When we woke up this morning, the cruise ship was docked in Seattle. We made it! At least, we made it back to the lower 48; we’ve still got 2,000 miles to go in the minivan before we’re “home” home, but after spending a week mostly out at sea, even Seattle felt like “home”.

When disembarking from a cruise ship, there are two ways to do it. The first way is to carry all your luggage off the boat. If you can do that, you’ll be one of the first people off the boat. If you can’t do that, then you have to check your baggage, just like at the airport. All your baggage will be tagged and taken into the hull of the ship. Then, one zone at a time (our ship had 20 zones), you exit the ship and go to the customs building where you try to find all your suitcases in a pile of suitcases that belong to 2,200 other people. We packed for this cruise with the intention of carrying our own luggage off the ship, and at 7:15am this morning, we did just that. We were one of the very first people to exit the ship and quickly made our way to …

… a dead minivan. “Someone” (not me) left one of the dome lights on in the van, and the battery was dead. Both the shuttle drivers and the security guards said is was against their policies to give us a jump (we even had cables), so we ended up calling AAA and having them come jump the van. Although the AAA building is literally a 2 minute drive from the parking lot, it took over an hour for them to find us. Eventually they did, the car was started, and we were on our way.

Our next stop was four hours east in Spokane, Washington. Susan and I lived in Spokane from 1996-1998 and wanted to go do some site seeing. Our first stop was our old office. There were a few familiar faces left in the office, but most of the people we knew had moved on. We had great but brief visit with a few old friends there.

We spent the next couple of hours driving around Spokane, looking for places we used to go and such. I should probably write a separate blog post about the experience, but basically we barely found anything that looked familiar to us. It was a very frustrating experience for me. Places I “knew” where they should be were no longer there. We even had to use the GPS to find our old apartment complex. Susan summed up the experience with one great sentence: “It feels as foreign to me today as it did the day we moved here.” I couldn’t agree more. We were both hoping to show the kids some of the places we used to go but even most of the restaurants we used to eat at were gone. It was almost as if I had amnesia or had dreamed of living there. I never quite got my bearings, and I can honestly say that I have no personal need to ever visit the town again. I’ll still keep in touch with a few people that still live there, but the Spokane I remember, I guess, is gone. It certainly wasn’t the closure I was hoping for.

The AAA guy that jumped our battery suggested that we eat at a place called Zips in Spokane, so we did. We went to the location in the Spokane Valley, if it matters. As the four of us walked in Susan and Morgan went to the bathroom while Mason and I stood in the lobby listening to the two employees behind the counter yell at each other over who was busier. Not good. After the girls came out of the restroom, I went in to the bathroom. While I was in the bathroom sitting in the stall, some guy dressed like a gangster comes in the bathroom and stands outside my stall. He wasn’t using the restroom (I could see his feet) … he was just standing there. I flushed, stood up, and opened the door. This guy is still standing there and staring at me, and he’s got his whole gang uniform on. I, on the other hand, look like a guy who’s been in a tiny room with two kids and his wife for seven days and has resorted to pooping in burger joints. The guy eventually walks out without doing anything in the restroom. I walk out behind him with the hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

I get out to the lobby and although that guy’s gone, outside the window I am now watching a drug deal go down. These two guys are sitting in an old GMC pickup truck; the driver looks like Charles Manson back in the day, and the passenger looks like Charles Manson today. A third guy walks up and leans in the window and is looking around and I’m thinking to myself, has Spokane really got this bad? About the time our food arrives, this guy walks in and asks if he can use the store’s phone; the girl at the counter tells him no. He pleads his case — he’s left his wallet somewhere and he wants to call to see if it’s there. She tells him no again, and he asks to speak to a manager. While this is going on I’m watching the drug deal go down in the truck parked next to our van, and Susan notices that the car parked on the other side of our van appears to have bullet holes in the door. About this time we got a couple of “to-go” sacks off the counter, tossed our food into them, and left.

Other than gas and a quick Walmart stop, we didn’t stop again until we reached Missoula, Montana, where we are now for the night.

So anyway, about those pictures. The good news is, I took pictures. Lots of pictures. Over a thousand pictures. The bad news is, I wasn’t able to upload them while out at sea. The good GOOD news is, now that I’m parked at a hotel for the night, I’m able to (hopefully) get them all online. I am uploading them by day. So far, only days one and two were online. I had uploaded (so far) days three through six, and will keep uploading them until either I fall asleep or the hotel kicks me off for being a bandwidth hog. :)

All of the pictures will be available at the following link:

http://robohara.com/photo/index.php?album=Vacations%2FAlaska_2012

Note that they should be roughly in chronological order. They probably won’t have any captions until I get home and have a bit more time on my hands.

Tomorrow we’re going to cruise through Yellowstone National Park at breakneck speed and try to hit Mount Rushmore. I can already feel the vacation falling apart at this point; everybody (including me) wants to be home, so we’ll have to determine tomorrow how many destinations get axed.