I woke up and saw movement around the ferry terminal’s cars, and lights, so I assumed things were starting to happen. I crawled out from my bag, wandered over to the ferry building, + bought our tickets, then back to wake up Val + another guy who was sleeping nearby. Val was totally cocooned – snug as a bug in a rug, as they say – and was woken with some difficulty. We went + sat in the warmth of the waiting-room, until it was time to brave customs at about 7. That in itself was an effort, with lots of us crowded into a small room. Eventually we got to the front of the line, + this time it was oranges we weren’t supposed to carry across, so we had to sit there and eat those.
And then onto the boat – quite an impressive vessel. We went straight up to the solarium, where we were told a lot of people would camp out, and managed to bag ourselves a lounge chair/bed each, and Wayne, a Canadian we had met in customs, came up with us. At first we thought we would miss all the scenery, because there was a blanket of fog around us, but that lifted fairly soon, and we had gorgeous sunshine. I did lose my seat for a while when a couple of rude bastards took it, ignoring Val’s protestations, but fortunately they pushed off again after an hour or two. We passed our time reading, eating (the provisions that we’d brought up), playing cards, and from time to time looking at the scenery. That, the latter, was very nice, but not nearly as dramatic as we had been led to believe. There were a bunch of kids on some school outing in the solarium, and they were pretty rowdy + ill-behaved, but one of them did lend me a book on, and do a pretty poor job of trying to explain, dungeons + dragons, so that was one unexpected bonus. I hit the sack at about 12, feeling pretty much exhausted, and was asleep virtually straight away.
One of our regular bouts of sleeping under the stars, all the more so since we had decided to leave our tent in the car in Terrace. And my usual reaction to any crowd of young people – intolerance, basically. Though the introduction to D & D was a kind thought… even if I have still never played it.
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