Alaskan Assassins

Once more we must apologize for the absence of a Sunday post, excusing ourselves once more on the grounds that we were once more out of town. The patience and understanding of our devoted readers will be rewarded herein with a detailed--read lengthy--narration of our adventures aboard a commercial cruise liner in and around the great state of Alaska, over the unfortunate sale of which our Russian comrades continue to berate themselves.

Saturday (3 June):
The first day of our much-anticipated vacation brought with it some minor frustrations, for the narration of which we shall quote in its entirety a primary document composed by an eye-witness to the day's events. We shall exercise some editorial prerogative in the presentation of the text, but only lightly, believing as we do that the true spirit of the day can best be preserved through the vigor and verve of Lia's unadulterated prose. We therefore quote from Julia's and Eli's diary, ghostwritten in this instance by Lia:
"We awoke early Saturday morning to finish packing, to clean, and with the high hopes that Julia would take a nap before we had to leave for Salt Lake to meet our 3:55 p.m. flight to Seattle. We hoped too much on the nap, but we did arrive at the airport by 2:00 p.m. I fed Eli in the car at long-term parking, then we waited alongside our mountain of luggage for the shuttle. Its coming was speedy, but its going was not; we finally got to check-in well past 3:00. Grandma had printed off electronic boarding passes for us, so we were relieved to stand in the no-wait, e-check-in line. As we headed to the kiosk, a Southwest Airlines employee, Veronica, informed us that because we had a lap infant we would have to check in through the problems line that was at least 50 passengers long [with only one employee at the desk-Ed.].
"We somehow managed to herd the luggage and both [kids] into and through that line, and who should help us at 3:35 p.m. but that lovely girl, Veronica. At 3:45 she was finally done checking us, prolonging the event quite a bit by detaining me while she called our gate to tell them we were coming, and then urging me to hurry once she finally hung up.
"By the time we had made it through security and come screeching around the corner to gate B14 at 3:54, we discovered that our 3:55 flight...had been delayed! That was the first good news of the day. Physically exhausted from all that exertion, we handed Julia off to Grandma & Grandpa and plopped exhausted and very frustrated into delightful airport chairs to await our flight....
"After our sit our tops had almost ceased to boil until we started actually boarding. Lo and behold our trusty friend Veronica had kept our boarding passes, so we couldn't board the plane. With long lines of angry customers holding their breath to see what he would do, Sergio made the right call by letting us on with the extra boarding passes Patti had brought, belying the computer's insistence that we hadn't checked in. Three cheers for Sergio! [Hearty hisses for Veronica! - Ed.]
"The only mishaps on the actual flight were one vomiting scene played by Jacob; one diaper change on the floor by the rear exit hatch played by a terrified Eli; and one long movie of whining and complaining, directed, shot, produced, starred, and co-starred, along with every supporting role, by Julia. (Actually that movie didn't play until Collings family Cruise Extravaganza Day 2).
"[After arriving at our Seattle hotel and suffering through a minor delay in the procuring of our dinner], Julia had the worst night's sleep of her post-6 months-old life and awoke to inaugurate a veritable reign of terror (Daddy said she was a veritable Robespierre)."
The foregoing, we believe, is an accurate rendition of the day's events, though we must note that Lia in her great generosity of spirit has been rather too merciful to that unmitigated blockhead Veronica.
Sunday (4 June): In port.
We celebrated the anniversary of Heber C. Kimball's call to open the British mission with a series of wholesale violations of the Sabbath. Eli protested our paganism on the shuttle that transported our infidel selves to the cruise ship by means of a thunderous blow-out (the first of many more than a dozen during the course of the week--a pox on the Huggies Diaper Corporation and their mendacious claims to prevent leakage--false, false as harlots' oaths!). The crew of the Norwegian Star greeted us with no less than seventy-four injunctions that we "have a smashing week" aboard their august vessel and with an imperious call that we gather with our life jackets on for some imperative instructions about preparation for emergencies. We had a delightful dinner at one of the restaurants on board before enduring the painful ordeal of putting Julia to bed. She ranted like a banshee for some twenty minutes, and devoured $12.50 worth of peanuts, cashews, and candy bars before her thrifty parents realized to their horror that these items, though placed invitingly atop our small fridge, were not free. Mercifully, she fell asleep, and Justin and Lia sought successfully to preserve their sanity over vanilla ice cream cones before eagerly leaping into oblivion themselves.
Monday (5 June): At sea.
Jacob's vomiting on the plane, together with the nocturnal vomiting that kept his parents awake the previous evening, proved an ominous augur of worse things to come. The virus that afflicted him now afflicted his parents, Jeni and Sam. When these last made their way to Sick Bay, they were promptly placed on 24-hour quarantine--a fate, some might argue, worse than death when it means confinement in a 8' x 12' room with no clocks and no windows and two violently uncooperative children.
In the afternoon, Julia and her cousin Joshua engaged in une affaire d'honeur around the ping-pong table. The result of their contest remains disputed.
Lia jogged in the morning, making good thus far on her vow to exercise during each day of her vacation. In the afternoon she attended a cooking class. In the evening Julia and Eli thrilled their parents when, in the first triumph of their long career of bunking together, they both fell asleep at the same reasonable hour and stayed asleep. After they went to bed, we placed the baby monitor in the able hands of Justin's parents while we sneaked out for a night (or rather an hour or so) of fun. There had been advertised a "Concert of Big Band Music," which we attended in the hopes of seeing Justin's brother, Jared, and his wife, Mitcee, (both former members of the BYU ballroom dance team) dance. It turns out the Big Band Music was performed by a band of three, and none of the music sufficiently inspired Jared and Mitcee to take to the dance floor. In an effort to bribe them, we promised to go sing karaoke if they would dance. We duly made our way to the karaoke bar where we shuffled through a long list of the available songs. During this shuffling, Justin came to the alarming recognition that he knows no songs in the English language and only three in the Italian tongue: "Nessun dorma" from Paccini's Turandot, "Va pensiero" from Verdi's Nabuco, and the brindisi "Libiamo nei lieti calici" from Verdi's La traviata. He was stunned to learn that none of this great operatic anthems was available on the karaoke machine. Lia made a valiant effort to sing Sarah McLachlan's "Angel," but a rather amusing mishap--though, consistent with the dignity of this blog, not worthy of repetition--prevented that effort. She sang "Desperado" instead, dazzling the eyes and ears of all present.
Tuesday (6 June): Juneau, Alaska.
In the morning, Lia went to an aerobics class while her husband and daughters went exploring. The exploration began auspiciously, and from the vantage point of their ensconcement in the Spinnaker lounge at the forward extremity of the ship, the three neophyte sailors saw their first whale. In the ensuing excitement Julia romped gleefully about the lounge, alternately sounding Indian war whoops and giggling enchantingly. She tripped once but to no ill effect; however, she soon tripped again as she ran full speed toward a lounge chair. The unhappy result of this fall was Julia's banging her forehead against a metal bar lining the sides of the chair. When her horrified father picked her up, she had an unwholesome crease along her forehead which soon burst and began to bleed. Julia shrieked in agony while Justin sought to comfort her--a task which proved difficult since he had to hold her on his hip while he carried Eli in a Baby Bjorn pouch. As Julia bled and cried and as a kind onlooker secured some ice, Justin felt something eerily wet on Eli's leg. Further inspection revealed the unhappy fact that Mt. St. Eli had blown out once more, this time with a vengeance. So the hapless young father raced from the lounge at 12th floor forward to our stateroom at 5th floor aft, with one child on his chest spewing offal, the other in his arm spewing blood. Upon arrival in the stateroom, Justin cleaned up the offending liquids before calling Grandma for reinforcements. Julia screamed in protest when we tried to apply ice to her injuries, but she eventually calmed and fell asleep in her fathers arms. Eli had preceeded her in drifting away to slumber. When Lia returned from aerobics, Justin smiled and reported that they had had a quiet morning, that nothing at all of note had transpired.
In the afternoon we arrived in Juneau where we were greeted by a hearty rainstorm. The silver lining on these rain clouds was, however, that we got to dress Eli in her Thlingit ("Eskimo" as expressed vulgarly) outfit and Julia in her adorable pink raincoat. We had a pleasant walk through Juneau, made more pleasant by our purchase and consumption of two giant cookies made from scratch at a local store, before stopping for a self-guided tour of the Alaska State Capitol. We happened upon the state legislature, which since January has been in special session in an effort to resolve the state's present fuel crisis. A lobbyist for a local company, a man single-handedly opposing the imperliastic efforts of the Exxon oil giants, took us aside and warmly regaled us with fascinating morsels of local and state history. When we told him we had a brother-in-law from Sitka, he told us of the bellicose spirit of the Sitka natives, still proud of their magnificent resistance to the onslaught of imperial Russia in the nineteenth century. At the end of our tour, two kind government employees presented us with pins emblazoned with the state flag and with an outline of the state itself.
After the capitol we visited the governor's mansion, a handsome white edifice that overlooks both town and sea. We then visited a Russian Orthodox chapel that has survived the ravages of time since the nineteenth century. On our return walk, the sound of the falling rain was entirely overwhelmed by an explosive torrent of Julian oratory. Julia talked long and loud, exhausting in her effusive loquacity the sum of her encyclopedic knowledge.
While we were experiencing Juneau under the inexorable downpour of the clouds above and of Julia's mouth below, less ardent (but more wealthy) souls like Jared and Mitcee were off kayaking.

Wednesday (7 June): Skagway, Alaska
The virus that struck the Tolley family the day before now struck Jared, Mitcee, and their son, Joshua. They too were now quarantined and missed the experience of the former boomtown of Skagway. While in Skagway, we visited the Moore home, which in previous centuries belonged to a pioneering family of some prominence. Women in flamboyant nineteenth-century dress guided tours of the city; quaint, but mildly unsettling when we overheard one such woman, her face made up after a rather gothic fashion, invite her tour group to "Close your eyes and feel the ghosts that swirl about us."
Lia fed Eli brunch at City Hall while Justin and Julia staked their claim to a local playground, ascending and descending two large parallel slides over and over and over at Julia's behest. While at City Hall, Lia learned something of the criminal gravity with which Alaska views the feeding by humans of native animal life. Apparently if you see anyone feeding the animals you are to call 9-1-1 immediately. This sense of gravity was later confirmed on the ship itself when both our captain and our park ranger issued solemn rebukes over the loud speakers to eager passengers who had been innocently feeding the birds. These, by the way, were the only such announcements during the course of the week that did not employ the term "smashing." At a Skagway grocery store we sought in vain to find replacements for the items we so ingenuously devoured from our stateroom minibar. The Tolley family, meanwhile, eager for activity after the enforced idleness of their quarantine, went dog-sledding.
Thursday (8 June): Glacier Bay, Alaska
We spent the entire day on board as we sailed through the visual wonders of Glacier Bay. We saw several whales during the course of the day and were generally awed by our surroundings, though from our vantage point on a floating shopping mall the experience somewhat resembled the viewing of such surroundings on a movie screen. Justin, Jared, and brother-in-law Dan engaged in a rousing intrafamilial series of Ping-Pong jousts. Justin was without qualification the worst player of the three, but by some fluke he once beat Dan, the unqualified best. After the kiddies went to bed at night, Justin and Lia crept up to the top deck where they sat contentedly for a while in a hot tub, in a stupor of thought as the sun set.
Friday (9 June): Ketchikan, Alaska
Ketchikan proved our least favorite of our on-shore stops. Lia had been in a hiking mood all week, so upon consulting a map of Ketchikan after disembarking, we decided to make our way to the Ketchikan creek to see what hiking opportunities there presented themselves. We therefore charted a course based on the map and followed it. Unfortunately, this meant marching up a steep and lengthy hill and, like the Grand Old Duke of York of nursery rhyme fame, promptly marching down again, albeit in a different direction. With great exertion therefore, which included carrying a stroller down a dozen or so flights of stairs, we arrived precisely where we would have arrived had we strolled leisurely for two blocks while remaining at sea level. Upon descending the hill we stopped to visit the local natural history museum where we watched a film about Southeast Alaska and enjoyed the exhibits. Julia really enjoyed the exhibits, entering immediately upon intimate terms with the hide of an Alaskan brown bear. "Hi bear!" she warmly saluted--over and over and over....At the adjacent bookstore we watched part of another film which featured the lovely seaside village of Sitka at considerable length. Our hearts swelled with pride.
We finally made it to the creek, only to learn that it is lined on either side by tourist shops. The only historical landmark in this sector was a rather lamentable one--a to-scale reconstruction of a nineteenth-century house of ill repute. We did however see a large sea beast in the creek itself that looked like a seal or a porpoise.
Saturday (10 June): Victoria, British Columbia
Justin's sister, Rosalyn, was afflicted this day with the infamous virus, landing the Eves family in 24-hour quarantine.
The B.C. capitol was our favorite on-shore visit. We rode into town on the top level of a double-decker bus. Arrived in town, we toured (alas, on the outside only) the beautiful parliament buildings and strolled the city's principal street. We then went to what our bus driver hailed as one of the largest natural history museums in North America. The museum was cripplingly expensive, but a kind young woman unexpectedly presented us with a free ticket to an imminent show at the Imax theater that is part of the museum. We went to the show, which turned out to be, not Mystic India as Lia ardently hoped, but Fighter Pilot as Gabe and Boe might have wished in our place. The film, though unartistic and all but plotless, was yet eminently cool, with plenty of exuberant sound effects and sweeping shots from the interior of various fighter planes, shots which, on the gargantuan Imax screen, made one helplessly dizzy.
Sunday (11 June): Happily, our return proved much more pleasant than our departure. Felicitously returned to our humble abode on the corner of seventh north and first west, we take leave once more of our slumbering reader.