On board! Hooray. Or not?...

Welcome to our dining room!

April 6,2014
An uneventful morning except that Sherry & Joe were unable to get on the ship. Nevermind that they only decided to go with us last night! Apparently there are no more cabins available.

We spent the night at the Fairfield Inn & Suites Airport and Cruise Port (my readers will have to suffer through my putting in a lot of names of people and places as this is the way that I keep track for future reference. It’s so nice to go back to my blog/journal later to refresh my memory of whom we have met and where we ate and stayed and even sometimes what we had to eat or drink!) and used their bus to get to the Cruise Port in Port Everglades.

Sherry and Joe (Randy’s cousin and her husband) and we had dinner last night (FOUR hours of conversation, drinks, and food!) at Grille 401. A bit of an adventure finding the restaurant. At one point we had three—count ‘em, THREE GPS going at once! Poor Joe was driving and he had to sort out three voices telling him where to go—and that didn’t include the GPSs! Two of the GPSs wanted to go in directly opposite directions! Eventually we found it and had a wonderful meal.

We got to the ship and were escorted (!) to our suite; that was kind of nice. The room(s) are as pretty as the website shows and we are definitely going to be very comfortable here. We found the Crow’s Nest bar and our waiter for the duration will be Ryan. So easy for us to remember! And we’re teaching him how to make a martini—stirred not shaken (“don’t bruise the booze” he said).

The waitstaff are great but so far I have to say I am not impressed with the service level in our Pinnacle Suite on Holland America. Even though we are paying through the nose for the penthouse suite (AKA Pinnacle Suite) we will have to pay through the nose again for: water (!) (the water in our tap came out brown!), any drinks not ordered at the bars, internet access (at approximately $55/100 minutes and I say approximately because I cannot sign on yet because they haven’t entered all the passengers’ names yet!). Not an auspicious start to this cruise. And our fourth bag with all of Randy’s dress clothes and shirts has not shown up as of 30 minutes after sailing. Wonder if they’ll let him in the dining room in shorts and a t-shirt?

Tonight will be our first dinner in the dining room and our first chance to meet our tablemates. We have already met some nice folks, Henry & Lilia (he says in 56 years of marriage she is only the 2nd Lilia he has ever known). We met Liliane (haven’t met her husband, Dave) in the Crow’s Nest during Sail Away and they are part of the Cruise Critic group that been planning a lot of tours in the upcoming weeks.