Autumn in Canada #6

Autumn in Canada

 #6

Saturday, October 5, 2019

Embarkation

          Hotel checkout and cruise boarding day. We are going to miss this gigantic room here at the Boston Sheraton. We need to be at the Cruise port before noon. After breakfast and last-minute packing we headed for the port. The weather was 46º...brrr. Janet was not feeling her best.

          Bill scheduled an Uber to pick us up at 11 AM. Our driver arrived right on time and got us to the port on time. One thing we’ve learned about Boston is that there seems to be no direct way to get anywhere and traffic is always terrible – even on a Saturday morning.

          We arrive at the cruise port and our ship – Holland America Cruise Lines, the Veendam (one of their smaller, older ships), only to discover we weren’t allowed to bring aboard the 24-pack case of spring water we’d bought for the cruise. We gave it to our drive, who has small children. (We could tell by the toys in the back of his mini-van).

          Security has become much like the airport. We had to unload our pockets and run our backpacks through the X-Ray scanner.  We got our ID photos taken for our digital stateroom keycards and boarding pass for when we get on and off the ship at the different ports of call, and proceeded to the waiting area.

          The PA announcement stated that our staterooms were ready and we boarded. We found our stateroom on the main deck of the port (left) side, we head up to deck 11 for lunch at the Lido Market (buffet).

          After lunch, we headed to our cabin to prepare for the lifeboat drill at 3 PM. That turned out to be quite a mess with a lot of confused older people stumbling around and not understanding the crewmembers (many of whom had very strong accents from different countries) After the “all clear” sounded we went back to our cabin to unpack

          We dressed for early dinner at 5:30 PM in the Main Dining Room since all the later slots were filled.  It is quite beautiful. We were joined by two women from Utah. The older one was there because her husband was ill and couldn’t make the cruise.