Mary’s been doing all the writing because I decided I wanted to only drink in the cruise and not have the responsibility of documenting it. But I must post about how DIVINE yoga on the balcony is. On both this cruise and our Crystal Cruise in December 06, I borrowed a yoga mat from the health club and then did yoga on the balcony accompanied by my MP3 player. At times yesterday the roar of the float planes totally drowned out the yoga instructor in my headphones but otherwise it was quiet and beautiful and really a transcendent experience that I highly recommend.

My whole body was aching yesterday – partially my injured shoulder, partially my legs screaming from all the stair walking, partially trying to adjust to the bed, but I decided I need a massage. They offered me a special of 50 minutes of Swedish massage for $99, but she said some other massage would be better for aches, and she dropped the price from $150 to $130 if I did it while we were still in port. I was impressed with what the massage therapist accomplished in 50 minutes and I DO feel better today. Afterwards I took a steam bath and then a shower and then a sauna. Often this is all I do – I am a big fan of the “poor woman’s spa experience” in which one partakes of all the amenities of the locker room but does not purchase any actual spa services. I will say that if that’s what you’re after, Crystal has a much better “poor woman’s spa” than Regent. The Regent locker room was small and the steam room was tiny and the lockers were sort of beat up and the keys didn’t work well. But I’m evaluating, not complaining. The steam room was nice and hot, and it all made for a lovely afternoon.

Next post, back to Mary. I find myself kind of boring. But we both would like to offer this correction to her previous post. It was the weather in Ketchikan that was dry and mostly sunny, not her ears. Well, her ears probably were too, but she was referring to the weather.

I’m writing my own post because Mary believes in shorter blog posts so I’m not allowed to add on to hers.

Room service dinner: I was glad they brought all the food at once. We’ve been getting up so early, I really wanted to go to bed early and that is hard if you have dinner in the dining room – that is a long, drawn-out affair. I was done with dinner in 30 minutes and we were in bed reading by 8:30. I fell in love with Juneau through our window. As Mary said, the water was calm and it was really, really quiet. From the bed, I could see the aforementioned snow-capped hill and some little houses across the way. I kept saying I felt like I was in the Swiss Alps – it was so picturesque and peaceful. I would have been happy if the whole cruise we were docked in Juneau with that view outside our window. Again, though we wished for the starboard side prior to the cruise, I am SO glad we ended up on the port side, primarily because that means that when we are in port, our view is generally of the water side rather than the town side. Since we spend so much time in the room and out on the balcony, even while we’re in port, that matters a lot to us.

Mary also didn’t write about Patsy Ann. There is a statue of Patsy Ann that greets passengers disembarking cruise ships in Juneau. We were fortunate to be docked right in front of wonderful Patsy Ann. Patsy Ann was an English Bulldog who used to come down to the docks and greet the steamships in the 1930s. She had an uncanny ability to know not only when a ship was coming in but which dock it was going to. There are two signs next to her statue that tell her whole story beautifully and Mary took photos of both, so maybe eventually we will post them. At any rate, we both fell in love with Patsy Ann, and Mary, perhaps because she was so tired, started crying when she read the signs.

While we were looking at Patsy Ann, two of the women we had met at the Friends of Dorothy party came up and asked where we had been because they hadn’t seen us on the ship. I said, “We’ve been around, but we spend a lot of time in our room and out on the balcony.” (In fact, yesterday I was thinking it would be fun to bring a sleeping bag and SLEEP on the balcony.) One of them said, “Do you not live together or are you apart much of the time?” Mary said, “No, in fact we just don’t seem to get bored with each other.” Really I think the proper question would have been, “Do you not have a stateroom at home or a balcony?” It’s true we are together a lot but we also just love our room and our balcony and we are admittedly less social than many people. These women said they had been out on their balcony maybe 5 minutes this cruise, which is about 1/1000^th of the time we’ve been out on our balcony. But that’s what’s so great about cruising – like some stupid ad copy says, “You can do as much or as little as you want” and I maintain there is nothing more divine than hanging out on your balcony when everyone else is off in port or at a show or gambling or whatever. We have our own quiet little world – a BEAUTIFUL quiet little world – and I think there is nothing like it.

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