I don’t know whether I am going to blog the rest of the cruise, but I am bored out of my mind right now so I will at least share our adventures getting on the ship. A couple of weeks ago we received an email telling us that there would be three ships in port today and boarding would take longer than usual. I knew that meant boarding would be hell so we had devised a plan to kill a lot of time at the airport after flying into Vancouver. Specifically, we were going to go to the Fairmont airport hotel and pay for day passes at the spa where we would swim and sauna. Then we would have lunch. Then we would head to the cruise port. Doesn’t that sound lovely?

We flew from Portland to Vancouver this morning, leaving at 9:30 and arriving in Canada at 10:30. Last year we enrolled in the Nexus program which gives us expedited entry into Canada and the US plus TSA-Precheck privileges. When we got off the plane, I was very excited to use our Nexus cards for the first time. We meandered so much getting off the plane there were no crowds at all at Customs and Immigration. Still, we paid for this Nexus privilege so we went to the Nexus machines, inserted our cards and received a message that we could not use the machines because we did not have iris scans on file. We had to go through customs and immigration for regular people, which took approximately 2 minutes. The guy who checked us through said we could go upstairs to the Nexus office and possibly get our irises scanned. Since we had all the time in the world, we figured we might as well, so we headed upstairs. We had to wait for 15 minutes but then we both had our eyeballs scanned. The scanning involved staring at a mirror and centering a green light on the bridge of my nose. It was very hard to get the green light centered on the bridge of my nose. Once I managed it, though, the iris scan man told me to widen my eyes. As soon as I widened my eyes, Mary started laughing at me and I had to try very hard not to laugh (because immigration officials are scary) but I moved my head enough to lose the green light and I had to start all over again. Fortunately, my Nexus privileges were not revoked and now the government has a scan of my irises. Yay for that!

Once our irises were scanned it was close to noon, and Mary said she thought we should just eat and then go to the cruise terminal because otherwise we would get nervous about missing our ship. We had a very nice meal in the airport from a Vietnamese restaurant confusingly named Thai Hang. Then we took the SkyTrain to the waterfront and wandered numerous times in the wrong direction from where we were supposed to be going. This would have been fine if I hadn’t had a cortisone shot in my foot on Wednesday that made my foot hurt more than the original pain I went to the podiatrist for. Also because my foot was numb until this morning, I spent two days limping around and now my left knee is hurting also. I feel old.

Eventually we got to where we were supposed to go which was an exhibit hall in the Convention Center. There were THOUSANDS of people in the room. We had to get in line to get numbers and then sit and wait for our number to be called. Which brings me to now and why I am bored out of my mind. The numbers are for groups of people and every time a number gets called a huge cheer goes up from the chosen group. It was approximately 12:30 when we were given number 82. At that point they were calling number 42. They just called number 79 (big, loud cheer) and it is 4:35 pm.

I am grateful that we are sitting because once before I naively went on a one-night cruise from Vancouver to Portland and spent 4 hours standing in a hot underground area with no food, water, or bathrooms. This is much more civilized. Back when they were calling numbers in the 60’s, I tried to talk Mary into going outside for a little walk and perhaps a snack but that made her too nervous. I have read the New York Times, listened to Fresh Air, and played numerous games of Pig with Mary. The sad thing is once they call our number we have to go stand in two more lines for security and customs and immigration. I will be happy to get on the ship!

Note from Mary: Shortly after Lis finished the above, our group was called and we left our holding pen to go stand in a huge security line. The line moved pretty quickly, though, all things considered, and everyone in line was surprisingly jovial, so it wasn’t too bad. After going through the metal detectors and then re-gathering our stuff, we left the security room and went to the room for customs – and the end of yet another giant line. My heart sank a little, but then one of us noticed the Nexus sign. We asked the guy shepherding us through the line “Can we use our Nexus cards here?” He said “You have Nexus cards?” and when we showed them to him, he got very excited and said “Yes, yes! Go here, go right up to that counter!” And so we waltzed right to the Nexus line, where there were TWO PEOPLE ahead of us instead of 500, and were on the ship in a matter of minutes after that. We heart Nexus 🙂