vacation day 2: seattle to vancouver

We got on the road early Friday morning. Our first stop was a diner named Voula’s that Becca had found through the Food Network show “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives”. Said diner was located near the University of Washington, and ended up being right along the route that we had to travel north to Vancouver.

Voula’s was sort of Greek-themed; there were blue and white decorations on the inside and out, and there were some Greek-type items on the menu. We ended up getting a Chinese piñata (like eggs benedict, but with smoked pork instead of ham, and covered with chipotle-flavored hollandaise sauce), two Greek sausages and and a Greek sausage/eggs/hash browns/feta cheese scramble to share. The portions were gigantic and sharing one meal would have made more sense, but we didn’t know this when we were ordering. The food was excellent, and if you’re ever in Seattle, I highly recommend checking it out.



Our visit to Vancouver ended up being a complete bust. Our breakfast took a bit too long, and then we had to wait more than 30 minutes in line to cross the border into Canada. If you’ve ever been to Vancouver, then you know that the roads and highways are not intelligently designed. There’s really only one major road into or out of the city, and it was completely congested. By the time we got to the downtown area, we ended up having to turn around to take our rental car back to the airport. I’ve already been to Vancouver before, but I felt bad for Becca, who had never been and thus wasn’t able to see much more than views of the city from the car. That’s better than nothing, but not all that great.

Getting on board the cruise ship wasn’t all that smooth, either. We had to wait in line quite a while to get on board the ship. One thing I noticed right away was that there were hand sanitizer stations all over the place. Becca later heard that there was an outbreak of some kind of “intestinal problems” on the ship’s previous voyage, so the crew was taking all sorts of precautions on board the ship. This also extended to the buffets, where they were no longer letting guests serve themselves. That always makes things take longer and you never get just the right amount of food. Bummer.

As soon as we were able to put a few things down in our room, we headed outside to take pictures and walk around the ship. We were able to get some pretty decent views of Vancouver and the weather was nice, which was great. After the typical pre-sailing boat drill, where everyone gets to wear lifejackets (in disaster and death, we’ll all look like fools), and head to their muster station (the place where you’d get on a lifeboat if everyone was told to abandon ship), we went and had dinner in the main dining room. We were lucky enough to once again get a table for two, which was nice. The last thing I want to do on my vacation is sit with a bunch of people I don’t know and listen to their dull, awkward conversations about nothing. I get plenty of that when I go on business trips.



Dinner was excellent. As usual, it consisted of a few different courses. We both started with a goat cheese tart. Next, I had a bowl of cream of chicken soup while Becca ate some barfy endive and arugula salad. For our main course, I had prime rib with mashed potatoes, green beans and carrots, while Becca had spaghetti in some kind of white sauce with pancetta and some other Italian-type jazz. I had dark chocolate-covered cream puffs for dessert, and Becca had crème brulee. Everything we had was great.

We didn’t do much after dinner. We wandered around the ship for a while, and then went to the front of the ship to take pictures of the sunset. It was a nice way to end our first day at sea.