Our Viking Journey - Part One

As I indicated in previous post, Linda and I returned recently from a wonderful vacation cruise aboard the Viking Cruise ocean liner Neptune.  We left Pittsburgh on May 6 and flew to Montreal where we boarded the Neptune,  and over the next 13 days, we explored Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax, Boston, and New York City.  We did all of this while traveling on this beautiful ship, all the while being treated to excellent service, eating wonderful food, and being entertained nightly.  It was the trip of a lifetime, and a vacation experience that we will never forget.

Now I have often said in this very space, that overloading other people with details and photos of YOUR vacation, is a lot like recounting your latest round of golf or telling everyone how your fantasy baseball team is doing.  There is only so much that other people want to hear.  So, I will try - repeat TRY - to just scratch the surface with a few stories and some photo highlights.  If you want to hear more, just ask, or, if you REALLY want to know more, come on over and we will happily sit you in front of our computer and show you the hundreds of photos and videos from the trip that we have stored there.

So, here goes....

This is a piece of public art in downtown Montreal.  We don't know what its is called, but those of us the tour bus called it "The Goalie".

It was quite cold and very windy when we got off of the bus to explore Quebec City, so I bought myself a toque hat to commemorate the visit.  How very Canadian of me!

A block later, we went into another store, where I found a toque that I liked better, so now I have two of them,  Hey, you can't take it with you, right?

Because of weather and bad seas, the Captain had to cancel our port stop in the city of Gaspe, but that gave us an extra day at sea and an extra day in Halifax. We much enjoyed our stop in Halifax, where we stopped at a local brewery, enjoyed a flight of beers, and had some wonderful conversations with some local folks.  Sadly, while in Nova Scotia, we did not run into Sidney Crosby 😥

Then it was on to Boston, where I was able to get some pictures of some famous Bostonians, or at least pictures of statues of famous Bostonians.

JFK at the Massachusetts State House

Unfortunately for us, the Paul Revere stature 

is undergoing some refurbishment

Bobby Orr outside of the TD Garden

This was taken one day before the Celtics 

were eliminated by the Knicks

And of course, while in Boston, we had to stop where everybody knew our name.

Here's a crazy memory.  The guide on our tour bus in Boston, "Uncle Steve". used the word "cockamamie".  I told him that I hadn't heard that word used in forty years, but it's a great word, and I resolved then to use it more often!

The trip ended in New York City where we took a "Manhattan Highlights" tour.  Now this is not a tour that I would highly recommend.  Your bus drives through Manhattan and the guide says something like "On your right is Rockefeller Center Plaza." If you're sitting on the left side of the bus, you miss it, and even if you're on the right side, the bus drives right past it and if you blink, you miss it.  It is also difficult to appreciate the grandeur of the Empire State Building while sitting on  a moving bus at ground level.  One thing that the tour did though was make a thirty minute stop at the World Trade Center 9/11 Memorial.  That was a moving experience and well worth putting up with any of the other shortcomings of the tour.

I am going to stop here with this particular travelogue.  I will be doing an additional post in the days ahead that will showcase some of what we experienced aboard the Neptune.  That will include some of the features of the ship itself, the entertainment that we experienced, and, most importantly, some of the people that we met.  Meeting different people, I have found, is the most fun part of a journey like this.  Everybody has a story to tell. In that post, I will especially highlight a couple from Massachusetts, Patti and Barry, that we met on our first night on board with whom we shared a cocktail or three just about every night on board.

Stay tuned for Part Two.