Ready to cruise to Alaska. Wait a minute, he’s dressed for Scotland, not Alaska! Scotland isn’t until next fall, Mike, so put that away until the next Sounders game in the sunshine!

And what’s all this about Alaska? Mike and Tami did a very rash thing two days ago and signed up for a week cruise to Alaska that leaves TOMORROW! Spring is here and wanderlust is in the air. Tami has been perusing those countless emails sent by Princess Cruises and finally found one that was just too cheap to pass up.

Ever since Seattle became a cruise port, Tami has had a dream of taking the bus down to the dock and hopping on a ship to Alaska. So that’s what we’re going to do. We just hope it’s not raining too hard tomorrow when we catch the bus to Pier 91 because it is probably almost a mile from the bus stop to the dock. Not gonna take no taxi though, gotta live that dream.

One consequence, though, of buying the cheapest and close to last room on the ship is that we are in the bowels of the ship in the very last room in the bow. No matter! Fun will prevail! We don’t plan on spending a lot of time in the room.

We do have  bit of history with this very kind of thing Just over 30 years ago, when we lived at Snoqualmie Pass, we were good friends with the managers at Alpental, which was owned at the time by Holland America. As managers, our friends had access to great deals on last minute openings on their cruise ships. So with 4 days’ notice we embarked then on a seven day cruise to Alaska. At that time we were in one of the larger rooms and my mother and sister were able to join us. We had a wonderful trip and visited Ketchikan and Juneau on that trip. It will be interesting to see how those two towns have changed. We will also be visiting Skagway, which we’ve always wanted to see.

So stay tuned and we will see what kind of adventures steerage brings on a modern cruise ship.