July 09, 2022, Boston, USA - Embarkation Day

Well, wow, what a day…. 

We had a quite, restful night at the Homewood Suites by Hilton in the Boston Seaport District. A very nice hotel located within an easy 10 minute stroll to the cruise ship terminal. In fact as you open the front door of the hotel, our Zaandam was in clear site. This hotel also offers a very nice breakfast and is well staffed and stocked at all times, for those of you that have stayed at some breakfast included hotels, you know how nice this feature is. Yes, this hotel is a bit on the pricey side but, all in, the value is there, well at least for us. After a somewhat long travel day, it was nice to know that getting to the ship was not going to be complicated at all, no overcrowded shuttles here. 

Please do all the necessary app things before hand, in this case it was the arrive Canada App and the more importantly Verifly App. Completing this step saved us about 40 minutes. There was one on those snaky lines with the person asking if we had completed the app requirements, “well, yes we did”, okay then go this way which was passed this line and right upstairs, 5 minutes later we were in the group 1 waiting spot chatting with past cruise friends, Lucia and Henk. We were in our stateroom by 11:45am, the earliest we have ever been aboard any ship. Plenty of time to unpack our bags that we carried on and head down to the served lunch in the dining room, again the last two cruises we were on, we got on the ship after the lunch ended and no, not because we arrived at the ship too late.

Now to back up a little, let’s call it at the ramp as walked onto level 3, the teak promenade deck of the ship. Well, there was a moment of a memory of leaving our last ship (evacuated) back in March 2020 in Perth. The wood smells all came back and the incredible wonderful feeling of actually stepping back onto one of our classes special ships, the Zaandam is or was a sister ship to the former Amsterdam. Let’s just say so nice to be back aboard. 

We had some cruise friends on the prior cruise of this ship, they disembarked today, and they helped secure for us the same table that we had on the Amsterdam, big shout out and thanks to Ann and Cathy. A nice surprise, our table for 4 set for the two of us, upstairs on the rail.

We enjoyed the 4, 5 and Presidents Club reception in the Crow’s nest prior to sail away, great catching up with more wonderful cruise friends, Ken and Fred. Sail away out of the Boston Harbour was very picturesque, beautiful sunshine and about 23 degrees Celsius. Huge bonus was seeing Enrico aboard serving drinks, a very special waiter to us that we have known for almost 10 years. So let’s just say we do feel at home here. We have seen other familiar faces but conversely we expect to see some faces in the familiar positions that are just not yet there. One familiar face we saw was that of Glen Michael from the ill fated Amsterdam, I was able to have a very nice catch up chat with him. He was the port lecturer on the ship that we got to know very well and again, let’s just say it’s been a tough few years all around. He remained on the ship through all the repatriation of the crew and the subsequent sale of the ship.

It has been a most incredible day and we look forward to whatever comes on this journey of a lifetime on this Voyage of the Vikings. Tomorrow is Bar Harbour, we have been here once before in 2008, so we look forward to see what has happened since this last visit. 

Quote of the day. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from a safe harbour. Catch the winds in your sails”. Explore. Dream. Discover. - Mark Twain

A few pics of our day, this is my first post after some time, hopefully it all looks good on your end… Hope you enjoy…