Cruising in Alaska

There’s no poker content in this post, but I’m having the time of my life on a cruise to Alaska. We’re onboard the Sapphire Princess, having left Seattle this past Sunday. Yesterday we visited Ketchikan and this morning we cruised the Sawyer Glacier in Tracy Arm Fjord. In a few hours we’ll be docking in Juneau.

This is my fourth or fifth Alaska cruise and I never tire of going up here and seeing the sights. This time there are 10 couples comprising a group of friends that go way back. With the exception of one friend-of-a-friend, I know all of the guys from as far back as elementary school. My oldest friends in this group I’ve known since the third grade, and the newest of the group are guys I met my first year in college, and although we’ve kept in touch with each other through the years, we’ve never all gotten together like this as a group.

What spurred this on was a much smaller get-together two years ago, when four of us met in Florida for a week (most of my friends migrated from New York to Florida; while I made my way out west and eventually found myself in Palm Springs), where we did things we hadn’t done for years, like play stickball in the street with spaldeens that my friend Rick found somewhere on the Internet, and generally behaved like we were still 16 years old.

We had so much fun that we knew we had to blow this up bigger and better so we expanded the group, decided to go to Alaska, and this is where I am now.

I know this post might bore many of you to tears because there’s no poker content in it, but I love every moment of it. In fact, if it were any more fun it probably wouldn’t be legal. I’ll get back to playing poker and writing about it next week. This is just a week off from reality and responsibility and it’s just something everyone ought to do every once in a while.