On summer evening in 2019 I was bored and surfed cruise offers and found an awesome European cruise that seemed like a really good deal, starting in about ten days. Wife agreed that it sounded fun and that we had nothing better to do… then I remembered that we actually had to get ourselves to Europe. Couldn’t find any good J seats at short notice. So I came up with a backup plan - SEA is within driving distance (6 hrs). Found a great deal on an Alaska cruise… and a week later we were boating off to the 49th state on Holland America.