We left Hawaii and flew to Vancouver via LA. Two things to mention; whilst waiting for our connecting flight at LAX we experienced a 5.0 richter scale earthquake, the whole building shook and everyone paid attention. Then on the flight Eric had a lot of problems with his sinuses and his nose began to run and he had a very bad headache and began to shake and become feverish; Abby was worried that we would not get past Canadian customs as they may think he had swine flu. Luckily he had improved by the time we had collected our bags.

So we met Abby's mum at Vancouver airport and moved into our condo in downtown for a few days. We did a bit of shopping and sightseeing and had a day trip to Whistler.

On Saturday 23rd May we all joined our cruiseship, the Zuiderdam, for a week long trip up the inside passage to Alaska. There are a couple of things to say about the cruise, having never done one before. We have never seen so much food available, eaten and so much food wasted in one place!. Every port that we stopped at in Alaska was full of tacky tourist shops and jewellery shops (something to do with the gold rush?). The most stunning day on the ship was cruising through glacier bay national park, who'd have thought we would see so many glaciers on this trip. Apart from that, the ship had a fabulous screening room with big armchairs, so we were able to catch up on lots of films that we have wanted to see.

On the last day of cruising we had a disembarkation talk from our cruise director and he told us about the stupid questions people had asked this week. Here are our favourites:

Q1. Do these stairs go up or down?

A. I'm not even going to answer that question.

Q2. Which elevator will take me to the bow?

A. None of them, this is a ship and not the starship enterprise, ours only go up and down.

Q3. Do the crew sleep on board?

A. No, they are flown home every day by helicopter-OF COURSE THEY STAY ON THE SHIP!