Up early - around 5:30am - and headed up to the Lido Market buffet because that’s where the coffee is. There are three things that make first thing in the morning one of my favourite times of the day, especially when I’m up before everyone else:

1. coffee

2. the New York Times crossword

3. silence

That last part hasn’t happened since we’ve been on the ship. I don’t know why, but this ship seems determined to make every waking moment of the day loud. The shows, the bars, the restaurants… loud. Even this morning, when nobody else is around, the piped-in music is blaring like I’ve gone to a concert. I put in my earbuds and tried listening to my own music, but the ship’s music was loud enough to cut through even that. WTF?

Anyway, Rob came up a little while later, then Annie joined us a little bit after that. The scrambled eggs were delicious as always and on the fruit bar, they had fresh tamarind. I’d never had it before and I discovered that it tastes a lot like a date, but it’s incredibly difficult to eat.

We pulled up at a dock six miles north of the little town of Sitka, Alaska. There’s no dock in town, so ships park out here and take a city-run shuttle into town. As it happens, the Norwegian Sun was parked here as well.

I guess it really is a small world, because we’ve been on the Norwegian Sun before, several years ago on a cruise through the Panama Canal. That was before I started writing these travelogues, though, so you’ll just have to take my word for it when I say we had a good time.

Sitka greeted us with fog and drizzle and the view off our balcony was kinda eerie…

Around 11am, we decided to get off the ship and poke around the area near the dock. There’s a visitor’s centre, some adventure tour companies, and a crab restaurant. We decided to have lunch there.

We both got the crab mac & cheese and shared an order of sourdough corn fritters. I chased mine down with a huckleberry margarita.

I was happy to see that the crab was all sitting on top of the pasta, so I could eat it separately from the rest of the dish (a weird hangup of mine). I thought the pasta and cheese was delicious and the corn fritters were even better than that. I even really liked the huckleberry margarita, in spite of it being very sweet. Once lunch was over, we headed back outside to find that it was still raining. We opted to have a lazy day on the ship rather than take the shuttle into down, due to the cold, wet weather.

Naps happened. Nice! The weather almost cleared up a little, and we could see a bit more off the balcony.

That still wasn’t enough to get us back outside, though, since we were both committed to our lazy day by now. I had changed into my Qatar Airways ‘loungewear’ and spent most of the day writing a song called ‘Fuck Cancer’. Writing the lyrics has been a bit cathartic, opening up old wounds and then healing them again. I’m pretty happy with it so far, but I’m only about halfway through it.

We went for an early dinner and I shocked Rob and myself by opting for a nice salad.

After dinner, we went up to the Crow’s Nest for espresso martinis and a view.

Saw a couple more whales, but didn’t get the camera out fast enough. It was nice a relatively quiet for awhile up there, but a family started playing a table game with wooden discs and it got pretty loud pretty quickly, so we bailed and came back to the room to await the sunset and the inevitable drinks party afterward. The sun won’t set until 10pm tonight, so here’s this picture taken just before 9pm to tide you over. If I get a good sunset shot, I’ll include it with tomorrow’s post.

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