues). We’re only here for 5 hours under the Jones Act but that’s enough for me to determine I’m gonna return to visit by car on my own time.

We took the Ghosts and Graveyards tour in a 45 degree rain. The first hour is the graveyard where, of course, everyone is dead. About halfway through it, I wished I was too. Things got better in the second hour visiting a maritime museum and the old Fort Victoria courtroom which is supposedly haunted by the two Chief Justices of the Fort. I figured that if anyone could bring them out I could ( if only as a professional courtesy ) but no dice. I even stayed behind, alone in the Courtroom and sat on the bench thinking they’d at least throw something at me but the old buggers never showed. Oh well, maybe next time but I’m 0 for 3 on ghosts on this trip.

EPILOGUE

The subtitle of this post will be the title of my new book, "HOW TO PLAN, IMPLEMENT, AND ACHIEVE TOTAL DISASTER" which will be dedicated to all those for whom business travel is a normal part of their existence. I’m sure every one of you can top this story but I cannot imagine why you would want to.

****** Back in March, having no idea about the logistics of getting off the ship or how things work in Seattle, I booked our return to New York on the midnight red eye out of SEATAC rather than the 1:00 PM flight. I figured that no matter what went wrong, I would have enough time to get it corrected. What I learned is what happens when the plan IS what goes wrong.

Saturday night we find that we are scheduled to leave the ship at 8:40 AM. I immediately initiate PLAN A which is to book a cheap hotel room to store the baggage while we explore Seattle. WRONG. It seems there are 16,000 Microsoft employees in town and the nearest open hotel room is back in Ketchikan. Since that seems a bit extreme, we nimbly divert to PLAN B which is to store the luggage at Terminal 30 for the day and proceed with the Seattle exploration, then return about 8:00 PM, pick up the bags and head for the airport. With this plan in effect we go through the Princess disembarkation procedure which is both super efficient and painless. Really well done Princess BUT also an hour early. We are off the ship with bags (all of them) in hand by 8:30 AM. We now have only 16 hours to get to the airport and I can feel the clock ticking.
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Plan B works great for ten minutes until the Concierge at Terminal 30 informs us that she is closing at 3:30 PM and all luggage that isn’t gone will remain a guest of the facility until Monday at 9:00 AM. Given our options, we take the deal and set off for Seattle Downtown but instead of one long block of time, we now have until 3:30 PM for exploration which, if all goes well, will allow us to check in at the airport a mere 8 hours before our flight. I’m sure Plan C would have worked better than this but we didn’t have one at this point.
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Anyhow, we did the Space Needle, once again satisfying my periodic need for acrophobic tachycardia (translation: extreme fear of heights) and then took the duck boat tour. Completion of these tasks left us with just enough time to have lunch and then stare at the space needle for an hour and a half from every conceivable angle. We did until the rain started. I used this rain delay to develop Plan B2 which was to go back to Terminal 30, get the luggage (remember this is 6 adults and 2 kids), get to the airport, check in, check the luggage through and grab a cab into town for some fun and dinner in a restaurant. Not great, but not bad as a THIRD backup plan and it beat standing in the rain looking up at the Space Needle.
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Plan B2 went down the toilet when we arrived at SEATAC at 4:00 PM and realized we had gotten there before the JetBlue staff. Since they had no flights until 10:30 PM, there was no reason for them to assume some knucklehead would get there FOUR TIMES earlier than necessary for an international flight. I had never before beaten the airline to the airport so I guess it’s worth doing for the experience but this meant we were NOT checking the bags and we were NOT going into town. What it did mean is that we were going to sit in the OUTSIDE area (remember we have no boarding passes) of the airport until the JetBlue people showed up. Not knowing when that would be added a certain suspense to this little adventure. Thus commenced "The Great Wait"
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Along about an hour into the Wait, we realized that with six adults, 2 kids and a serious bunch of luggage, we pretty much owned our little ten seat section of SEATAC’s departure area. Given that we would be in residence so long, we declared our area a sovereign nation, immediately naming our new country "Frank". Things went along quite well in the new nation until discussion arose as to whether it should be an Athenian Democracy, a Jeffersonian Democracy or just the Federalist style bureaucratic madness which we already know so well. Being founding fathers in the 21st rather than the 18th century, we made no decisions except to table discussion until a committee could be formed to study the issue and report back. In the meantime, we would engage in debate as to whether our priority should be (a) securing our new borders, (b) establishing formal relations with the Gate C crowd or (c) going downstairs for coffee. Given all these weighty problems and our ability to fight about them at great length while accomplishing nothing of any real consequence, I really did feel like a Senator. Maybe being in the Congress or a state legislature is really nothing more than perpetually sitting in an airport with eight hours before your flight. That would explain an awful lot.
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Anyway, once Frank was up and running we still had 6.5 hours to go. We used this time to memorize the entire Arrivals and Departures board. I can now speak with absolute authority on almost all of Air Alaska’s weekend routes to Anchorage, Juneau, Ketchikan, Nome and Fairbanks. For a while, three of us actually toyed with buying round trip tickets to Juneau just to see if we could get back in time for the flight. If the kids hadn’t been there, we might have done it and I think we would have made it too.
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At the halfway point (8:00 PM) there was cause for joy and celebration throughout the nation of Frank. The JetBlue gate staff showed up. They were, as always, terrific but when they found out we had arrived at 4:00 PM to check in for a midnight flight, at least two of them looked like they were seriously considering calling the local mental hospital to check for escapees. I would not have blamed them. In fact, had they come for me at this point I would have gone along quietly.
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With bags checked and boarding passes in hand we could now enter the inner ring. I have always admired the Disney World method of having people pass through stages while waiting incredible times to get absolutely nowhere and I now understand it fully. Just the ability to get from outside to the gate area made us feel like we had really accomplished something. I felt like I was almost home despite the fact that we still had four hours to go before the flight.
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The second half of The Great Wait passed by in a blur of food court items, reading $150.00 worth of newspapers and magazines, almost all of which were in English, and entertaining the 2 kids, who were in much better shape (and probably better behaved) than the adults. By the time they opened the jetway door for boarding the feeling was something like standing on the shore of the Red Sea and having Moses say "OK everybody, shake a leg".
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Well dassit for this trip. I would do it again although I think next time we'll come up with a better name for the new country.