Day #1 of Alaska Vacation 2009 5/09/09

Starting today, I will be making blog entries about our 1st ever cruise to Alaska aboard the Norwegian Cruise Line Pearl. During this vacation, I took well over 1200 photos and videos. I will be uploading the best photos in order to save myself some blog space. ****PLEASE NOTE- I WILL BE UPLOADING ALL OF MY VACATION PHOTOS ONTO WEBSHOTS. AS SOON AS I AM FINISHED, I WILL PUT A LINK ON THE TOP RIGHT HAND COLUMN OF THIS BLOG.**** I hope that you enjoy. And away we go.....
On Friday, 5/08, we went to bed rather early because we had a very early plane to catch. I did not really sleep that well, which is not unusual when it is the day before a big trip. The following morning, we woke up around 2:30 in the morning on Saturday, 5/09. We were out the door and on our way to the airport by 3AM. Once at the airport, we checked in through one of those Kiosk things. We then weighed our luggage by ourselves because the the counters did not open up until 4AM. One bag weighed a little bit over the 50 pound per bag limit, so we put some items from one bag into another. Once we finished that, the electricity in the airport went out. We had a really bad lightning storm that we went through, on our way to the airport but it was over with by the time we got there. The electricity stayed off for a little over an hour. The airport was being run by generators but there was very limited services available. This meant that everything had to be hand written by the customer service personnel at the counters. This slowed everything down to a crawl but we were fine because we had everything done just prior to the electricity going out. We grabbed something quick to eat while waiting to depart. Our flights were long ones...over 3 hours to Houston and then over 4 hours to Seattle. Once at Seattle, we had a limo service pick us up and take us to our hotel downtown. Because our room was not ready yet...it was only about 11AM by this time...we stored our luggage in a locked room that the hotel provided us. We then decided to walk around Seattle to take photographs. I took a lot of architectural photos as well as scenic shots. We ended up walking to Pikes Market and the Waterfront area. It was packed down there because of some type of annual festival. Pikes Market was packed full of flower vendors for Mothers Day which was the next day. We ended up eating at the Fishermens Restaurant which was on the waterfront and very good. I had the fried Halibut and Chips platter and I think Veronica had the Shrimp and Chips Platter. By the time we got done with our dinner, we were pretty well pooped out do to the long day that we had. We went back to the hotel and went to sleep very early that night.


The famous Pikes Place Market










Flower venders at Pikes Places Market for Mothers Day






Various flowers that were in numerous stands at Pikes Place Market. Tulips and Lilacs were the main flowers













Getting ready for the tugboat races

Seattle ferry
This is the Norwegian Star. She was docked and taking in passengers the day prior to our Norwegian Pearl arriving




Various architectural photos of Seattle
















This is Veronicas version of Breakfast At Tiffanys...Starbucks in hand



Pictures of Veronica outside of an old, but still used Theater

Here is a movie of some street performers outside of Pikes Place Market. Please make sure that you turn off or pause the music player that is in the right hand column of my blog.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful pictures! I want to go to Seattle!

Funny that you had this big storm just before you left. In 2006, The night before I left for Japan we had a huge electric storm (the sky turning purple and green!!) and the power went off. The next day it was till off and I was afraid the airport would have no power. Luckily, it was fine. apparently, the power wasn't restored for 2 days!!

I smiled when you wrote "long flight." For me 3 and 4 hour flights mean short flights; when I fly to and from home to Japan, my flight is usually 12 hours!!

Can't wait to see the Alaska pictures!!

Wendy said...

Oh, my - what wonderful pics - and all on Day 1!

Toni said...

oh sure, you're gonna tell the story in order, so I hafta wait for newlywed details. ya wanker!

meanwhile, holy awesome! Fish and flowers -- I mean, a girl would never have to leave THAT market -- have sleeping bag, will scale fish for food and posies! And your architectural shots -- thank thank thank you for taking the kinds of pictures I would've taken myself.

i find those big a** ships VERY intimidating, actually.

DreamTNM said...

Beautiful pics!

MikeinAlaska said...

Great pictures and tremendous fun! Keep taking all of those beautiful pictures!

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