9/24/10 – Day 0 – Bon Voyage

     After sleeping in and having a nice complimentary breakfast at our hotel in Seattle, we took a bus to a grocery store for some American snacks and amenities that we thought would be nice to have over the next two months.  We then took a shuttle to the port in Seattle, checked in, and boarded the vessel that will be “home” for the next 68 days, Holland America’s M.S. Amsterdam.  The ship is not huge as far as cruise ships go, but it is plenty large enough for our voyage.

     Realizing exactly how much luggage we brought (14 pieces) by seeing it all piled onto our beds and couches in the stateroom left us the daunting task of unpacking. Even though we were so kindly upgrade to a Veranda Suite two days ago, our stateroom is still quite small to have 3 of us trying to move about organizing our belongings all at the same time.  I finally gave up and decided I will be fine unpacking another day.  Our upgrade really didn’t give us much more room inside the stateroom, but it did give us our own private balcony which we are sure to enjoy throughout our trip.

      We had a beautiful, clear view of Mount Rainer around 5 p.m. as we headed west out of Seattle through the Straight of Juan de Fuca.  Travel has been nice, as well as our fellow guests.  Antong is our head waiter and Widi is our assistant, both hailing from Indonesia (which we will visit later in our trip).  I will be eating dinner at a table with my folks, along with an Marsha and Michael, a brother and sister traveling together who winter in Kissimmee, FL and summer in the mountains of Pennsylvania where they grew up.  They are seemingly very kind and I’m sure will prove to be nice company with whom to enjoy our dinner mealtimes.

     Concerning time difference from home, we started our voyage in Seattle’s Pacific Time zone, 3 hours behind Florida’s Eastern Time zone.  As we travel west, we will continue to fall behind an hour at a time until crossing the International dateline, when we will be skipping an entire day and jumping ahead of you by almost 20 hours.  I’ll try to keep you updated on our time difference as I go. Obviously, my posts will correlate with my days and times and not necessarily yours.