Goodbye Vancouver!

We are on our way! It’s been quite the day with a leisurely start to the morning with an amazing breakfast at our hotel. We were super impressed with everything about the St. Regis from the service and friendliness of the staff, the luxury of the rooms, and the delicious breakfast. Totally worth the price.

Our boarding time was at 2:00 so we had lots of time to kill after breakfast. We decided to talk a walk to the pier where our ship was leaving from to see how long it would take us with our suitcases in tow. It was 15 minutes and  thankfully all downhill so we figured that was doable and we wouldn’t need a taxi for the short distance. We had fun exploring the pier and found our ship and took the obligatory selfie.

It’s a beautiful ship and huge! It’s going to take a lot of exploring to figure out where the heck everything is. 

We went back to the hotel and read for a while until check out time. We were sad to leave the St. Regis behind us but eager to begin our adventure. We pushed, pulled, and cajoled our suitcases to behave on the 15 minutes walk to the pier and finally arrived 2 hours early. We managed to find a lame Mickey D’s cheeseburger to stave off the hunger for a bit and then decided to be renegades and checked in an hour early for the cruise. Guess what? Nobody cared! How anticlimactic 😏

We made our way through a dizzying array of roped off lines; through the initial baggage drop off, then to the ship checkin then off to another area of the pier where we did the customs checkin which was a work of art of roped-off lanes herding the passengers through miles of lines.  Thanks in part to these epic check in lines, we clocked in an impressive 5.94 miles of walking today.

Once on the ship, we had a couple of false starts of going down the wrong side of the ship to find our room, but gratefully found suite 8301 where we will be ensconced in our balcony room for the next 11 days. It’s an adequate sized room for 2 people with teeny weeny twin beds next to the balcony, a decent sized  couch in the middle of the room and a bathroom with all the necessary accoutrements to meet our hygiene standards next to the entrance. We also met Mikka, our steward for the trip (picture to be taken on another day) who was super helpful in answering our many questions. Before we knew it, we felt the ship moving away from the pier and we quickly made our way up to the top deck to watch Vancouver disappear behind us. It was a beautiful afternoon and we couldn’t have asked for better weather. 

It was about 5:30 by the time we finally went back to our room and we were starving! We are still very much on east coast time and I’m not used to waiting until 8:30 to eat dinner. We made our way to the Grand Epernay dining room (fancy schmancy!) and were greeted by our waiter Ngurah. Not sure what country he is from, but he couldn’t have been nicer. The real star of the show though  was the sommelier, Sachin. A man who didn’t handle stress well at all and acted like he needed a good vacation himself. I got such a kick out of watching him try to handle all of the requests for wine and maintain his dignity. He only semi succeeded with maintaining his dignity. I hope we get a chance to sit in his section again. Is that mean? It feels a little mean but I feel like I really relate well to Sachin.

After dinner, Mum and I made our way to the theater to watch the comedian hired for the cruise. Celebrity Cruises needs to get a refund! To be fair, it was his very first show of the cruise and he probably needed some warm up time, but damn! The “hilarious comedy of Sean Kent” rather missed the mark. There were a few good jokes here and there but mostly it fell flat. He performs again in two days but I think it’s safe to say, we’re going to pass on that one.

Tomorrow is our first full day at sea which we are super happy about. The plan is to go to the dining hall early to miss the hoards and then find a quiet place to place cribbage so that Mum/Meany Pants can clean my clock for the first of many times on the cruise.

Goodnight from cabin 8301 😘