Typed up at: Laura and Alan’s place in Emeryville, Starbucks in Palo
Alto Posted from: Laura and Alan’s place in Emeryville, Andy and
Juliette’s place in Newbury Park
The port
agent drove us to the place where our ship had just docked. The
gangplank wasn’t down yet, so we spent a while just standing next to the
car taking pictures. It was dark, and huge cranes with bright lights
were already starting to take containers off the ship. Trucks drove by
to move the containers to different cranes further back. Those cranes
would haul the containers onto big piles about a hundred yards away from
the water. It was awesome.
After maybe
half an hour of picture taking, the gangplank came down. In the ship’s
office we met the captain who took our passports and sent for the
steward to help us with our bags. We took the elevator to our cabin, and
were impressed with how nice it was. We had a very comfy bed. A table, a
lazy chair, an L-shaped seat around the table, TV, DVD player, mini
fridge, plenty of storage room, and a nice little bathroom. Most amazing
of all was that we could drink the tap water.
We got into
our ship routine pretty quickly, and it was built around our food
schedule: 7:30am breakfast, 10:00am tea, 12:00 lunch, 3:00pm tea, and
finally 5:30pm dinner. At mealtimes we would sit at the captain’s table
and eat whatever had been cooked for this meal. The food was nothing
special, but we enjoyed it. The captain was quite the talker, and we
enjoyed him also. He was German, had been a sailor for over 40 years,
and enjoyed talking about his experiences, or just answered the
questions we had about life at sea.
Some people might get bored on a container ship, but we both kept plenty
busy. Danielle knitted and read a lot of books. I worked on random
programming projects and played on the PS2 in the
officers’ rec room. We both took advantage of the gymnasium to get some
workouts in, and every day we take a walk on deck at least once. The
deck was 260 meters long, so an easy walk all the way around could be
stretched to last quite a while.
We stopped by
two ports on our way: Osaka and Tokyo. On those days I spent a lot more
time outside, watching everything that was going on in the harbor. As I
mentioned before, the best part was seeing the containers be moved by
the truly enormous cranes. I don’t know what to say about it, except
that it was the highlight of our sea voyage. One day we went down to the
engine room, and got a tour from the chief engineer. For the curious,
the engine has 9 in-line cylinders, generates 55,890 horse power, and is
still bigger than you think it would be.
After more
than 10 days of seeing nothing but ocean (and a very rare passing ship),
we stopped just in sight of the California coast. We were ahead of
schedule, and the engines don’t like going slow. During this time all
the lifeboats were lowered to make sure they all still worked. We also
saw quite a lot of whales which were making their way north. None were
really close to the boat, but with binoculars it was still great to see.
Several of them showed us their tails as they dove down. We also saw
dolphins, and even a mola mola which came to the surface briefly. It was
a beautiful day.
In the
evening we sailed through the Santa Barbara channel, arriving in Long
Beach just as the sun was coming up. US Customs came aboard, asking us
about our trip and checking the fridge for contraband. After breakfast
we got off the ship and took a shuttle to the harbor’s parking lot. The
security guard called us a taxi, and soon we were on our way. We should
have just gotten a taxi to the closest Metro Link, but instead we spent
a small fortune going all the way to Union Station. From there we took a
train, and early in the afternoon we arrived at Andy and Juliette’s
house.
