Hi y’all!

My wife & I cruised the inner passage to Alaska (Aug 3-10), it was a great time!

The cruise line provided me with an accessible stateroom, a bottle of distilled water for my CPAP machine, an extension cord so I could plug that machine in, and the battery charger of my power wheelchair. The cruise ship also hired two interpreters!

Wow right?

I was also pretty darn lucky, or not, that I was the only person out of 2500+ passengers who needed a sign language interpreter!

I added the ‘not’ because I had no one else to talk to, other than my lovely wife.

No other Deaf persons went cruising with me.

The interpreter team, from Utah, were superb… highly skilled… for Deaf audiences. For DeafBlind, they were supportive and helpful.

One was super fast, fingerspelling at breakneck speeds, while signing everything spoken. The other was more relaxed, less fingerspelling, more summarizing of what was being said, more delightful to watch.

Aside from that, they did an outstanding job… here are some of the things they interpreted for:

• A couple of comedy presentations, a comic actually asked “… did you interpret that?” while another emcee asked how do you sign “eek” …
• A history of Gold presentation
• A square dancing soirée
• A couple of game shows, one which I was runner-up
• A Sexiest Man competition, which I won…
• A Trolley Tour of Prince Rupert
• Dining table discussions

There was a few barriers where their skills would have benefited me, but they were not present:

• Getting on: getting thru customs and security
• Ports of call, specifically getting off & on the boat, going thru security
• Getting off, we had to wait for an announcement broadcasted over the PA system, luckily my wife is hearing.

For ports of call, if I wanted to browse the shops, the interpreters were not allowed to interpret, if I took a cruise sponsored tour, then yes, they could work that!

All in all, the interpreters from Utah were super important, allowing me to participate fully on the ship.

Thank you for that!