Wednesday, September 12, 2007

A ferry story


I love the BC ferry, especially when I time it such that I get on one of the "Spirit" ones. They're the biggest size and very posh. You can read and not get a headache because of the motion. And they have an area for kids with play equipment and tvs to calm the little monsters down. The tvs are tuned to the Family Channel and so I don't usually like to sit there because it drives me crazy. You can't help but look.
One time the ferry was so crowded, there was no place to sit, not even in the kids section. There were several busloads of Japanese and Senior Citizens going to Victoria on that run. I shared a table with an East Indian family who was just going there for the day to see Butchart Gardens. The woman was telling me that the last time she had been was 5 years ago on her honeymoon, and the hotel was so bad that they didn't have a rollaway bed for her mother, and only one bed for herself and her husband. I didn't ask any more about that.
But this time I ended up on one of the smaller, older "Queen"s. There's even a picture of the Queen in the forward cabin. I had some work to catch up on so I found a table in the cafeteria towards the back. There was a group of about half a dozen men sitting at a nearby table playing cribbage and gossiping like little old ladies. One was wearing a Judas Priest t-shirt and had tattoos all over his arms. You get the idea. I was eavesdropping because it was hard not to, and truthfully I wasn't really ready to get back into the details of western hemlock dwarf mistletoe just then.
They had some carrot cake that one of them had brought in a large Tupperware and were sharing it around, and trying to make one guy have some even though he kept politely refusing. Finally they wore him down, saying stuff like "you'll waste away to nothing" and "I've never known you to turn down cake before." and "Well, what can you expect from someone who wears a pleather hat."
The conversation degenerated from there and about halfway through the trip I noticed what an annoying laugh this one guy had.
And at the table across from me was a group of Senior Citizens also playing cribbage, but they took it more seriously and finished their game pretty quickly. Less gossiping went on. Their conversation was more like "fifteen-two, fifteen-four, I win." A friend of theirs walked by and made some comment like "And have you used what I taught you?" and the lady said "Yes, and I lost."
I must have sat in the cribbage playing area of the ferry or something. I tried to learn how to play it once but it never stuck.
The end.

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