Last night's sunset occurred as we were finishing dinner in the dining room. The 'food crew' had done the rounds singing and thanking guests of the Noordam for choosing Holland America. As we were already on Deck 3, we simply walked to the outer deck space. This happened at about 8:50 pm in some desolate place north of Campbell River, BC.
Jay, the 1900 guests, 850 staff, and I noted the weather had been exceptionally clear for the prior five days. The sunset proved that we were going south, southeast into some cloud cover.
When we awoke in Vancouver Harbour, it was overcast. The only other ship calling today is Holland America's ms Niewu Amsterdam.
My alarm rang at 7:00 but I set it to snooze for an extra ten minutes.
We are now HAL 4-Star Mariners. One new perk is that we no longer have to pick a disembarkation time. We get the black luggage tags and can leave the ship from the time its cleared until 9:30 am, which is when everybody who's not continuing a cruise must vacate.
We leisurely had our last breakfast of the cruise on the Lido deck and walked off the ship at close to 9 o'clock. We'd shared one large suitcase which was waiting in the terminal and rolled it about 500 meters onto the SkyTrain. It takes around 35 minutes for the SkyTrain to reach our station and we have a door directly into our apartment building. So we were home before it finally started to rain.
