Lines

As a preview of my world cruise next January, my friend Nanette and I took the ship I'll be on then in a little mini-cruise from Vancouver, BC, to Seattle. We rode the train from Seattle to Vancouver, then sailed back. It wasn't much of a cruise -- less than a day, most of it happening during the night. There will be several posts about it, of which this, which details all the lines we stood in, is the first.
First line: in King Street Station, Seattle, to get our Amtrak tickets using receipts from online purchase.
Second line: to get the specific seats on Amtrak with the tickets we got from the first line.
Third line: to go through the doors of King Street Station to seat ourselves in the seats we got in the second line.
Fourth line: at the other end of the train ride, to go through Canadian customs. Canadians, even customs officials, conformed to the stereotype -- they were cheerful, polite, helpful, and personable, responding to a request for a stamp in my passport with a smile and the impress of a stamp on a page of my passport. (This is the passport I got to replace the one I lost in Russia, so all it has in it are blank pages were official stamps from other countries should be. It's like I've never been anywhere. The customs lady was very nice about it.)
Fifth line: actually, where there might have been a fifth line, there wasn't one because the Vancouver Sky Train pulled up in the station just as we emerged from the escalator, having encountered another cheerful, polite, helpful, and personable Canadian who gave Nanette a Sky Train ticket when Nanette's credit card refused to cooperate with the Sky Train ticket machine.
Sixth line: OK, now we're at the cruise ship terminal. There were several more cheerful, polite, helpful, and personable Canadians who helped us get there, but you get the idea about that part. And we're in one of those snaky lines delineated by blue cloth ropes waiting to go through metal detectors -- alas! even in Canada, they must worry about the stuff seen in metal detectors.
Seventh line: to present our cruise ship tickets and be shunted into an echoing room full of plastic folding chairs filled with those who would -- eventually -- after a couple hours without access to food or water, with restrooms only a vague whispered rumor among the huddled masses -- be our fellow passengers, but not before the --
Eighth line: to present our tickets yet again, get our pictures taken, and receive the electronic keys to our stateroom on board the ms Amsterdam! Which, you'd think, would be it. But no.
Ninth line: short line to pass through the "Welcome Aboard ms Amsterdam!" cutout so the ship's photographers could take our picture in hopes of selling it back to us as a souvenir. And are we done yet? Of course not.
Tenth line: at the top of the gangway as we Actually Set Foot On Board ms Amsterdam! Yes! We are on the f-ing boat! We are aboard! But we still need to show the stateroom keys to a ship's official to make sure that somewhere between the checkin desk at the end of the eighth line and the step onto the ship, we haven't somehow transmogrified ourselves into people who have no right to be on the ship.

But now. Finally. After all our toils and troubles and hunger and confusion and fear and trembling, we are in our stateroom, verandah suite #6213. We've been told that there is food at the other end of the ship a couple floors up in the Lido Restaurant. But, unable to face the possibility that we might have to face an eleventh line of those with whom we had already shared the last few lines, we order room service, including generous slices of chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. Which was just as good as you think it was.

There were virtually no lines to disembark the next morning. Everyone had been assigned to a subgroup, each subgroup was called forward to pass by an official who read our electronic keys so they'd know who was officially gone. We had to show our passports and customs declarations to US customs, but there were no lines, you just walked up to one of six or seven uniformed guys behind desks, they made sure we looked at least moderately like the photos in our passports, smiled, and waved us through. They weren't Canadians, but they were cheerful, polite, helpful, and personable.