I love planning for our trips. Yes, I can spend multiple hours in a day working on the logistics, but at the end, I always feel like I’ve had a major accomplishment.
We’re cruising to Alaska on Holland America Line (HAL) in late May/early June. We will embark from Vancouver, Canada. We live midway between three airports—Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Akron. I only include Akron in my searches when we’re going a short distance. I don’t like to make more than one stop on a long trip. I want a layover on that stop of over an hour so we don’t miss the connection, but I don’t want to have to kill three hours. And I don’t want the stop to be way out-of-the-way between Cleveland/Pittsburgh and the destination. For example, on this trip I don’t want to connect in Newark, Atlanta, or Houston. And, if it is a long trip, especially an overnight trip, I want to fly in Business/First Class. I have a very hard time sleeping in a coach seat, and Jan without sleep is Jan with a migraine. Another factor is that Jas is a nervous flyer. He usually needs a Bloody Mary and a Valium to keep from breaking my fingers when we take off. (She who took her first flight at age 5, and dreamed for years of getting her pilot’s license, simply cannot fathom this anxiety.) Jas loves that the flight attendant takes his drink order the minute we sit down. Since the first flight I booked us into the First Class cabin, he has never complained again about my working my magic to get us into First. I have “miles” credit cards for the three major airlines, so that’s where my search begins.
The first thing we wanted to do on our way to Vancouver was to visit Barb, my sewing friend who runs Bali Fiber Tours and lives in Victoria, Canada. My Delta card on American Express gives me a free companion ticket each year. The companion ticket can only be used in the Continental U.S. So we would fly Delta to Seattle, take a ferry over to Victoria, spend a day or two with Barb, then take another ferry to Vancouver. I found a hotel in Vancouver that sits atop the cruiseport, making that an easy decision. I tend to weigh price again convenience. The greater the convenience, the higher the price I’m willing to swallow. We are therefore in a hotel that costs way more than I would normally pay. And I haven’t yet told Jas how much the hotel costs. That’s my dirty little secret.
Then I went for the airline. I looked at the schedule for the ferry to Victoria. I even called their office in Seattle to double-check. The only ferry outbound leaves around 7:30 a.m. Well, darn. That meant we had to fly in the day before and find a hotel near the ferryport. I found a flight on the Thursday before our Sunday cruise embarkation. All the flights to the West Coast either left early in the morning or mid- to late-afternoon. This flight I liked would get us into Seattle around 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. To our body clocks, that would be early on Friday morning. Then on Friday we would take the ferry to see Barb, spend the night with her, and get the northbound ferry from Victoria to Vancouver.
I clicked all the buttons, and carefully selected the companion ticket and applied it to Jas’s ticket. And then I got this pop-up window that instructed me to [also, I thought] click the $200 credit box. Then I finished and paid. By this time, I had been at the task for several hours, and had looked at all sorts of options, so I didn’t stop and do one more final review of the $$$. Or apply a logic check to it. Big mistake!
Then I emailed Barb to ask about the bus that would take us from downtown Victoria to the Vancouver ferry. We had talked about this whole scheme months earlier, shortly after booking the Alaska cruise. But now, Barb—who had been planning to retire after the cruises she led in 2022—had decided to take another group of women to Bali, and when we were flying into Seattle, she would be flying into Bali. What?!
Okay. That’s not too bad. I was sorry I would miss her, but we had already booked another cruise in April of 2024 that would sail from San Diego to Vancouver, with a port visit at Victoria. Yea. I’d get to see Barb, she’d get to finally meet Jas, and we wouldn’t have to deal with ferries.
[About at this time, I had booked our flight back to Cleveland from Anchorage. No problems. A red-eye out of Anchorage into O’Hare, an hour layover, and a subsequent flight getting us into Cleveland around noon, retrieve the bags, shuttle to the parking lot, home by 1:30. Easy peasy.]
So how would we get from Seattle to the cruiseport in Vancouver? Oh, Amtrak. Jas worked on the railroad for thirty-some years, and loves trains. All trains. Freight or passenger, he loves them all. And Amtrak comes up the coast, stops twice in Seattle, and goes right up to downtown Vancouver. So we’d take the train. I studied the schedule and figured out how to make it happen, down to where we would hail a cab to take us from the train station to the hotel. I reserved our seats on the train and reserved a hotel room nearby that had a shuttle from the Seattle airport.
But the more I thought about carrying two big bags (filled with seven-day Inside Passage cruise and three-day Denali National Park visit) onto the train and to the hotel, and remembered our ages and old knees, I shuddered. But there’s an app for that—for the bags. Well, a website for that. The company is Baggage Forward. They’ll take your bags and ship them wherever you need to go. For a price. I went online and entered all my information, but it wouldn’t let me enter Vancouver as the destination. I did see that to ship them to Seattle would cost $144 per bag. But that’s worth it for the convenience and protection of our aging knees, shoulders, and backs. Right??? But I would have to call them to get the quote for shipping internationally. Vancouver may be nextdoor to Seattle, but it’s a different country.
So, on Sunday afternoon, I sat down to use the Ultimate Cruise Planner designed by Ilana Schattauer of the “Life Well Cruised” blog and YouTube channel. I pulled out the Flight Information page and started documenting all the flight information both for myself and so Jas would have a copy for himself. He wouldn’t have to ask me about dates or times. And while I was at it, I would tell him how much he owed me for his half of these flights. I could get those bills paid off.
I pulled up my Delta to Seattle email and looked carefully at the numbers. O! M! G! Jas was NOT flying free on a campanion ticket. I did NOT have the entire first class flight for two for around $850. For f***’s sake. What had I done?!
I thought I’d sleep on this and figure out if I wanted to just live with it or make big changes. At odd moments, I thought about: getting into Seattle when we could hardly keep our eyes open; schlepping two 40# bags into shuttles, out of shuttles and into hotels; into trains; into cabs; and into more hotels.
In the morning, I called Baggage Forward and asked for a quote to ship two “medium” size bags to Vancouver to be delivered to the HAL office in the Vancouver cruiseport. The price was $404. Ummm, per bag. $808 to not have to schlepp bags. If I hadn’t been shocked enough when I realized Jas was not flying for $0, this now pushed me over the edge. Things had to change!!!
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Re-reading this post on May 27, as we’re in the Vancouver hotel waiting for tomorrow afternoon’s embarkation, I note that we actually are traveling with three full-size suitcases, not two. That would have been a $1,212 charge!!!
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And then I remembered that Jas had a credit with United from the cancellation of the Alaska cruise we had planned to take in June of 2020. We all know how 2020 ended. The expiration date of that credit of $1,087 had previously been graciously extended by United to the end of 2023. Well, Baby, we were going to use it now!!! So I figured out which United flight I thought I wanted, and searched for the phone number. Do you have any idea how deeply airlines hide their call center numbers nowadays? Very deeply! I finally found it, and explained to the agent that it was a reservation I couldn’t make by myself online because I would pay for my ticket with miles and for Jas’s with the credit + my United credit card. Half an hour later, this complex task was accomplished. We now have a flight to Vancouver through Denver, leaving Cleveland at 10:00 a.m. We don’t have to drive up the night before and pay for a hotel, as we can leave home between 6:30 and 7:00 and arrive at the gate with plenty of time. I’ve emailed my HAL “Personal Cruise Consultant,” Katerina, and reinstated the transfer from the Vancouver airport to the hotel, which coincidentally is the same hotel that HAL books passengers into when the passengers have HAL-booked flights. And on Sunday morning, we will place our bags outside our hotel door, and take the elevator downstairs to check in for our cruise.
Alaska, here we come—as soon as the next nine weeks of this semester pass.
I. Can’t. Wait.
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As I’m proofreading this page, I remember that United changed our CLE-DEN-YVR flight from 10:00 a.m. to 8:55 a.m. That means we would have to get up at 4:30 a.m. to get ready to leave before 6:00 a.m. to get to CLE in sufficient time to clear TSA and get Jas his Bloody Mary. Not gonna get up that early for such a long day on the plane. Made reservations with the Crowne Plaza near the airport to park, sleep & fly.
This page was written in late February, 2023. Today is May 16, 2023. We leave in nine days. Why am I proofreading this page today?
I’m changing some things around in my website as I want to be able to write about the trip as each day occurs, so the task won’t be so overwhelming when I get home. Two days after we get home, I begin playing for YSU’s Dana Vocal Performance Clinic week of summer camp for high school singers, Monday through Friday that week. And I’ll be in rehearsals each night as we head into tech week for the world premiere of “The Other Side,” words and music by my friend and former student, Adam Dominick. I’m one of the rehearsal accompanists and playing piano in the pit. And I’ll have a houseguest—my grandson, recovering from one of his transition surgeries.
So, if I leave the writing of my travelogue until I have time to do it, it won’t get done.
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