Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Soon! Our first port…

When last I left you, we were headed to dinner with Captain Timmers, a delightful man who has been sailing (Aside: why do they call it sailing when they use engines? I just finished re-reading Hawaii. To “beat” around the tip of South America without engines to help, now THAT’S sailing!) for 30-plus years.

Anyway, the dinner was fabulous. There were eight of us plus the Captain, a native of the Netherlands but a resident of the US who does plumbing on the side when he’s home (his wife owns a plumbing company and he helps out). The other passengers were people who have traveled extensively on Holland America. Extensively? That doesn’t begin to cover how much they travel. Two men said they are usually the number one on the ship with about 1500 days on board. They aren’t numero uno on this cruise and may not even be numero dos! The people with the most days have 2850 days. Yes, Two THOUSAND eight hundred and fifty days. That’s approximately 7.78 YEARS on board a Holland America ship. I think the captain may have more days than that, but not too many (he said he spends approximately six months a year on board, times 30 years is still only 15 years on board and he’s PAID to do it!).

It was a wonderful meal with great company and both of us enjoyed our dinner immensely. Since it was the Captain being served, the Chef went all out although the Captain said he told the Chef not to serve anything that wasn’t ordinarily served at dinner for everybody. Well, it may be served to everybody else, but it wasn’t plated the same as everybody else’s meals! I would have loved to take photos but thought it would be a bit tacky to bring a camera to dinner!

Back down to earth. Randy and I have both been taking computer classes about Windows 8 so I’ll have to get Randy a new monitor (touch screen) and install Windows 8.1 when we get home. We’ve also gone to a couple of lectures, not earthshakingly erudite, but then, who goes on a cruise to be educated? But when a lecture is advertised as being about the history of the Azores (our first stop, in a day, at Ponta Delgada) and ends up being about the volcanoes on Iceland, something is wrong. Plus he has way too many bullet points and fancy distracting cartoons on his powerpoint!

Tomorrow, April 14th, we FINALLY get to a port. We are supremely bored! The last time we did an Atlantic crossing we were coming off a 30-day cruise to South America and so probably needed time to recover from that. This time we don’t have anything to recover from and the classes and other time-fillers aren’t very interesting to us. Thus, the boredom. We’re reading lots of books on our kindles, however!

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