We're Getting on the Ship! (Freemantle)

It's still the same day that we went to the zoo in the morning. By the end of today, I had over 22,000 steps. This is also not the most interesting post ever, so my apologies.

I don’t know if it’s because we have a mini-suite or if it’s because Insight Cruises (our organizers) were able to get the priority boarding arranged with P&O, but the boarding process was very fast. We sat in the big pre-board area for about half an hour (good time to catch up on a little blogging) and then skated through the rest in about 15 minutes, so we were on the ship by 6. Usually we’d head right to our cabin but on the way there was a place to sign up for internet with a sail-away discount, so we did. Then we went to our cabin and wow, just wow. It’s called a mini-suite, but it’s not very mini!. It’s on the aft portside corner – meaning it is at the very end of the ship, on the right when you’re facing back. Because it’s the corner cabin you enter it down a hallway, with a mysterious door to your right and a little nook where you can put your binoculars. The hallway opens out into, a sitting room with a bar sink and TV and a floor to ceiling window with a sliding door in the middle to go out to the balcony, a bedroom area with another TV and a desk, a dressing room, and a bathroom with a tub and two sinks, one in the room with the tub and the other in the room with the toilet – which is on the other side of the mysterious door and can be accessed from either side. It has more drawers and cabinets and clothes hanging space then we’ve ever imagined, and the balcony has railings across rather than the usual frosted glass, so you can actually sit on the recliner or in one of the chairs and see out, looking back over our wake. It’s really something else.

On our way to our room our cabin stewards were waiting for us and introduced themselves – Lileth (F) and Danielle(M). Lileth came in to show us some features of the cabin and remind us to go to our muster station, which is the Black Circus show lounge – we aren’t assigned to a specific lifeboat, which makes us less comfortable.  We obediently stayed in our cabin to watch the (unusually long) safety briefing, which included instructions for the using the water slides, and then equally obediently headed down to our muster station, where they scanned our key cards. I don’t think I mentioned that we got new lanyards when we got to Perth which have a clip that you can also clip your room key to – very convenient.

Since our luggage wasn’t in our room yet we did our usual touring of the ship. It’s physically a larger ship than we’ve been on before, with about 2,000 passengers on board, and it offers a lot more activities than a HAL ship, although many of them have additional costs. It has 6 restaurants, plus a private dining room where you can get the $220/person tasting menu (wines included), waterslides, a zipline, something called “walk the plank”, and the Titanic Experience which I think is when they hang you off the front of the ship. There’s also the aforementioned water slides, which actually hang out a little over the water, plus many pools, lots of shopping, the gym and the spa, and a lawn bowls area. We learned yesterday that lawn bowling is having a resurgence in Perth especially among young men, who’ve discovered that they have cheap beer on Friday nights. Or so we were told.

Because of all the restaurants there are a lot of places on the ship where you can’t get from one end to the other. It will take us a while to get it all figured out. The ship was built in 1997 and has clearly been refurbished but there are many places that look a little worn, including in our cabin where neither of the thermostats seem to work. Fortunately it’s a good temperature both inside and out. We continued our exploration of the ship until it was dinnertime. Our small pre-cruise group of 40 has expanded to over 140, and mealtimes are a bit weird. For one thing they’re later than we’d like, and for another they aren’t all at the same time – tonight, they had space for 70 of us at 7:30, and the rest at 8. Dinner tonight was at the Asian-themed restaurant, the Dragon Lady. We’d planned to get there at 7:20 but got lost or delayed in some way, and by the time we got there they were telling a couple front of the line that they were full. They turned to leave, but then Elise came and said that no, we could all be seated. We called back the couple who’d started to leave and ended up being seated wit them – Kelly Beaty, former editor of Sky and Telescope, and his wife Cheryl. They were very engaging dinner companions and we had a tasty and enjoyable time with them.

After dinner we went back to our cabin. Our luggage had arrived so we go unpacked and went to bed. It’s very exciting to have unpacked know that we don’t have to repack for five days! I was pretty congested and it took a while to get comfortable, but the roll of the ship finally worked its magic.