Tues July 22, 2025
Hi Gang! We’re back home safe and sound after a long day of travel. We got off the ship in Seattle at 8 AM on Mon 7/21 and arrived home at 8 AM Tues 7/22. But that did include a 5 hour tour of Seattle Mon morning/afternoon with a drop off at the airport.
Seattle is a really cool city and it was sunny and 75 so no rain which is rare there. As part of the tour we stopped at what’s called the “Amazon spheres”. They were these two sphere shaped buildings that had 40,000 plants inside and are only open to Amazon employees. The cool thing outside the spheres was a “banana truck” that gave out unlimited free bananas compliments of Amazon. How cool is that!
We learned that Seattle was named after Chief Seattle one of the indigenous people who first lived there. The Pike Street Public Market has the original Starbucks shop as well as that crazy fish market where they throw the fish across the market! It also has a 30 foot wide by 8 foot tall gum wall with all chewed gum stuck on it. Yuk! The last fact about Seattle is they have a very large Chinatown section and the martial arts actor Bruce Lee was born there and is buried there.
After the city tour we got dropped off at the airport. We got really lucky and dodged a bullet. We had booked our flight using miles thru American Airlines and the first leg was from Seattle to Vegas via Alaska Airlines. Well you may have heard in the news, Alaska Airlines had a major IT problem and cancelled all of their flights on Sunday July 20th. Luckily our flight was only delayed 30 minutes but the Seattle airport was packed and we heard horror stories of people being at the airport for over 24 hours!
We then had a couple hour layover in Vegas (and yes, the whole airport has slot machines all thru it!) and our American Airlines flight to Charlotte was on time. The nice thing about both legs of our flight was we were upgraded to First Class on both flights. Sweet!
So that’s all for now. We had another amazing adventure and never tire of the beautiful scenery and friendly people of Alaska. We’ll be home for only about a month and then we’re off again in late August for a 17 night cruise from Oslo, Norway to Barcelona, Spain. Should be fun! Happy Tuesday to all!
PS: I’ll be working on fixing the lack of free space issue that’s preventing me from posting my pictures!
The Wandering Italian 