Day 9 - last day in Hawaii

Our last port day, again, a bittersweet thing. I woke up very early and went out to sit on the verandah. I was in time to see something very bright just setting in the west – Venus? (Editor’s note: no, Jupiter) And we were passing by an island that is a shield volcano –Molokai (editor’s note: yes). I was glad to be up early because I found out yesterday that Dave has been posting his own blog (I knew he was writing, but I didn’t know he was posting) and I wanted to read it so I could find out what we’ve been doing. One thing he mentioned that I haven’t is the invisibility cloak that we have up in the crows nest at night. Even if we say hi to the bartender, as we did tonight, they don’t seem to be able to see us once we sit down at our usual table. Eventually someone will sit down at a table near us and they’ll realize we’re here. Perhaps Dave’s nightly club soda isn’t enough to entice them over here. One night they lost us between the time of taking the order and bringing it over.

Anyway, Dave came out and we sat on the verandah for a while. I headed up for breakfast in the lido (sliced almonds for the oatmeal – yum!) and stretch and abs classes with Mark. When I got back down to the room we had a half hour or so before we were supposed to go to the vista lounge. Three notes here: 1. This is the MS Oosterdam’s first time here in Hawaii. 2. This port (Lahaina, Maui) is too shallow for the MS Oosterdam, so we needed to take tenders to get ashore and 3. We discovered a couple days ago that neither Dave nor I really wanted to do the snorkel expedition – we had each put it on our list because we thought the other really liked it. Number 3 goes to show that it’s important to tell the truth about what you want, even when you’re making shore excursion lists.

Numbers 1 and 2 combined to make a shipload of unhappy passengers for Holland America. The tender procedures had been explained very well to the passengers – passengers with HAL booked tours would go to the vista lounge; passengers without shore excursions would go to the Queen’s lounge and get tender tickets. Unfortunately nobody told the young crewmember in the Queen’s lounge, so she just started sending folks down to the tender loading area. Usually they send the folks with tours out first, but by the time they were ready to do that the gangway was completely clogged with angry passengers. Remember that there are 1,800 passengers, each tender holds 80, and they can only load two tenders at a time. Also some of the elderlies take a long time to load, as both the ship & tender are moving. So we ended up sitting in the vista lounge for about half an hour, and by the time we got down to the tender loading area Nigel, the officer in charge, had been berated for almost twice that long by angry passengers. We told him we hadn’t minded waiting in the lounge, as it was quite comfortable. He seemed very thankful for a kind word.

We sat with a nice couple from Alabama in the front row of the tender on the way to shore. The front window was open and a pleasant breeze was blowing in. Imagine our surprise when a big wave came in too! Our seatmates got it pretty good. This is their first cruise and they were having a super time. We enjoyed chatting with them about their tradition of taking each grandchild on a special trip when the grandchild turns 16. Their story of taking their granddaughter to New York, and the chat they had beforehand about how she was to enjoy it and not have any attitude or sulkiness made us laugh.

We got to the harbor and transferred over to our catamaran. It turned out to be a very well run, very fun expedition. I especially liked that as soon as we got on board they were offering free soft drinks and water – usually they charge for that stuff. They kept feeding us throughout the day – banana bread, fresh fruit, sandwiches. It makes a huge difference. The cat was comfortable and it wasn’t far at all to where we were going, an old pier that had been damaged in the last hurricane, leaving lots of slabs and pilings for coral to grow on and fish to hide in. We hopped in and snorkeled around for a couple hours. Many turtles, lots of different fishes. One I’d not seen before was the cornet or trumpet fish (Hawaiian name: nunu), a long tubelike fist with giant eyes. I probably would have stayed in all day, but eventually they blew the horn to bring us in. At that point they put up the sails and we cruised around for an hour or so. This was my cue to stretch out on the trampoline and take and excellent nap. Unfortunately and inexplicably I hadn’t put sunscreen on my legs, so between the backs of my legs which were pointing up while I snorkeled and the fronts which were up while I was napping I am a little lobster colored on the bottom half.

We got back to the ship at about 2:30, and I had set up a second massage at 3 so I headed on up there. We got some sad news – the 7 course meal prepared in front of us by the executive chef and paired with wines selected by cellarmaster Bernie that was supposed to be tonight had been cancelled due to lack of interest. I say we would have been interested enough to make up for it, but apparently that wasn’t good enough. I was disappointed, but Dave was really, really disappointed. The pinnacle grill hasn’t been doing a very good business either – the prevailing attitude seems to be that we’ve already paid for the food in the dining room, so why would we pay again? Well, there it is. Leaving Dave to deal with his disappointment I headed up to the spa, where I discovered that most of the muscles Mark had unknotted had stayed unknotted, so in general the massage was more relaxing this time. But between the sunburn, the slightly chilly massage room, and the complete state of relaxation I’d achieved I had gotten quite chilly. I stopped at the Lido and got some hot tea and sat out on the back in the sun to drink it, but I was still pretty cold.

Apparently we missed the announcement that they’d moved the time for the last tender to 5:00 instead of 4:00, because we were amazed to see the tenders still zipping back and forth well after 5. I think the whole tender thing didn’t go quite as smoothly as they would have liked, and I’m mildly curious about how they might change things. While we were watching the tenders Dave noticed a fish swimming by the ship – I think it was a nunu, but it was a big one, maybe 4 feet long? We watched it swim back and forth for a while, then suddenly it gave a great lunging leap and next time we saw it it had a fish crosswise in its mouth. It took a while for it to get the fish turned around so it could go down lengthwise. It was like Mutual of Omaha’s wild kingdom right there by the ship. We didn’t see the last tenders come in or get hauled up, because we needed to head to the dining room. We had a nice dinner as always, although for the first time I ordered a fish that wasn’t spectacular – a pepper crusted swai that was perfectly cooked but not really to my taste. Dave’s Legolamb was very good, though, and he was kind (and full) enough to give me one of the slices. I made up for my disappointing dinner by ordering two desserts, a german chocolate cake with a super super chocolate frosting (which I scraped off and ate, leaving most of the cake behind – backwards from my usual preferred cake eating form) and an absolutely delightful espresso-date sticky pudding, which was more like a gooey cake and was quite possibly the best dessert I’ve had aboard ship. Boot camp and zumba start up again tomorrow, so payback is coming.

We really like going up to the crow’s nest after dinner, but I also like doing my blog then, so tonight I compromised by taking the laptop up with us. I am really enjoying typing and swaying to the music- I think this may be a new tradition. Dave says my typing is not too distracting, although I notice that I’m not doing so well because I keep trying to type to the beat. Here’s something I want to remember: he played a song with the lyric ”my my my it’s a beautiful world” by Colin Hay, former lead singer for Men without Hats, that I like very much. We stayed with Chris until his 9:00 break, and then headed down to the Queen’s lounge for Vivienne and the HALcats doing 50s & 60s favorites. “You know what I love about 50s & 60s night?” she asked. “All the songs were written in the 50s and 60s.” well, there’s no arguing with that. The HALcats were swinging pretty good, and my favorite dancer, the barefoot lady in red, was there, although she was wearing a black dress and shoes tonight. The dancing was pretty terrific and Vivienne wasn’t as flat as she sometimes is, so it was very good.

When they took their break we headed to the vista lounge for the Chris Alpine, the comedian. You may have noticed that we’re much like fickle TV viewers - when they go to a break we change the channel. Both in the crows nest and in the vista lounge, which are all the way forward on the ship, you can tell that the seas are a little rougher. Like the Veendam, the Oosterdam has what I call a bow nose – a bulbous protuberance just at the water line. I’m not sure what it’s for, but in rougher seas when it hits a wave just wrong the whole ship shakes – Chris-the-guitar player said we’d hit a whale. If that were true, we’d be leaving quite a line of bruised whales behind us. You can feel it through the whole ship, but it’s especially noticeable in the forward lounges.

Anyway, we decided to sit downstairs for the comedian. The late show is usually sparsely attended, and sometimes in the balcony it can be hard to feel the energy of the performance. Before the comedian started we found out more from Dave the 12 year old cruise director about what went wrong with the tendering. In addition to the young crewmember sending too many people down to the tender boarding area, the harbormaster in Maui was only allowing 1 tender to dock at a time. Apparently several ships officers went over and spoke with her, and convinced her that two tenders was a bare minimum. Anyway, we sat in the back row of the floor section, which Chris-the-comedian says are the people who want to be close to the action but not part of it. Bingo! He had many funny bits, and had more interaction with the audience than most. He did do the airplane seatbelt joke, which is wearing thin, especially since he messed it up – the whole point of doing it is that the release mechanism is different from the one on your car. A particular favorite joke of mine was how you could tell how old a man was by how high his pants were – sort of like counting the rings on a tree. Now that we’re heading east they’re taking away the hours they gave us, so it was midnight by the time we got to bed. Tonight’s towel animal: Gorilla.