People don’t take trips – trips take people. ~ John Steinbeck
And this trip certainly took us! This is the rest of yesterday’s story. I have one more short one to tell and then I’ll pack my bags. Here’s a recap:
- We Found Tuscon without getting Lost (If you know us you, know that’s big)
- H’s phone did get Lost (stolen) at jcp
- We Found the best seat on the plane but Lost air space to the big blurry man
- We Found our uglied-up luggage and my nice looking cousin in Seattle
- We Found our ship and our room
- We Lost our sea legs
- We Lost our dinners
We Lost our dinners because I’m unfailingly polite. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes, not so much.
The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them. ~ Amelia E. Barr
For example, we Found Wala, our head cabin steward, finishing up our room when we boarded Friday afternoon. He soon got Lost and wasn’t Found again until Wednesday. Meeting him did make the voyage very different from all the previous ones.
On Sunday, we arrived in Juneau. It was a beautiful sunny day, which is really saying something about an area that gets 55-90 inches of rain between May and October and then it starts snowing.
Heidi Found her sea legs but mine were still Lost as I griped my bottled water and filled up on tiny Tums.
![](https://theforkintheroad.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/pa220003.jpg?w=423&h=282)
Found these at the airport. How cool to get an antacid and breath freshener in one! They made up my entire Sunday breakfast. Haven’t been able to look at one since.
In Juneau, we took a float plane to a remote area and went on a bear hunt (which will be my next and final vacation story).
I was moderately sick on the way to the island. I was really sick on the flight home and just barely Found the room before I Lost Saturday’s soup and a half a container of tiny Tums.
When we got back on the ship, there was a notice on the door.
As it turns out, Heidi wasn’t seasick and I wasn’t tap-water sick, we had the Cruise Ship Flu. Since we got sick the 2nd day of the cruise, catching it so quickly was a mystery. The mystery was solved when I Found Wala on Wednesday, “feeling much better”. Much of the crew had gotten the bug at the end of the previous cruise and the symptoms started when they saw us!
You probably can’t read the last sentence in the photo of our notice. It says:
The biggest problem is that this illness is readily spread from person to person (such as by shaking hands) as well as by touching surfaces and items that an ill person has touched.
In my pre-Top Secret Agent life, shaking hands wasn’t just polite, it was a standard professional practice. When we met Wala Friday afternoon, I cheerfully shook his hand. Heidi, wisely, just stuck with hi. In my weak defense, I doubt there was a surface in the room he hadn’t touched while getting it ready for us so maybe we would have gotten sick anyway?
Because this was a 2 week voyage, Juneau was followed by a 2nd At Sea day where I remained quarantined as requested by the captain. I Lost myself in book 3 of a Dean Koontz series I’d been reading on my Kindle. Everything on the ship changed. There were bars on all the books in the library.
For a week there was no serving yourself anything at the buffet where the wait staff looked like surgeons in their plastic gloves. At nearly every corner, someone was squirting Purell on you. Even the salt and pepper shakers were removed.
Puzzles pieces were quarantined. I don’t do puzzles on cruises but it was strange to read puzzle warnings on the tables.
To their credit, the staff did all they could to contain the virus and threw a party the second week with free wine (or soda) and cheer for all.
Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey. ~ Fitzhugh Mullan
We Lost about 3 days of this 14 day trip, but Found new ways to celebrate the journey! One last story about Bear Hunting and then this vacation will be all packed up.