Day 6 Math at Sea!

We woke up early on our last sea day for a while, and I decided to take it easy – catch up on the blog, practice my ‘uke and hula, not rush. I sat at the desk with the verandah door open while I wrote, which is one of my favorite things. It was really nice not to be still. Meanwhile Dave did his morning walk and breakfast.

At 8 I went up for Tai Chi, then breakfast, and then there was a choice to make - as there so often is – Coffee with Dario the cruise director, where he’d be interviewing himself, or Reconnecting Joy & Mathematics with Frank Farris, husband of lecturer William Beerman. I ended up with Frank; Dave went to Dario. Frank’s talk was wonderful. It tied in with the thinking I’ve been doing about being good at and not good at things, and he also just did wonderful things with shapes and numbers that were kind of like going to a really geeky magic show. Did you even know that there is an online encyclopedia of integer sequences? Me neither. Dave learned many good things about Dario, but also was there when Dario said he was looking for an amateur astronomer to lead some stargazing. So Dave will be doing that sometime after Hawai’i.

We decided to do the scavenger hunt, which this time was getting signatures from various ship’s personnel. We didn’t manage to snag a deck officer or a security person, but we had a great time going all over the ship for half an hour.

Then it was 11, time for hula for me and relaxing time for Dave. It was our last lesson until we leave Hawai’I, so I recorded it on my phone so I can practice. After Hula I met Dave and we went to lunch, where we got a two-top in the hopes of being out in time for a 1:00 talk. It worked out well. We ended up sitting next to another two-top and having a nice chat with them about the HAL wine tastings, which are a good time if you get a good table but aren’t very well taught. I tried the sugar free dessert and it was surprisingly ok.

The talk at 1:00 was called Under the Jarvis Moon, a movie about the US government sending a group of young (18-19 year olds) Hawai’ian boys to live on 3 remote islands in the South Pacific to claim them (the islands, not the boys). It was an interesting movie but that 1:00 hour does not work for me to sit still and listen, so once again I did some napping until Dave woke me up to go to ‘ukelele class.

Again, our last get-together until after Hawai’i which is too bad because we’re all starting to get it. Fortunately we can practice on our own over the break. I’m sure if you stood outside the room we’d sound very slow and ragged, but it feels like playing music. Except that G7 chord is just not working out for me! After class I went over and talked to my Kumu Hula, my hula teacher, to ask if there was a Hawai’ian sign language and if it was influenced by or related to the very descriptive hand gestures during the hula. Unfortunately both she and Kainoa know nothing about sign language so they were not any help.

I headed back to the cabin and blogged until about 4, when Dave came back to the cabin and we headed up to the Lido for the Aloha Sunset Hour, an excellent tradition, even though it’s an hour early for sunset. I have remembered that asking for sparkling water gets you the imported stuff (same price), so that is my fancy drink for the day. Dave would like you to know that we officially crossed into the tropics at 4:37pm today

Dinner was good again. This time Louise and Dennis were the ones with the excused absences, but the table still hummed along. I ordered the giant prawn for an upcharge, and it took a very long time to get there. But when it did there were two of them and they were super giant, on a giant bed of vegetables. I’ve had a bit of a veggie deficit and this solved that problem.

After dinner we hung out in the cabin, then went to the show. It was the World Stage team doing “Feelin’ Groovy”, a 60s themed song and dance show. We didn’t get there in time to get a good seat, but the show was good natured and enjoyable. After the show we went out to 6-Forward and looked at the stars and clouds. It’s warm out.

We’re tired tonight, so it’s going to be an early bedtime. Tomorrow we are back on land – Nawiliwili Kauai. We may be the only two people on board who are disappointed. 

 

Day 5 - I take my first nap of the cruise

Content warning - this is a long one, without a lot of pictures because we keep forgetting to take them. 

After a slightly late night we woke up early – around 6 – and headed off to do our exercise-y things. I did workout 1 of Team Body Project’s Body Burst series. It’s  tough workout that I like to do on the ships because it’s about 40 minutes and hits both strength and cardio, so you get it all done efficiently. I also like it because it is a pretty showy workout so people always tell me how awesome I am when I get done. And who doesn’t like that? I had a little free time between finishing my exercises and Tai Chi.

Tai Chi was excellent as always. On the way out of class yesterday a woman commented to me that she felt like he was not introducing enough new stuff, but I totally disagree. I am loving the slow pace and the long amount of time we’re spending on Qi gong breathing before and after. If I weren’t already relaxed and blissed out from being on the ship, it would be really relaxing! At the end of the Tai Chi portion we ran through the whole sequence together with no verbal cues, and it was just magical. There was a couple watching from the bar and I could see that the class was in flow by the expression on their faces.

Breakfast and off to William Beerman’s talk on the Hawai’ian language. He’s a linguistic anthropologist and I was excited for his talk, because I thought it would use his vocation to illuminate the history & connection to other Polynesian languages. But it turned out to be a dry recital of how written Hawai’ian came to be (here’s a hint: missionaries), how it was almost exterminated and came back, and a bunch of word lists. He’s just not a good speaker. But tomorrow his husband, a mathematician, is supposed to talk about bringing joy to mathematics, and that could be very cool.

Then I looked at my watch and thought I had to rush off to Hula, and then I got there and nobody was there but I figured they were on Hawai’I time, and then it was very sunny so I thought I’d rush back to the cabin for my hat, which I did, and I got all the way back there before I realized that once again I’d been fooled by the incorrect time on my fitbit. At this rate I’m going to have to go the watch sale on the ship and buy an analog one – Eileen was proud to show off her dumb watch with the correct time at dinner.

I relaxed for a bit until it was time to Hula. Like TaiChi, the class was a little smaller than usual. And like Tai Chi, it was very fun. We reviewed Little Grass Shack and started learning E Huli, which we’re also learning in ‘ukelele class. E Huli is a much faster tempo than Little Grass Shack, which meant that for the first time both halves of the official program title  Hula Lesson/Polynesian Fitness came into play. Dave went to Kainoa’s lecture on Leis, which was well done.

We had lunch at the Lido because we wanted to not feel rushed getting to the 1:00 Hawai’ian language lesson from the ambassadors. Dave learned a lot but I took a full hour nap, half-waking enough to say the words out loud that we were supposed to be repeating. Fortunately the nap revived me enough that I was totally ready for our hula lesson. We reviewed our song Vacation on the Zaandam, and continued working on E Huli. It was very reassuring to realize that even with a week and a half to practice we’ll be playing slowly enough to make the dance very do-able. There are a couple non-beginners who come to the lessons, and one of them kept asking the teacher if we could take it faster. I spoke up and suggested that we might let the beginners set the pace, and agreed. He did it again a bit later, and Pua asked everyone who was brand new to ‘ukelele to raise their hands – and about 2/3 or the class raised their hands. We kept going slow. We also started learning Aloha Oe, which is considered to be a traditional Hawai’ian farewell song. But Pua asked Kainoa to translate it, and he came over and told us the it was written by Princess Lydia Lili’uokalani, the last sovereign monarch of Hawai’i, as an apology letter to her people for becoming a state.

I went back to the cabin and found Dave, and then we walked around the ship a bit – the weather is perfect – and ended up at the tail end of the pool party. We found a table in the shade and enjoyed our afternoon drinks listening to the dance band. Then we headed down to the cabin to put together our first bag of FREE laundry and get ready for dinner. We’d waited about a day too long and couldn’t get everything stuffed in the bag, but we have unlimited FREE laundry now that we’re 4 star mariners so we’ll just send another bag.

AT dinner Mikey and Linda (they’re daughter and mother, respectively – did I mention that?) had an excused absence to attend an event with their travel agency group, so it was a slightly different dynamic at the table. I haven’t talked much about our tablemates, so here goes with who was there last night. Eileen is from NYC, and yes, she is Jewish. She’s a regular cruiser but not often on Holland – her preferred cruise line is Cunard because it leaves from right there. Her primary goal on the ship is Bora Bora. Dennis and Loiuse currently live near Seattle. It’s a second marriage for both of them. They are big cruisers – for example, they’ve been on the ship since September 19, and will take a short break after this cruise before heading off on this years 120+ day legendary voyage on this same ship. They know everyone and everything, and sometimes Louise gets patronizing about her level of knowledge and monopolizes the conversation. There’ve been several instances when Dennis has tried to cut her off. We see them around the ship a lot and they’re the type of couple who is always together.  I think they could use a break from each other.

After dinner and blogging we went to the show, DJ Bucciarelli again. It was the same type of show as his last one, but with songs by female singers of the 70’s instead of Neil Sedaka and less multi-media stuff. Since we like these songs better we enjoyed this show more than his last one, and we’re looking forward to one more before he gets off the ship in Honolulu.

After the show we walked out to 6 forward, the open deck under the bridge. There are no lights there so the navigators can see, and the wind was coming from behind us so the air was essentially still. The temperature was perfect, the ship was rolling gently, and the clouds were playing peekaboo (pickleball?) with the moon. We stayed there for a long time, it was peaceful and lovely.

The ship is full, and there are really only two times we notice that – you need to be at the world stage about 10 minutes before the show starts if you want to choose your seat, and seats at the Ocean Bar to hear the Dam Band are at a premium. Usually a few open up in the top part of the bar during the break between sets, so we planned our arrival carefully and were able to snag two pretty good seats.

They were really swinging as always, and the female vocalist did a musical theater version of Copacabana that was really fun. The set got progressively dancier, and I ended up dancing so much that my fitbit even noticed. I could have danced all night, but after falling asleep in the papa olela (Hawaiian language class) I felt like I should call it a night. Thank goodness for sleep stories in the Calm app – I’m not sure I could dance like that and be asleep a half hour later. As always the gentle roll of the ship makes for an excellent night sleep.

At 2 am ship time went back another hour, to Honolulu time. We set our phones before we went to bed and it is triple excellent to have accurate time on our watches again!

Cruise note: Every day in the library there’s a number puzzle sheet, and one of Dave’s favorite things to do is sit out on the verandah and fill it in (in ink, no less). Yesterday’s was a Kakuro, a variation on Sudoku where the lines need to add up to a certain number. Neither f us had ever done one and it kept Dave busy for an enjoyably long time. 

Here is a bonus picture from a few days ago of me and Lewie playing our 'ukes 

Day 4 - Sloshin'

Last night at 2 am the ship moved into a new time zone – GMT-9, which isn’t a widely used time zone. In fact it’s so not widely used that Fitbit doesn’t have a setting for it, which means that neither my watch nor Dave’s will display the correct time. We spent about half an hour this morning trying to fix it out without any success.

My day started with Tai Chi at 8. We’ve now learned 3 moves, a positively glacial pace that I am totally good with. Today I coined a new term – there’s something called a bow step, which is a controlled step diagonally forward, but as the ship is rolling the step is sometimes less controlled and larger than intended. I call this a boat step.

After Tai Chi there was time for breakfast, then I met up with Dave for Coffee with Dario, this time with the executive chef Lenin from India. He talked about the organization of the kitchen staff, ordering food, inspections, and how much food waste they are allowed on average per passenger. He is married with two college aged kids, and has been working on the cruise ships for 29 years. It made me wonder how that works, but of course you can’t ask that.

Dave headed off to the cooking demo, where he discovered that Dario is also a chef. I went to the ship scavenger hunt, which today involved solving (very simple) clues to locations on the ship and taking pictures of them. I paired up with Donna, who is on her first HAL cruise. We foud everything fairly quickly except for the art gallery, which doesn’t exist on this ship. I took her back to see the whiskey barrel and that may have cost us the win.

Then it was a short rest before Hula for me and Hawaiian history with Kainoa for Dave. We both enjoyed ourselves. Hula has gotten even more complicated, but we’ve completely learned to moves to Little Grass Shack and I hope we’re going to continue practicing them in class for at least one more session! Afterwards I picked up Dave and we went to Hawaiian brunch in the dining room with a much better group than yesterday.

I had time for a short ‘ukelele practice and some blogging before official the official papa (lesson). Our weather is mostly cloudy and about 72, so Dave decided to try to sit on the promenade deck and read – it’s been too cold previously. Ukelele class was awesome as usual; Pua our teacher has delusions of grandeur when it comes to our abilities. Apparently we are having a showcase before we get to Papeete where the ukelele and hula classes will both perform, including at least one song where they will perform together, which will be interesting because there’s considerable overlap and at this point a lack of ability. But we’ve only been playing and dancing for 3 days, so there is time for improvement. The picture's not very good, but you get a sense of the number of folks in the 'ukelele class.

After class I got bit by the time zone problem and thought I only had a short time to be in the pool. Fortunately I didn’t let that deter me and I ended up with over an hour of fantastic sloshing in the pool. At 4 there is Aloha hour when the Hawaiian ambassadors play and dance and sing by the pool, so I got to hear a little of that before I needed to go shower and change for dinner. Dave was able to stay longer since he wasn’t wet.

Dinner at table 1 was enjoyable as always. I was starving from all that time in the pool and had two appetizers and a delicious bowl of dos frijoles soup for dessert.

After dinner we went to the show, Wendy the Cellist again. For me the show ranged from mediocre to actively icky. Afterwards Dave went to listen to the Dam band and I went up to the Crows Nest to play tone deaf music trivia, where you need to guess the song title and artist from hearing the lyrics read aloud deadpan. It’s harder than I thought it would be given that I’m a lyrics listener. It was a good time. That’s all for tonight!

Cruise note: You can see below that although our heading continues to become more southerly, our position gets more north of the rhumb line. 

Day 3 in which my nails are an issue

I want to add on from yesterday about my cardio session, which was jogging on the treadmill. The ship is in low swells – about 5 feet – with a noticeable rock from side to side. It doesn’t bother me – in fact I love it – but when I got on the treadmill I felt so nauseated and off balance I wasn’t sure I could walk on it! I walked slowly for a minute or so and the sensation went away and I was able to jog hands free, but whoa, that was weird.

We got up around 6 and I went to stretch class (meh), breakfast, tai chi and bootcamp. Dave did his promenading and we met up in the explorer’s lounge for the Cruise Director’s coffee. This morning it was two of our Hawaiian ambassadors – my ukelele and hula teachers. I didn’t get there until it was mostly over because bootcamp was 45 minutes, not the 30 I thought. The last 15 minutes were extra hard because of my confusion!

Next up was hula lessons for me and an ARS (American Recorder Society) member’s meeting for Dave where he was introduced to the membership as a new board member. Hula is going very well, although they went from learning two simple steps and two simple arm movements yesterday to learning to actually hula, which involves telling a story with your hands and arms. We’re learning the moves to Little Grass Shack. It’s a lot!

We had a small lunch disaster in which we ended up at a table with not interesting people (it happens, but fortunately not often) who ordered two appetizers and ate slowly. Dave’s entrée didn’t come before he had to leave for Kainoa’s talk on the Migration of the Hawai’ians people, which he said was worth missing lunch for.  I stuck it out through dessert, but was glad to escape.

I had free time until ‘ukelele at 2, so I did a little practicing. It went much better today – clearly many people had also practiced, and many ‘ukes had been tuned between yesterday and today. We learned two more chords (that G7 is nasty!) and played a whole song together. I was frustrated because my fingernails on my chording hand kept getting in the way, so after class I stopped in at the spa and they took care of filing them down.The nail technician (Yaya) was very impressed with my Madam Glam Frozen Stardust Cateye nail polish – made me feel very special. I took my ‘uke with me to the appointment so I could test it out and it’s much better now. Meanwhile Dave was at the regional wine tasting having a good time with a table full of knowledgeable wine people.

For this cruise they’ve turned the Lido bar into a Tiki Bar, with fake grass umbrella covers. Today was its grand opening, and the dance band was playing to celebrate. We enjoyed sitting in the sun and listening to the music. I still had my ‘uke with me and the back of it makes a great percussion instrument. I had my picture taken with Lewie the Lion (a human in a costume) who also had a ‘ukelele, but probably we won’t get to see it. This is a stuffed Lewie helping to open the Tiki Bar.

When all of that was over we went up to the crow’s nest to look at the navigation map that the cadets are plotting our course on. The map has the rhumb line from San Diego to Honolulu plotted on it, but as you will recall we’re taking the great circle route to save 7 miles. Dave thought it would take us South of the rhumb line, as alert readers will notice that our course heading has move southward since yesterday’s blog, but today’s position point was north of the rhumb line. Stay tuned.

Then it was dinner time already, and our table continues to evolve. Louise and Dennis mostly did the same things as Dave did, while Linda and Mikey and Eileen all had quiet days. We found plenty to talk about. After dinner there was time for some Duolingo and blogging before the show. The show was the first of 8 big stage shows on this cruise and was lots of singing and dancing, all well done. Two surprising things were that there were no costume changes – we’ve never seen that before. And the broad Scottish accent of one of the male singers. OK one more, that during the love songs there were often two hetero “couples” and two same-sex couples.

Back to the piano bar to round out the night and then an early bedtime. We get another extra hour tonight, but no towel animals. We’re reaching the point in the cruise where I stop rushing from activity to activity and start to take naps and read. I’m very excited!

Cruise note: Dave discovered this barrel on the aft Lido deck, which apparently contains whiskey that they are aging at sea. It will cross the equator at least 4 times, which makes it taste better? https://woodencork.com/products/jeffersons-ocean-aged-at-sea-bourbon-whiskey

 

Day 2 - we're all at sea here

We gained an hour last night, so we were both wide awake at 5:30. Here’s a kind of mind-blowing thing to think about: we all know that at the top and bottom of the world the lengths of the days and nights and the path of the sun through the sky vary greatly with the seasons, hence Alaska’s high midnight sun in the summer and low noon sun in the winter. The converse is that near the equator the sun rises pretty much at 6 am and sets at 6 pm, and has a very vertical path as it does those things, hence the fast nightfall in the tropics. We’re also not that far from the equinox, which has the same equal day/night lengths. So sunrise and sunset will be close to 6 for much of our trip. All this to say that Dave got up and went to the stern of the ship to see the sunrise.

I went off the the gym at about 7, thinking it would be mostly empty during stretch class, which is now held up in the crow’s nest because it outgrew the tiny floor space in the gym. My assumption was completely wrong, but I managed to get in a bootcamp workout before it was time to go up to the crow’s nest for Tai Chi. I enjoyed Tai Chi very much; we did things I knew but I really like Jorge, the instructor. He is from Columbia and his pronunciation of “pickleball” (peekaboo? we all thought to ourselves) is the best thing.

It’s early in the cruise so I’m still in rushing mode. I headed to the Lido to grab yogurt with nuts and seeds for breakfast and ran into Jorge getting the exact same thing. A quick breakfast and then back to the gym for cardio, then back to the cabin to change my sweaty body into a sundress to join Dave for a talk on Hawaiian geology & geography by Kainoa, one of our Hawaii ambassadors, which was good if not novel (I hit 10,000 steps on the way there). There was a talk right after that about basically the same thing by William Beerman, a former professor of anthropology and linguistics (!!!) from Brown University, but I had to rush off to Hula dance lessons on the Lido with more of the Hawaiian ambassadors. Hula lessons were excellent. We learned two steps: Kahalo and Hele, and I had a nice time chatting with Barbara of the purple hair, who is a very experienced cruiser. Note to self: wear a hat.

After Hula lessons I zoomed up to the Crows Nest for the talk on charts and navigation, which turned out to mostly be a Q&A with the Navigation 1^st & 2^nd officers and their 3 cadets. We are taking a great circle route to Hawaii which saves us 7 miles.

Then it was lunchtime. We sat with Gregory & Linda from Nebraska and had a pleasant time. I ordered 3 small plates which was a perfect lunch, but I don’t know if there’s a way to make them not all come at once. We went back to our cabin and discovered that our Kauai shore excursion had been cancelled due to hurricane damage. No time to think about that now, because I had to leave for beginning ukulele lessons.

Beginning ukulele lessons did not begin well, because the instructor started by saying, tune your ukulele to this note. Which is not a beginner thing I don’t think. I almost left but I am trying to do new things, so I stayed and Marie helped me a lot and I signed out the ukulele so I can practice in private because that  is what first children do. We learned 2 chords – C and C7, and tomorrow we will learn two more so we can play our theme song, “Morning on the Zaandam”. Later on we will learn to play the Hukilau song that was on a CD that the boys & I listened to on repeat, and I have high hopes that by the end of the cruise I’ll be able to play it. Barbara of the purple hair was there but we didn’t get to sit together.

I brought my Uke back to the cabin where Dave used his tuning app to make it sound less awful, and we booked a new shore excursion for Kauai, and then Dave took a nap while I did some blogging. Then Dave went for his afternoon beer on the Lido with Hawaiian music and dancers, and I took a shower and got ready for dinner.

Dinner was good. Our table is starting to gel and my lamb chops were excellent. We were having such a good time talking and laughing that Adi our waiter needed to kick us out so they could get ready for the second seating. We took so long, in fact, that we only had time for a short stop in our cabin before it was time to head over to the Captain’s reception in the big theatre, the World Stage. The Captain is very young and word on the streets is that this is his first command. He was a little wooden but managed to get through all the introductions.

After the Captain’s toast we sequed right into the big show, which was the Neil Sedaka songbook. I had gotten Neil Sedaka transposed with Neil Diamond in my head and was a little disappointed when I realized what kind of music it was going to be, but the singer was very good and also there were recorded interviews with his dad giving pearls of wisdom, such as “I have a chair, you have a chair. I have a TV, you have a TV. I have a car, you have a car. Add a bowl of spaghetti and that’s all you need.” And “If you’re healthy when you die, you’ll be pissed. Eat the cheesecake”.

Our tablemates Dennis and Louise had recommended the piano bar (they’ve been on the ship since mid-September) and we thought we’d check it out. It turned out to be a rollicking good time with lots of singing and even some cat meowing and dog howling, We stayed through two sets and then it was late and time to get the blog out and go to bed.

Cruise note: tonight we had a huge haul on our bed when we got back from dinner! Our first towel animal (we never know what this one is supposed to be – leave your guesses in the facebook comments), old style (fabric, not plastic) HAL bags and two mugs which is excellent because I was just about to buy one in the gift store because the ones in the Lido are tiny. And of course chocolate.

We are feeling very happy & lucky to be on this ship having this adventure!

 

We're Cruisin'

We flew into San Diego the day before and the hotel shuttle was waiting for us, so we got to the hotel easily and after check in it was already time to head out to dinner. We’d had good food and a good time with Josh and Jen at Queenstown Public House, so we went back there again and while the food was still good (especially the lamb skewers!) the time was not as good without J&J, which will be a bit of a theme here I’m sure.

Back to the hotel for reading and bedtime, and the next thing you know it was after 6 am and Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas (bigger than our ship, but not one of the monster ships) was pulling in. About 15 minutes later the beautiful Zaandam came into view, and we watched the sky lighten as it pulled in. Yes, our ship had come in.

Last time we went to Queenstown there was an Egg Tuck breakfast place under construction and it looked yummy. We had breakfast there this morning and are here to report that it was yummy, delicious soft scrambled eggs with bacon and cheese and a super yummy sauce in a pita-shaped piece of buttered grilled Texas toast. We split one and it was plenty of food although I would happily have eaten a whole one.

Then we headed to Ralph’s grocery to get a large bottle of hand lotion for Dave and some other sundries; note to self the CVS probably would have been a better choice for more variety. We walked back along the bay and it was already getting hot. We were hoping to find more bucket hats, but the vendors mostly weren’t open yet.

We got back to the room and grabbed a luggage cart so Dave could take all the checked bags (two medium roller bags and a very large, heavy garment bag without wheels) to the front desk where they have a stapler for attaching the HAL luggage tags. This is always an extra step and one of these times we are going to BRING A STAPLER. And not one of those mini ones, either, because they don’t do the work. With the amount of stuff we bring, it will barely be noticeable.

When Dave got back he changed into lighter weight clothes (he didn’t freeze on the airplane like I did) and it was pretty much time to walk across the street and get on the ship. Because we’re now 4 star Mariners (woohoo!!!) we get priority boarding and early cabin entry (and free laundry!), so we were through the check in process and in our room by 11:30. We had a small hiccup where they got our dining room assignment wrong, so we stood in two different lines for a while and got it taken care of. This is a pretty classic HAL move and everybody was pretty chill in line.

Lunch at the Lido was fine – not as memorable as Egg Tuck, that’s for sure, but few things are. We spent the rest of the afternoon reacquainting ourselves with the Beautiful Zaandam (we were on her for the Panama Canal and also the Vancouver-San Diego repositioning cruise) and getting our heads into cruise mode. Dave had a Portland Recorder Society board meeting, which he took from the comfort of our stateroom. Of course in the middle of the meeting our Captain had to do the testing of the emergency alarm, but that’s life on the ship.

It had been a nice leisurely day and then suddenly everything piled up. Dave’s two suitcases had arrived, but my one suitcase had not. At about 4 they had taken down the net that goes from the dock to the ship under where the suitcases are loaded in giant bins, and my suitcase still hadn’t arrived. I went out in the hall and another passenger was in the hall clearly looking for her suitcase, and then Nyoman (one of our cabin stewards, the other is Zal) came by and we asked him and he said they had probably had a problem and we should go to deck A forward. So we did and I found my suitcase had been tagged as containing a contraband power strip, which is not allowed if it has a surge protector, but it didn’t. So I grabbed it and a baggage person put it in the scanner, at which point everyone in line started yelling at me for cutting in line, which I had not realized I was doing, so I tried to get the baggage guy not to scan it but it was too late, so I apologized profusely to the people in line and they seemed to forgive me. Dave helped me do speed unpacking and we went to the bow deck which was open for the sailaway, but then we had to go to dinner to meet our tablemates who will be just fine, and then we had to rush to the 3+ star Mariner welcome, where we talked to a bunch of officers in a very weird receiving line, and then it was off to the show, which was a cello soloist playing everything from Bach to Bohemian Rhapsody. She had an excellent sparkly dress and the show was fun.

Then we were exhausted even though it wasn’t even 9:00 and we’re getting an extra hour tonight, but it has been a big day!

No towel animal. It’s a big day for the hotel staff too.

Bonus Photo: This is Captain Lewie. He will be have the riddle of the day every day, and at lunch our cruise director Dario will announce the answer. He was hanging out for photo ops while we were checking in.

Cruise note: while our cabin seems smaller than the one we had on the Nieuw Amsterdam it has a ton more storage space – we actually have a couple empty drawers! 

Cruise Note II: Google Chrome won't do photos in blogspot, but Firefox will. 

Coastal Cruise - Going Home

We both woke up early and watched us dock, then went to the Lido for last breakfast. I ran into Scott and Linda, so they joined us for breakfast. We were done with breakfast by 7:15, and done in our cabin by 7:30, so we decided to go up to (you guessed it) the Tamarind Bar while we waited for it to be our turn to disembark, since it had a better view than our veranda. As usual it was deserted except for the occasional staff member.

Once our group was called (gray 2) we made our way off the ship, grabbed our bags, and got on the bus. The ride back was uneventful, and the road construction, while still ubiquitous, was not too bad. Once we got to the airport we stood in a lot of lines – they seemed to be checking things 3 or 4 times – but eventually made it through and were into the preclearance area, which means that when we landed in Portland we landed as a domestic flight. Once in the terminal we found Josh and Jen (they took an Uber, which worked very well) and had our last lunch together at a sports bar so Josh could watch the Masters. Then we got on our plane and flew home (it’s a 45 minute flight). Dave and I got upgraded to first class so that was very nice. We did the airport things and aside from some traffic got home uneventfully.  185 days until the next cruise!