Our Adventure Begins!!

We are on our way!!
Neither of us slept very well last night. I woke at six to find Ken already in the bathroom. He said he had been awake since four. So I guess the fact that this will be cruise number 30 we have not become blase about it.
We were out of the house at 7:30 and on our way to Vancouver. The freeway was good with no problems at all. But when we left the freeway and headed across town the traffic came to a sudden crawl. In all it took us about an hour and a half to make the trip so in all it was not too bad. We parked in from of Kerri;s and called a cab from there. The cab trip was slow because as usual we got mostly red lights. Ken has a way of attracting red lights.
We arrived at the airport with lots of time. The registration desk was closed so we decided to get a Starbucks. We just had it with no time for the coffee to cool when the desk opened. So juggling hot coffee we made our way through the paper work and got our boarding passes. We were assigned to row 6 and we were seated together.:-)
Because you can't take liquids through security we found a place to sit and enjoy our coffee and our shared cookie.
We cleared the next hurdle without a problem. Because it was early and not at all crowded the security people were laid back and in a good mood. When we were being screened the officer asked Ken to remove his hat as he compared the photo on the pass port. Then he asked "when is your birthday?" Ken answered and then the officer asked" when is your wife's birthday?" Ken looked surprised but a second later responded correctly. The officer laughed and said that is not the usual question I just thought I'd see if I could get you into trouble,,,, but you passed"

We relaxed and waited for the time to board. The plane left on time and we had a great short flight. It was a 2 hour 20 minute flight. Ken had a window seat and he was able to see Lake Tahoe and Yosemite .
The air was warm when we disembarked and we had no trouble finding our way to our luggage and to the shuttle. The shuttle trip was shared with one other couple , they will also be on the Grand . This is their first Princess cruise and they asked a lot of questions that we were able to answer.
We arrived at our hotel around 5:45. Again we were pleased with the hotel. They say we were upgraded to the Bungalow building and my oh my our room is very nice.(  I will post some pictures later.)
We called Wendy and Ken and before we knew it they were meeting us in the lobby. We were given a grand welcome. They could not have been more gracious or more welcoming. The took us to a lovely restaurant and we have a grand meal and visited as if we had been together every day for years when in fact we had not seen each other for almost 7 years. We reminisced and told stories and laughed and just had fun. They drove us back to our hotel and they came up to our room and visited again. They left around 9:30 and it was not too long before we were sound asleep. The busy day had caught up with us.

When I opened one eye and had a peek the clock said 6:57, I had slept through the night , I had not been up even once!! Unusual for sure.

We laid around and relaxed for awhile. After showers we headed to the lobby for breakfast. It was a full breakfast with everything including waffles and eggs and sausage etc. There were a lot of people there and you could tell most were cruisers and the conversations were about the different ports we were going to be visiting.

After breakfast we arranged with the desk to have a porter come for our bags at 10:15. We are scheduled to travel on the 10:50 shuttle to the ship. We went for a short walk , wondering if there was a near by shop where we could pick up some wine but nothing was really close so we returned to our room to wait for time to head to The Grand Princess.

More tomorrow