2005 Canadian Maritime Cruise

Marcia and I are fans of Garrison Keillor and his Prairie Home Companion (PHC) broadcast.  On those times he did a show in the Seattle area, we’d do our best to attend the live show.  It was in January or February of 2005 while listening to the broadcast, we heard Garrison Keillor in very short announcement saying that he was organizing a cruise with Holland-America of the Canadian Maritime provinces that summer with details on his web site.  After looking at the details we thought it’d fun, so we signed up a few days later.  It was good thing we didn’t wait any longer as the cruise was fully booked by the end of the week.
The one-week cruise started and finished in Boston.  The ship stopped Bar Harbor, Sydney (Cape Bretton Island, Nova Scotia), Charlottetown (Prince Edward Island) and Halifax (Nova Scotia).  For Garrison Keillor this was a “coming home” trip of sorts as some of his ancestors immigrated to Halifax in 1774.
As Marcia and I were still working at this point, we were economical with our time.  We arrived in Boston a few days early for some touristing.  As I recall, we visited the USS Constitution, the aquarium and Boston Museum of Science.
Even though we were first-time cruise ship passengers, it was easy for us to fit in and become comfortable.  Everybody on board was a Garrison fan so you always had something to talk about.  PHC brought a lot of the same performers who were regularly appeared on the show and they put on a show every evening (actually two shows because the performance auditorium on board only was able to seat half of the passengers at a time).  After the main show, many of the music performers performed at the bars and clubs elsewhere on the ship.  Besides the performers, PHC brought along naturalists and historians that presented or lead activities during the day.
There were no great adventures but we had a lot of fun and ended up doing two more PHC cruises in the following years.