Our
family vacation this year was spent taking our first cruise, an adventure to
Alaska! The ship's port was in Vancouver, so we had to drive to Canada
first. Mom and Roger shared a room, while me and Jason shared
another. I slept a lot of the time in my bunk, catching up on sleep and
reading Les Miserables.
Over the summer I started sleeping super late, going to bed around 4-5am,
because I've been doing the closing shift at McDonald's. Plus I've always
been kind of a night owl. The night always had a way of opening up my
creative mind, and that's when I write in my journal the most. My brother
tends to snore the roof off, so it was a great challenge maintaining peace of
mind at night. Nonetheless, I found a way to get through it. God
bless the inventor of ear plugs!
The cruise was alright, but I didn't feel like I fit in with all those upper
class people. We did a lot of fun things though. Onboard we saw a
great movie called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Next to Troy and Passion of the Christ, it's the
best film I've seen all year. Kate Winslet plays a whimsical, colorful
young woman who falls in love with a surprisingly boring Jim Carrey
character. She opts to get all her memories of Jim erased after they
break up. She wanted to erase him from her past because it hurt so much.
Jim spends most of the movie hooked up to some machine, wandering through her
memories, trying to recapture them as they disappear before his very
eyes. We also spent a lot of time on the lido deck, and at the
all-you-can-buffet they had every night. Man, did we eat a lot. One
night, I ate 3 bowls of ice cream- that's not hyperbole.
Cruises usually make 4-5 stops at ports of entry along the coast, where people
can get off and go on excursions. The one I picked- a plane ride over the
mountains- got cancelled due to high wind. So we took a not-quite-as-fun
train ride instead.
The best part of the trip was probably Glacier Bay. I actually slept
through half of it, because I'd woken up at noon, only to find everyone
outside, looking at the snowy bay all around the boat. Large bits of
glacier ice were floating in the water, drifting by like they were mobile
islands. I wandered around the boat looking for family, but couldn't find
them. When I finally did, I asked why they didn't wake me up. They
said they wanted to let me sleep in, because I'm always cranky when people wake
me up. Ugh, they're right. Either way, someone would have made a
mistake!
