My wife & I have cruised several times & on a few different lines, but had never cruised with Norwegian. We wanted a new experience, so we picked a re-positioning cruise from Vancouver to LA. We had cruised to Alaska several years before from Vancouver out of Canada Place. The city is beautiful, as is Canada Place. This trip we would be cruising out of Ballantyne. Ballantyne is basically an overflow port & is used only a handful of times a year. We were told that we should wait to go down to the pier until the afternoon & the disembarking passengers had time to leave as the port is not large. We later learned that this was a mistake. A disemabarking passenger got hurt & lost, leading to a delay. Then the computers crashed leading to an additional delay. In all it took 4 hours (no exaggeration) to board the ship. By the time we had, the muster drill was complete & we were starving. I was surprised to find that the buffets were not open. We had to wait an additional half hour to eat.
We left port about an hour late & soon learned that our first port of call (Astoria, Oregon) was cancelled due to high seas. this was disappointing, but no ones fault. The seas were indeed rough, approximately 18 foot & 2 additional ships in port the day before, stayed to weather the storm.
Our next port of call was San Francisco. The weather cleared up, but the government shut down closed the National Parks. Therefore, a lot of passengers were scrambling to find a new excursion. We got on a Hop-on Hop-off bus tour & truly enjoyed ourselves. Once again the ship was delayed leaving port because a crew member "jumped" ship. U.S. Customs & Border patrol delayed us over an hour to sort the matter out. By this time it was very dark out & we were not able to see the Golden Gate very well.