July 15 -- "setting sail"

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After supper. Some luggage remained to be loaded. Ours had arrived by the time I took this pic, but had not arrived before dinner. It had traveled from Anchorage on a truck (not on the tour bus that brought us, and not on the same schedule that governed our movements).

Holland America does a lot more than cruise ships, in Alaska. It owns hotels, it books and manages land excursions, and it manages luggage.

Our first adventure with luggage was not on Holland America's watch. The travel agency which booked us with HAL (Holland America's nickname) had no relationship with HAL, other than as a frequent customer. They booked us with one (1) hour to change planes in Minneapolis. Now this would be awfully tight, in my estimation, given that Minneapolis is a Northwest hub, even setting aside that we were leaving from Detroit, where you don't leave on time more than one time in 20 or so.......

Naturally we didn't leave DTW until nearly an hour after we were supposed to have left. Naturally (Minneapolis being a hub, and all), our first plane parked about a mile from the next one.

The rest of my family arrived in Minneapolis from Kansas City, considerably ahead of us. I called my brother the minute we hit the ground, so he knew where we were. Northwest asked people who were not in a hurry to catch another flight to stay put on the plane, so we were amongst the first off the plane from DTW, and we hustled (sending my college athlete daughter ahead).

Northwest paged us as we were en route -- right, that will speed us up, we'll stop and answer a page.... ???

Both of my siblings declined to get on the plane until we got there. We greeted them, and were scolded by Northwest people "You must get on!"

Hmmm. WHOSE fault is it, exactly, that we are only getting here now? WHO was late out of DTW???? My DH pointed out to the NW agent that if they had actually cared that we arrive faster, they would have sent a cart for us............ She didn't have an answer to that.

In any case, given where this all began, you will have surmised that our checked bags did not make it onto our plane to Fairbanks.

There are so few flights into Fairbanks that our luggage did not arrive until some time the next day (when we were panning for gold, or watching those smiling dogs, or learning about ancient Athabaskan customs)................ We were glad!!! to not have to try to figure out WHEN/where we were going to buy clothing, and glad to have our own stuff................ (It came via Seattle, too, not straight from MN......)

The next adventure was rearranging stuff so we could just take a tiny bit of what we brought when we went to Denali. The bulk of our stuff went to Anchorage when we went to Denali............. Luckily that went pretty smoothly -- a couple of the bags belonging to my extended family (my parents, my siblings, our five children) were in the wrong rooms (my sister's family got one of our bags), but that was easily and quickly remedied.

We got used to putting luggage in the hall the night before, to be collected by Holland America and transported, likewise by HAL, and delivered to us, later.

HAL provides a variety of luggage tags, with different pictures and different info (a list of all hotels you'll be staying in on land, say, or your room number on the ship....). I had put tags and stickers all over (and inside) our checked luggage saying that we were sailing on the Ryndam with HAL on July 15, and to please call HAL at (whatever the number is) if the suitcase was found.............. I don't know which of all the tags helped our stuff join us in Fairbanks, but I was glad I had put all that info all over it, when it didn't arrive in AK when we did.......

Thinking about all the people working the Alaskan busy season, I imagine a lot of them are engaged in seeing to it that people's stuff gets from here to there in a timely fashion............







Finally, we are ready to go. The big dipper, pointing at the northern star, is the Alaska state flag.







The port behind us,







Seward to starboard,







port side mountains.







Lace in our wake.







On our way to College Fiords.





In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these posts, a link to the next one is here.

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