Will You Just Relax Already?

I highly recommend cruising as a fabulous way to vacation. If you're not an engineer. My Engineer had a really hard time relaxing. I know, right? What's so hard about being waited on hand and foot, having your messy room cleaned TWICE a day, and all while passing by absolutely gorgeous scenery?

But let's start at the beginning. It was a stressful week of preparation. I don't much like packing, much less for four people, and add to that the fact that these people don't have the required clothes. There's not a dress code for going camping, or road tripping, and that's what we normally do for vacation around here.

“Where are those black dress pants you wore at the last school program?”

“Mom, that was two years ago, I wore a costume last year, and I have no idea where they are. And besides, I don't like them. I hate dressing up. Do we have to wear airplane shoes?”

(When you fly on buddy passes on United, which we've had the privilege to do many times thanks to my generous brother-in-law, there's a strict dress code which includes dress shoes. You sometimes end up in first class (yeah!) and you can't be looking like a ragamuffin and offend those fancy first class people. So the boys each had a pair of (probably plastic) fancy looking black shoes. That really didn't bend. They hated them.)

“Yes, you need airplane shoes.”

So I start digging in their closets. We've been blessed with LOTS of hand-me-downs from a friend with a boy two years older than Jake. But we don't always use everything, because, well, we're casual people. Guess what I found? A suit. That fits Jake perfectly! And two pairs of comfortable dress shoes, each in the exact size of my two boys. Creepily amazing. I still had to take both of them shopping (separately, I'm not totally insane) but now the list was shorter.

Eventually, we were packed. Best drove us to the airport. First stop, Seattle. 

As you can see, YellowBoy was a bit tired. He can sleep anywhere.  

That evening we enjoyed an amazing dinner in the revolving restaurant at the top of the space needle. YellowBoy was especially impressed with the whole moving thing, and kept reporting what percent back around we were. You can't really feel the restaurant moving, but when you look out the window, then you can tell. It takes 45 minutes to go all the way around. The view was spectacular.

In the morning we were off to the pier. The boarding process reminded me of the song Alice's Restaurant, where Arlo Guthrie describes his adventure of the army inspection, “We got inspected, detected, injected, infected, rejected, and they left no part of us untouched.” (Or something like that...) But we finally got all fourteen of us through to the waiting area, and pretty soon we were off!

And know I realize that it took me two pages to just get us on the boat...so this story will be told in pieces. Stay tuned.