Just got back from my third Alaska cruise. I do love cruises – they are the greatest holidays. The biggest decision I had to make all week was which lounge to have before-dinner drinks in!

But life aboard ship is a little different these days. Getting on the ship right away you notice that there are Purell hand sanitizer stations set up everywhere on the boat and the staff and crew are quite adamant that you scrub up before meals. Not a problem of course, hygiene is always important! But two days into our cruise, I was advised by a clerk in one of the on-board shops that the ship was on “code red” status, which apparently means that people on-board were sick. Norwalk sick. From then on everything changed. Crew members were seen wearing surgical gloves and sometimes even masks, disenfecting wipes were everywhere and the distinct smell of bleach was in the air. The self-serve areas of the buffets were now operated by staff and heaven help you if you tried to pour your own coffee! Even the pens we used to sign our bills were being disinfected after every single use!

The next morning, the captain got on the PA system and vaguely discussed the problem of infectious gastro-intestinal illness on cruise ships and in our destination ports. He ended his talk with aq request for all of us to wash our hands and then let us all know exactly how many times he’d already done so that morning. Everyday for the rest of the cruise, he reminded us to be diligent and let us know how diligent he was being. His record was 5 times before 9 am!

I don’t know how many people actually got sick. I heard lots of rumours – some even saying there were hundreds of people sick. I think at worst it was probably about a hundred in total. Whatever the actual numbers were, you did certainly notice something was going on by the empty places in the dining room at dinner and the number of cabins with mail piled up outside the doors.

What was really annoying though was finding out that people were sick but weren’t reporting it. I guess they were worried about being quaranteened, but really, it’s not like anyone with Norwalk is going to be eager to belly up to the buffet table, is it?

By the end of the cruise, some people were angry about the illness and felt that the crew and the cruise line could have/should have done more. I don’t know quite what else could have been done though. We were all told that the bug was on the boat and we were told what we could do to try to prevent catching it. Lord knows the staff was doing their best to keep the germs under control. Some people need someone to blame I suppose, even for random acts of nature.

Anyways, what does all this have to do with scrapbooking? Well, I’ve already devoted I don’t know how many pages to my cruise adventures over the years, so I wasn’t really expecting to do very much for this trip. But this new feature of cruise life definitely warrants a page or 2, I think….