We’d woken at four in the morning and flown from London to Paris to Vancouver, and I have to say right here that Vancouver international airport is absolutely gorgeous. There might be photos of that at the very end of this Alaskan cruise travelogue series because we had time when leaving to take some shots, but everything on embarkation day was just travel, travel, travel with hardly any time to stop and take in the surroundings between all the whisking us off on the next step.
At the airport we were met by representatives of both Holland America Line and Princess Cruises because they both operate under the same larger corporate umbrella and on this day, because their ships were right next to each other in the cruise port, they were sharing bus transfers too. We waited until enough people had arrived to fill a newly-arrived bus, then set off for the drive through Vancouver and to the cruise terminals.
We’d been warned before arriving that Vancouver cruise port could be congested and we should expect to wait in queues for a long time. That certainly seemed to be the case for the Princess passengers on our bus who we could see joining a large group in one building still waiting to board their ship, but we were the only two who were actually cruising with Holland America and this was now the middle of the afternoon. Our terminal was completely empty so we were able to check in then pass through security and passport control almost as if they weren’t there.
A note about passport control. It was weird to us at the time, although it makes perfect sense, that we’d had to pass through Canadian passport control at the airport, but then American passport control at the cruise port a few hours later because the cruise was going to American ports. Indeed, during the cruise we’d also be taking an excursion over the border into Canada and back again so we’d need to have passports checked twice more while on it, then another time when returning to Canada at the end of the cruise, and another one when leaving Canada at the airport.
We were on Koningsdam with our luggage and after doing the necessary bits for the muster it was time to actually start to relax. We had also been awake at this point for nearly twenty hours with a fair deal of stress in there to cope with so we were feeling a little frazzled. No photos of the room at this point, then, which I’d normally do, especially when boarding a new ship on a new line. Instead, the view from our balcony of Vancouver cruise port.
And we could see the Princess ship on the other side of the terminal building.
We’re not really people people. We are introverts. We like to simply stay in our cabin for the sail away because the top deck space can get busy and boisterous at this particular time. However, on Koningsdam we decided to make our way to the ship’s aft to have a couple of drinks out among the happy-to-be-cruising crowd just to see whether it would be more refined than that one time we experienced it on a P&O ship and vowed never to do it again.
Not really. In fact we were really surprised by how young and noisy the crowd was, generally. HAL has a reputation for the older, more reserved, slightly wealthier crowd. We didn’t see that so much here and we have to assume that the week-long duration made this cruise more accessible to a younger demographic.
There was music, singing, group dancing, and lots of laughter. We mostly sat and smiled and tried some drinks, but as the ship finally got underway I realised that finding good spots to take photos of the scenery we were passing was going to be more of a challenge than I’d expected.
We took another drink each back to our room for the remainder of the sail away from Vancouver and Canada.
If you cruise often enough then at some point you’ll pass beneath a bridge. We’ve passed beneath quite a few now and we added the Lions Gate Bridge to that list. There will be more information about that structure when I cover our disembarkation tour.
The remaining photos are just a small number of the shots I took from our balcony as Koningsdam twisted and turned past the islands and land masses of Canada on her way out to the ocean. The built-up areas along the shoreline gradually gave way to pleasing views of trees and mountains that hinted at the landscapes to come on this cruise.
We had dinner in the main dining room and it was very good, but there are no photos of it because we were like zombies at this point. We were contacted by friends we knew were on the ship to see about meeting up but declined due to our knackered state. We were in bed and likely fast asleep by ten in the evening after over twenty seven hours being awake.
In the next post in this series there’s a sea day before we visit the ports of Alaska so there’s an opportunity to take a look around Koningsdam. We also meet up with some old friends, make some new ones, and visit a speciality dining venue aboard the ship.