Deck Four of the Disney Wonder has a jogging track that
circles the ship. Three laps is a mile. I tell you this not because you care
how many laps I ran, but to give you some sense of how big the ship is.
The first morning at sea, all I could see during my run was
gray rolling ocean and mist. It was that rolling ocean that woke me up. People
who say a cruise ship is so big you don’t even know you’re on the ocean are
liars. Big fat liars with their pants on fire. Either that, or they’ve never
been on a cruise ship in the northern Pacific. It took a whole day to get my sea legs under me. I was never really seasick because Linda came
prepared with these voodoo pressure point motion sickness bands, and those
suckers really do work. But even though I wasn’t sick, when I lay down, I felt
my bed rising and falling, and it wasn’t pleasant. Victor said
he felt like he was being rocked to sleep. Me? Not so much. I felt like I was
trapped on some sick and twisted amusement park ride. I had some really bizarre
dreams. All in all, the motion of the ocean was conducive to getting my butt
out of bed early every morning.
So that first morning, I was up at 5:30 and on the track a
little before 6:00. We were in open water with no land in sight in either
direction, just fog and ocean. The smell of the sea air, the waves rising and
falling, and the mournful wail of the ship’s horn were perfect. Zen. We were in
a thick fog bank, and the horn sounded repeatedly during my run. Only two other
people were on the track that early. The temperature scared most runners into
the gym. The three of us hardy souls were spread out around the ship, so for
long stretches of my run, I was alone with the waves and the fog. I never
really got cold. The track went inside at both the bow and stern, and I always
started at the bow. Sailing north, the starboard side was shielded from the
wind, and after a lap, the wind on the port side felt good. It was an awesome
run, the most incredible I’d ever experienced.
Until the next day.
We stayed out late the night of our first full day at sea,
so I was tired enough to overcome the discomfort of the rocking, and I slept a
little later. I might have slept a lot later if the ship hadn’t bounced so hard
around 6:00 that I was sure Captain Fabian was trying to catch some air…or that
we had hit an iceberg. The alarms didn’t sound, so when my heart rate slowed I
got dressed and hit the track.
Turns out we were entering Alaska’s inside passage between a
string of barrier islands and the mainland. We had to slow almost to a stop to
pick up a special pilot for that leg of the trip, plus the currents produce a weird chop at the entrance. The engines revving up in that chop
probably woke me up. I’m kinda glad it almost bounced me out of bed because the
second morning, I had this to look at during my run.
The second morning was the most incredible run I’ve ever
experienced. There was land on both sides of the boat, but the starboard side
was all snow-capped peaks. I’ve never been in a place where you can see both
ocean and mountains stretching to the horizon. The early hour and southeast
Alaska’s ever-present clouds made the world appear monochromatic, everything in
shades of gray. I would make a silly comment here about how many shades of gray
except it was too magnificent to reduce to a puerile joke.
The water was silver
sliding to a gun metal with the mountains rising almost black. The snow was
stark and beautiful against all that gray. I stopped twice to take pictures. Once,
another guy stopped running and looked with me. It was the kind of moment you
wanted to share with someone, even a stranger.
Morning two was a prelude to some of the most spectacular
vistas of the entire trip when we cruised up Tracy Arm to the Sawyer Glacier.
I’ll tell you all about that when I write Blue Ice.
On morning three, I needed the alarm to wake up. We reached
Skagway during the night, and the boat was blessedly stopped. You really don’t
appreciate sleeping in a stationary bed until you’ve slept in a moving one for
a couple of nights. I made myself get up because I justified the ridiculous
amount of food I ate by saying, “Yeah, but I ran this morning.”
I’m so thankful that I did get up because every morning the
view from Deck 4 was different, and every morning it felt like a gift when I
saw it for the first time.
This is what I saw when I stepped out onto the starboard
side of Deck 4. I thought I had stepped back in time a hundred years.
The view from the port side assured me it was still 2012,
but wow…
The track was a bit more crowded on morning three. We were allowed
to disembark at 7:30, and folks were getting an early start on the day. I was
out by 6:15, and I was dodging other runners and walkers. I didn’t mind because
the excitement at finally getting to step onto Alaskan soil was palpable. I’m
pretty sure I might have used that excitement as an excuse to cut my run short
that morning.
Skagway was my favorite port. The town was quaint. The shops
were fun, and I didn’t yet know that the cruise lines owned most of them and
that I would see the same shops in Juneau and Ketchikan.
The canoeing excursion to the Davidson Glacier that
afternoon was my favorite adventure of the trip. Once again, that is a whole
other blog post, but one minor detail is relevant to this one. Hiking out of
the woods in the heavy rubber boots we were issued, I wrenched my knee. It hurt
like a @#*$! Linda had warned me in advance that there is no cursing on a
Disney cruise, so I yelped and bit my tongue. (I should also note that it was
Linda who upon realizing that the coffee shop in Skagway was not a Starbucks
and could not make her a mocha exclaimed, “This is bullshit!”)
Morning four I woke up in Juneau. My knee was still pretty
jacked up, so I didn’t run. I took this pic after we disembarked.
Juneau was the only port we visited which doesn’t rely
almost exclusively on tourism to support the local economy. Shipping, mining,
and government (it’s Alaska’s capital) keep the town running. Subsequently, it’s
not as picturesque as the other places we stopped. If I was going to miss an
early morning “first look,” this was the place to do it.
Missing my morning run in Juneau messed with my whole day,
and I decided that pain in my knee was the lesser of two evils. On morning
five, I got an early look at Ketchikan. Up to this point, both cruise line and
excursion employees had been telling us how lucky we had been with the weather.
I always raised an eyebrow when I heard this because it was cold and cloudy
every single day. When I stepped out
onto the deck in Ketchikan, I understood why we had been lucky.
Rain, and lots of it. Southeast Alaska is a temperate rain
forest. That’s why they have all those incredible glaciers and lush green
forests. It’s also why I traipsed aboard the ship like a drowned rat at the end
of that day. Robert and I were supposed to go on a float plane excursion while
the majority of the crew went on a crab boat excursion. Cruise Director Jimmy
informed me during my run that all float plane excursions had been cancelled
due to the weather.
Bummer. I was disappointed for myself, but even more for
Robert. He worked so hard to make everything perfect for everyone else, and the
thing he was looking forward to the most got cancelled. We found something else
to do that day, and I’ll tell you about it later, but it was anticlimactic
after looking forward to the Mystic Fjord Float Plane Excursion.
Morning Six, or If the house is a rockin’…get the hell out
of the house.
The weather didn’t improve after we left Ketchikan. In fact,
it got all kinds of crazy that evening. Around five o’clock or so, Captain
Fabian made an announcement that we would be leaving the Inside Passage and
there was some weather ahead. “We might experience some movement.”
Really Captain Fabian? We might experience some movement?
What you meant was “the ship is going to crest a huge wave, fly completely out
of the water, and then slam back down into the trough like the Andrea Gale in A Perfect Storm. Repeatedly.” We tried
to go to seventies night at the ship’s nightclub, but our drinks wouldn’t stay
on the table. Watching the band try to keep their footing while playing “Boogie
Nights” was fun, but we called it quits early and held on to the wall as we
made our way back to our staterooms. I lay awake for a long time listening to
things fall in the bathroom. Kaitlyn said the creaking made her
think of the scene in Titanic where the water burst through the wall as the old
couple lay in bed clutching each other. Happy thought when you’re lying in bed
on a ship.
We were still rockin’ and rollin’ the next morning, although
not to the same degree. I was out of bed less than a minute after I woke up.
Someone should patent that idea as an alarm. The clock strikes 6am, the bed
starts rolling, and boom! You’re awake.
My last morning’s run was much like my first. Nothing but
ocean on either side. There was less fog than that first morning, and the ship
was rising and falling more, but otherwise my run was very peaceful. Zen. Unencumbered
by distractions, I ran the farthest and thought the most. Later that day we
stopped in Victoria, Canada, and we returned to Seattle overnight, but I felt
like my cruise was bookended by those two runs.
Normally, I hate running on a track. Running in circles is
boring. I like to go somewhere when I run, watch the scenery change. Running in
circles in the middle of the ocean is different. You’re moving forward at the
same time. I was moving forward in every sense of the word. Each morning I got
up and ran on that cruise was a gift, a gift I gave myself just by getting up
and doing it.
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