Cruising, Part 2

You've seen what we did when the boat docked in port... but what did we do on the cruise ship?
LOTS!

One day, we sailed into Glacier Bay National Park to see some glaciers. The scenery in Glacier Bay really boasts of God's creative power.

 

  

  

Chunks of glacier in the water.

  

The Margerie Glacier; the largest glacier we saw.

It extended far back into the mountains.

Looks like a bird to me.

 

   On board ship, there was lots to do:

Write

  Read. Play games. Swim. Soak in the hot tub.

Whale watch

Go to the bar. Go to the casino. Go to the spa. Listen to the jazz band, the classical duet, the BB King band, the piano man, or go to the nightly performance.

 



Hang out on deck

Play ping pong. Play Nintendo DS with your cousin.

Admire the towel animals the staff left in our rooms each night

And, of course, EAT! Along with the all-day buffet, the ship had a formal dining room. We had two tables reserved for us for dinnertime. It was so nice to eat all as a family! And, my, was it fancy! The servers pulled out your chair for you and scooted you in (speaking as a woman, it made me feel special) and then laid your napkin on your lap. Then, they would hand you the menu and you would have to pick an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert. They would bring each course one at a time.

Chicken stew and biscuits.

Some sort of zucchini and cheese appetizer.

 

A fancy strawberry dessert.

The ship even had formal nights where you couldn't enter the dining room unless you passed the dress code. It was fun to see all the different patrons in their fancy dresses and collared shirts and the servers in their dress uniforms.

 

But the best part of being on board the ship? Spending time with my family!


Cruising, Part 1

My grandma recently took my dad's side of the family on a seven day cruise to Alaska. My cousin and I, as the youngest grandchildren, were allowed to come, too. We had a blast!
The fun started before we even boarded the boat. Our boat left from Vancouver, BC, and the very building where we had to check in was also home to an anime conference that day! I don't know too much about anime so I didn't recognize a lot of the costumes, but I did spot a few familiar faces.

 

A fabulous Jack Skellington (from the movie Nightmare Before Christmas) and the black blob-creature from the movie Spirited Away. I also saw the Tenth Doctor, and I saw The Joker and The Riddler having a fight (with Jesus in the audience, go figure).

As we left Vancouver, we sailed passed Stanley Park. It was beautiful.

Vancouver's skyline and a corner of Stanley Park

We sailed with Holland America lines (what else would you expect from a family of Dutchmen [and women]?). Our boat was called the "Noordam," which, coincidently, is the same name of the boat that carried some of my ancestors on my maternal side from Holland to America over a hundred years ago!

There were three staircases on the boat and on each landing there was a picture or a piece of art. This painting depicts the Noordam that my ancestors sailed on to come to America in the early 1900s!

Our Noordam looked very different.

Our boat, along with one of the tender boats that brought us ashore to Juneau, Alaska.

All of Holland America's boats are registered in Holland; our boat had a Dutch captain and several Dutch officers. It was nice to hear the familiar Dutch brogue over the loudspeakers each morning, even if it was only to tell us the weather and our current position in the water. It was also cool to see all the Dutch touches... Dutch flags, pictures and busts of Dutch royalty, Dutch tea in the afternoon, Dutch breakfasts on the menu, and Dutch pea soup the day we visited Glacier Bay. Perhaps the best Dutch touch were the servers in the formal dining room singing "Lang Zal Ze Leven," the Dutch birthday song, every night to those who had birthdays. It was especially funny because all of the servers were most definitely not Dutch, but of all different ethnicities.

Our boat stopped in three places: Juneau, Skagway, and Ketchikan. We also sailed into Glacier Bay and spent the day admiring God's fabulous creation. At each stop, we had the opportunity to go on excursions, though most of us did not. Instead, we walked around the towns. It's amazing how many jewelry stores there are in the cities that cruise boats stop at! At least every other store sells jewelry.
In Juneau, I walked with several uncles and aunts and my cousin around the town. We found a Starbucks, which was a like coming home for me since there is a Starbucks on nearly every corner where I live. We also went to two bookstores.

In Skagway, my grandma, aunt, uncle, cousin, and I took the train up to White Pass. By far, this was my favorite part of the trip. I LOVE trains. They are my favorite mode of travel. This train took us up into the Alaskan mountains. It was stunning.

 

If you noticed the thin trail snaking through the left side of the picture, that is the trail that men seeking their fortune in the gold rush rode to get wherever they were going.

 

 

I spent most of my time outside the train car on a little platform, snapping pictures.

 

There were supposed to be three cruise ships docking in Skagway, but we were the only ones that made it into the bay, because of stormy seas. The store owners were expecting over 10,000 tourists, but ended up with only our meager 1,800.
The night we left Skagway, the wind was blowing harder than my mother (who grew up in the plains of Minnesota) had ever felt it before. Two tug boats escorted us outside the bay, just in case we needed help. Thankfully, we made it to Ketchikan with no mishaps.
Once there, we walked around town again. Most people go to jewelry stores or clothing stores or trinket stores when they go to Alaska. We went to the thrift store. We also walked around Creek Street. It is aptly named, seeing that there is a river instead of a road in the middle of the street. We happened to be in Alaska during salmon spawning time, so the lovely aroma of dead mother salmon followed us around Creek Street.
I loved seeing all of the different t-shirts Alaska had to offer:



Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na Batmoose!



I have to admit, this one is my favorite. It makes me chuckle.



May the forest be with you

There were four other cruise ships docked in Ketchikan with us, including our sister ship, the Westerdam.

Next time... learn about our trip to Glacier Bay, and the other activities we enjoyed on board the Noordam!

Live long and prosper.

Dutch architecture and other oddities.

So why are the houses crooked in Holland?

The Dutch, while generally a peaceful people, have one enemy that they have been battling since they settled in the Low Country. That enemy is... Water.
Instead of leaving, because there was too much water, the Dutch - who are very innovative people - decided to just get rid of the water.
So they started to reclaim the land, by pumping out water with - you guessed it! - windmills. Unfortunately, most of Holland is peatland. Peat is like a sponge. When filled with water, it's large and, well, full! But without the water, it sort of sinks in on itself and crumbles.

This is what started to happen when too much water was being pumped out of parts of the Netherlands, and that is why the houses in those parts started to sink!


Today, more than half of the Netherlands in under sea level!

Alright, that's one mystery solved. So, why do some of the houses lean forward?

For a very simple reason. Many Dutch houses are tall and skinny, often with three floors. What happens when you want your roll top desk or your piano moved to the second floor?
Well, you CERTAINLY don't want to take it up the stairs... Like the houses, the staircases are tall and skinny - and not only tall and skinny, but twisty and curvy too! Going up might be difficult on the shins, but coming down is risking your life, because there isn't room enough for your whole foot to be placed on the stair. So, you have to do an odd sideways shuffle down the stairs and hope you don't fall and break your neck on the way down.

(No wonder the Dutch word for 'stair' is 'trap'!)

So, you don't want to take your piano up the stairs (actually, it's pretty much impossible). What do you do? This is where the leaning house comes in. 

On most traditional Dutch houses, there is a hook on the top, which you can tie a rope to. The rope can be tied to objects on the ground, and those objects can be hauled up to the higher floors and pulled in through one of the large windows. 

You don't want your piano bumping up against the side of the house and ruining both piano and house... therefore, the houses lean out! 

One thing that my mom loved about Holland was the giant windows. You could see everything from inside! Actually, you could see everything inside from outside as well, for not many Dutch people have curtains. And if they do have curtains, they seldom close them.

All of the older buildings are made of brick, and instead of shingled roofs, the roofs are either tiled or thatched. (Kind of funny that in London, in order to have a thatched roof on The Globe theater, they had to have a special permit, but in Holland, most of the farmhouses are thatched!)

(In every town, there was at least a handful of buildings covered in construction work.)

(Roof being tiled.)

(Flying over Holland's cities, all we saw was a mess of orange roofs.)

Dutch houses are small - 'quaint' - but there is room for everything. In the United States, people can have a virtual mansion and still not have "enough space." Perhaps the Dutch are more content or more minimalistic than Americans? I'd love to be more like my relatives in that respect. (Although not in the area of books. You can never have too many books... well, you can never have too many good books. And they're so easy to store too!)

Live long and prosper!

Day 5: Amsterdam

But first a funny story.
When we came into the London airport, the line at customs was longer than the Lord of the Rings trilogy and, since my grandma couldn't stand that long, we put her in a wheelchair and started wheeling her towards the line. Before we could get there, however, an angry-looking man stopped us and informed us that we could go to a different line - a line for the elderly, the newborn, and others who need help - a line which only had a few people in it. We gladly took this express lane and were out of customs in about ten minutes!
We thought that a wheelchair might just help us through the airport in London, going to the Netherlands, as well. So we went and requested one... Instead of letting us take one ourselves, we had to wait... and wait... and wait... for an attendant to attend to us. Finally, someone came after about 20 minutes
When we got to the security lines, all of them had about the same amount of people in them. If any line had more people than the rest, it was probably the special needs line! So we waited some more and eventually made it into the wide open spaces of the Airport. Then came another problem. We were so early, our flight hadn't been assigned a place yet! So our attendant took us to the waiting area where he thought the plane would come in, and we waited there.
Moral of the story: It's okay to take advantage of your grandmother's status as an 'elderly person,' but sometimes it doesn't really work out all that well. :P

For the first few days in Holland, we stayed in my great-uncle and aunt's house. They were camping through Italy at the time, so we had their very large house (especially for Holland) to ourselves.
Their son lives only a few blocks away, so he let us into the house. We had another reason to be grateful for him the day we went to Amsterdam...
There are three major modes of transportation in Holland. Biking, is, of course, most prevalent (but more on that in a later blog post). If you are going long distances, there are trains that run all over Holland (how nice that the game Ticket to Ride had a Netherlands expansion!). Lastly, you can drive (more on that in a later post as well).
Because we had been cautioned about finding parking in Amsterdam, we had decided to take the train. For some odd reason, however, the ticket machines only took special pre-bought passes or coins. We didn't have 70 euros worth of coins (each) just lying around in our pockets, so we were a little stuck... And then my dad's cousin showed up! Huzzah! He was able to pay our way with his pass (we paid him back later) and we were able to make the train and get to Amsterdam! Yay!

Straight out of the train station, we went on a canal tour. This one hour tour took us down the major canals of Amsterdam and a voice narrated to us (in three different languages!) what we were seeing.

Some of the sights from the boat:

(Yes, those houses are crooked. Many are, because someone didn't take Matthew 7:24-27 to heart.)

(Beau-ti-ful!)

(A Chinese restaurant...)

 (Don't even ask me what that is.)

After the canal tour, we walked to the Rijksmuseum for some culture.

The Rijksmuseum is an art museum, famous for its collection of Rembrandt's - including The Night Watch.

They also had some Vincent Van Gogh paintings:

And some really beautiful paintings of ships on the ocean!

There was also a really cool model ship. The Unicorn?

We walked back to the train station after the museum. 

One of my favorites parts of our time in the Netherlands was just walking through the streets, seeing the Dutch architecture, hearing the Dutch language, and just seeing the Dutchiness of everything.

(Paving the road with cobblestones...)

 (In addition to crooked buildings, in the cities, you see a lot of buildings that lean forward too. Stay tuned for a later blog post to know why!)

(Bike parking lot!)

Live long and prosper!