Sunday-Monday Sept 10-11, 2023
Hi Folks! Once again I did pretty much a 24 hour travel day to go from Vancouver to Charlotte. I initially planned to fly standby and the flights out of Vancouver were not looking great even a month before. So since Seattle is so close to Vancouver and there are direct flights from Seattle to Charlotte I decided I’d fly home from Seattle. So I scheduled a bus to take me from the Vancouver cruise terminal to the Seattle airport.
Sailing in to Vancouver early Sunday morning was beautiful. The sun was just coming up and it was a clear day. The other cool thing about sailing in to Vancouver is your cruise ship has to time it just right to have enough clearance to get under the Lions Gate bridge. As you can see by the picture I took, our ship just cleared it by a few feet. Whew!
My bus was meeting me right outside the cruise ship at 10:30 AM (I chose the later departure since I was taking the red eye flight home). So I had a leisurely breakfast and got off the ship and found the bus stop easily and was on my way.
It was going to be a five hour bus ride but luckily the bus had wifi and the scenery along the way was pretty. We made a few stops along the way to pick people up but the most interesting part was having to cross the border. It’s been many years, probably 30+ years, since I’ve done a land crossing into the US. Everyone on the bus had to get off the bus, gather up all our luggage and go thru customs and border patrol. They asked a few questions and scanned my luggage and off we went. Not too painful. I heard one guy ask the bus driver if he could take his CBD Gummies across the border and the bus driver said he couldn’t. So he had to throw them all out! Bummer!!
We drove right past downtown Seattle and I saw the Space Needle then we ended at the Seattle airport. But I had another long wait since I was taking the late flight. So I found a place to watch some NFL football!
Interesting chain of events on the flight… I woke up Sunday morning to find out both red eye flights were almost sold out and I wasn’t sure I’d get a stand by seat. So luckily the late flight leaving at Midnight had seats I could buy with my miles and for a surprisingly low amount of miles I was able to get First Class. Sweet! Made that late night flight go so much smoother!
Kathy was nice enough to get up early and come pick me up at the airport when I arrived at 8 AM.
I hope you enjoyed traveling along with me on this one. I also hope you get why I can never get enough of the scenery, wildlife and glaciers of Alaska. It truly is The Last Frontier!
The Wandering Italian 