Part 1- Meeting with the Travel Agent - May 21, 2002

We stop at Liberty Travel to get our cruise documents from Roseanne, the travel agent. Generally, I like to do all the travel planning. Part of the joy and challenge of traveling, for me, is spending hours pouring over brochures, guide books, and searching the Internet to prepare for the trip. I read travel books and, when I can find them, novels about the places we want to visit. I like doing the research to develop an itinerary based on a variety of factors like history, architecture, scenic beauty, culture, and (formerly) interesting local foods. In the case of this trip, the decisions were easy. Irene's 84 year old mother, Nora, indicated an interest in going to Alaska. This meant taking a cruise, and getting on a ship means Holland America Line to me. Besides being the pre-eminent cruise line today, my mother, sister, and I traveled to Europe twice on Holland America Line ships back in the fifties and sixties. Travel was different then than it is today, and my mother wanted to relive the Atlantic crossings of her youth. I guess generations repeat their nostalgic yearnings.

We have worked with Roseanne to plan this trip for about nine months. As we sit down at her desk, she goes to the safe to retrieve our travel documents. She brings out a large folder containing an intimidating array of documents to guide us through our eleven day cruise/tour. Tickets, vouchers, luggage tags, off-ship excursions, declarations, and more fill the folder. Roseanne carefully goes through the tickets and cruise itinerary documents with us, answering any questions we have.  In our initial planning, she has easily understood our needs and helped us schedule an extra day in Anchorage to allow Mom to rest up before the rigors of the trip begin. Now, having looked at the times of departure and re-arrival from Newark airport, we realize we need to stay a night at each end of the trip. Roseanne makes several phone calls, obviously frustrated at the desk clerks' inability or unwillingness to meet our needs, before booking us into the Newark Airport Days Inn, which will allow us to park our car for the duration. We discuss tipping, a subject Holland America is, at best, vague about. We also have concerns about the formal evening dress required for two dinners during the cruise. None of us is interested in wearing formal clothes, but Roseanne assures us that tuxedos and evening gowns are not required. We can manage with what we've planned to take. We thank Roseanne for her work and head north discussing the trip and beginning to get excited.