For the second part of Mark and Lacey's honeymoon, eight of us went on an Inside Passage cruise from Vancouver to Anchorage. Distracted by my upcoming South America trip, I never really put together a cohesive trip account (we ate a lot); but I've managed to cobble together a few things here. All I really know is that I love the title "Cruise Shrimps in the Mist."

I had never been on a cruise before this, so I had little idea what to expect.

For example, I wasn't sure who the other thousand passengers would be, although the cruise line's "shore excursions" pamphlet allowed me to draw some, er, weighty conclusions. For example, the end of one sightseeing tour of Sitka warns (their italics): Please note: Tour involves walking on level, wide gravel pathways.

Or from the "Glacier Outback Adventure": Please note: Guests weighing more than 250 pounds will be charged an additional 50 percent.

(By the way, it turned out that cruise passengers are pretty recognizable. When I was in Ushuaia, Argentina, and the cruise ship came in, the town suddenly flooded with doddering old men and women in Hawaiian print shirts and panama hats, who, drawing their fancy cameras, advanced toward the souvenir stores while beaming benignly at everything in their way.)

	Ladies and Gentlemen ... the shrimps! (wild applause)

Anyway, my three pre-cruise questions were:

1) Does a cruise count as traveling somewhere? When I returned, would I be able to I tell people I had seen Ketchikan? (and, having seen it from a cruise, would I want to tell them?) Or does "seeing" a place actually require you to do something other than disembark at 8 a.m., ride a bike through town and make it back onboard in time for boat drinks and cocktail shrimps?

2) Is the rumor about cruise ships and shrimps really true? Would we be followed by tuxedo-ed waiters declaring a vision for the 21st century: Leave no shrimp behind? Would there be delectable mountains of deceased, shelled crustaceans next to deck-side swimming pools of cocktail sauce?

3) Is shrimps a cool word, or what? Is shrimps even a word?

"Cruise Shrimps in the Mist." I like that. That would make a good title.

* * *

Two days into our cruise, Hari gets in the elevator with one of her fellow cruise passengers. The other woman, a nice, sweet, grandmotherly type, looks at Hari and asks, "Oh, are you getting ready to go to work now?"

	Notice the lack of competition for prime fishing spots (yes, Jeff the uber-fisherman is hauling in a gigantic starfish): It's because everyone else is out playing Bingo and shopping for jewelry.

We were conspicuously out of place on this voyage of the ms Ryndam (which, we found out after we had returned, was the same ship that dumped 40,000 gallons of brown sludge into the Juneau harbor in 2002). There were 1,260 passengers, according to the cruise company, and our group of eight seemed to account for 99 percent of those under 60. The bad news there was that we were continually being mistaken for crew (see above, and also, when we were trying to board, the guy insisted that we walk through the line clearly marked "crew"); also, we were generally ignored by employees and passengers alike, especially when we wanted a crew member to take a drink order or when a fellow passenger wanted to cut in front of us in line at the buffet. Convenient, that.

The good news was that we pretty much got the run of the ship -- during the day, while we were ashore, the other passengers played Bingo. At night we strolled the deserted decks and relaxed in the vacant hot tub. I'm assuming everyone had gone to bed, or they were still playing Bingo.

There was an activities director, who looked to be about our age. She was incredibly excited to have young people on board, and industriously set about finding activities that we would find really super. She reminded me of student government types -- earnest, excited, clueless. In school, those people would come up with events, and you would look at the plan, and you would say, "who would go to that?" The answer, of course, is that 15 or 20 other Associated Students members would go, while the rest of us went surfing.

On the cruise, she immediately headed for us, cornered us in the "Crow's Nest" bar, where we were busy trying to enjoy ourselves, and impressed us by telling us that she didn't really get off the boat very much to look at the scenery and that "once you've seen one mountain, you've seen them all." Then she tried to get us to sign up for a lip synch show featuring '50s music.

I'm not sure if misreading your audience is a skill they teach in cruise director school, or if she really was in student government in college, but whatever -- we stealthily avoided her the rest of the week. Paul, saint that he is, got us out of the lip synch contest by claiming Mark and Lacey had planned something that day from 2-7 p.m. When she asked what, I think his response was, "Umm, I'm not sure." After talking to her, he found us and told us all to look busy that day (we did this by sitting in the bar and fleeing when she approached).

	Mmmmm ... cheeeese.

The one activity, of course, that everyone did get into, was eating. Meals were, I'm sorry to report, generally shrimpless, although the stereotype of gaining weight on cruises held true. Passengers are constantly bombarded with food, all of it free, all of it very high quality. It was the cheeses that did me in -- a full tray, every day, for breakfast and lunch. For dinner, they offered repeats of anything. For example, a person could hypothetically order three entrees and two desserts. That's um, hypothetical, and certainly no one at our (Jeff) table (Jeff) would do something (Jeff) like that (Jeff did).

One final, interesting note: On the first day, we did a lifeboat drill. A voice came on the intercom to tell us that we had enough space in the lifeboats for 1,500 people -- easily enough to fit everyone on board. When I looked at a map of the ship, it said the ship held 1,260 passengers and 500 crew.

At that point, I stopped making jokes about the Titanic.

* * *

In my imagination, this is the path a cruise line follows to justify, uh, sinking millions into new cruise ships:

1. Find a small town in Alaska with a cute name (i.e. Ketchikan), a population of about 5,000 and a declining economy that for the last 200 years has been based solely on fishing and gold panning.

2. Dangle vast sums of tourist dollars in front of the city council, until at least a voting majority is convinced that a cruise ship dock will reinvigorate the town's economy.

	You know, if you're not going to use that deck lumber ...

3. Make sure the city council is so convinced of this, they're willing to pay for the cruise ship dock using taxpayer money.

(Evidence: Haines, Alaska, has the most incongruous ship dock I've ever seen, a sprawling, barren contraption that looks like an 18th century frontier stockade fell out of the sky and landed on a nice little town hemmed in by snowcapped mountains. The dock was completely empty while we were there.)

4. Buy all the real estate on the newly built cruise ship dock.

5. Install wall-to-wall cruise-line owned jewelry stores with names like "Yukon Bob's Authentic Gold," which will draw all the people who can't walk very far (a sizeable majority on cruise ships) to buy something to prove they had an authentic Alaska experience.

(Evidence: Ketchikan, Alaska's "first city," offers, by my count, 19 jewelry stores on its Gold Rush-era waterfront, including 12 consecutive stores without a break. The town, which was a Gold Rush town, a fishing center famous for its brothels, has a population of 7,000.)

6. To make sure they don't shop anywhere else, distribute a morning briefing to each cabin before letting passengers off the boat, giving them a brief history of the town ("The rough-and-tumble town of Boondoggle, Alaska has always had an economy based on fishing, gold panning and selling golden fish icons to the Russian Church.") and then listing shops where they can "shop with confidence," because the cruise line will back every purchase in these shops, and, well, if you go somewhere else, that's just taking your chances. Make sure that all the recommended shops are either owned by the cruise line or giving a cut to the cruise line.

(Evidence, part I: An article in Alaska magazine, which I read on the way home, talked about some of the controversial aspects of cruise liners, and included one local person complaining that most of the stores were owned by the cruise lines, so most of the profits were heading back to the Netherlands, instead of into local pockets)

(Evidence, part II: The cruise staff delivered a "town briefing" to our room every day with the address, phone number and name of places where we could "shop with confidence.")

7. Drive smugly around the Inside Passage, cackling like mad.

(Evidence: Late at night, strange cackling noises, like sound of broken gas main, escaping from the bridge).