Month: September 2019

Day 18 was at sea. We got up about 9 o’clock. I actually had a real shower. It felt good. The excursion office manager called. I talked with him for about 10 minutes. He was apologetic in twenty different ways and guaranteed that things would be straightened out going forward. I was nice about it. I explained my frustration – they were zero for three and they were not only inconveniencing me but others were impacted by their goof ups. Anyway it ended okay. We had a test the next day when we attempted to get to Stockholm but that’s a story I will talk about down the road here. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. I will save the drama and tell you that the Stockholm experience was good. So back to day 18. In the morning we stayed in the room. We watched movies. Around 11 o’clock or so, we decided to go to five to pick up sandwiches that we would take the bingo. They make a really good toasted tuna sandwich. And Mary seems to like their toasted ham and cheese. We lugged our sandwiches from one end of the boat on five to the other end of the boat on seven. We picked up a tablet for bingo and went into Club Fusion to play bingo. While they were setting up for bingo we ate our sandwiches. I guess this is called being efficient. We got lucky on the second game of bingo. Our tablet won $125. I forgot to mention something that happened at poker the previous evening. I was reminded of it because the same couple was playing bingo. On our South American cruise we ran into a couple from California, I think San Francisco area. They regularly played Texas hold ‘em. So we got to know them a little bit. His name is James W too. I’m not sure what the W stands for though. The same couple is on this cruise. It was crazy to see them. I guess this is the definition of this is a small world. We talked to him that evening playing poker and then we talked with them some more at bingo. It was just a strange coincidence. Back at bingo, the room itself was very cold. We were both shivering by time bingo was over. It was so cold we went back to five to get something warm to drink. I actually had a whole cup of coffee which I drank rarely. We felt better with an extra $80 in the pocket. With some hot drinks in our bellies, we went to the Explorers lounge where there was an art auction beginning. We registered to get a bidding card. We wandered around and looked at the art again for the 400^th time before the action began. Because we’ve been to several of these auctions we know how they operate. We were not that active in this one. We did drink the sample champagne. We ended up bidding on and winning one Warner Bros. cartoon picture. As part of a mystery auction we won the chance to buy three forest scene pictures. I forget the artist name right now but we can buy all three for $350. We only won the option to buy them. We are not obligated to buy them. We made arrangements to go to the auction place the following evening at 7 o’clock to discuss what we bid on and won. Between the two cruises we bid on this and won the Clapper award and other little things. It was just a good time to reconcile where we were. Of course our afternoon was not complete without yet another stop. We signed up for the wine tasting so that was our next stop. They offer six wines to taste. The first three – the whites – with the same from the previous winetasting we did on the last cruise. The three reds were different. None of them were that good. The second to last was a French wine which was okay but really expensive. Their last featured red wine was a red blend from California. It was pretty good but it was from California so it had a lot of tannins and a high alcohol content. As I learn more about wine these are the things I like the least. Anyway, the winetasting took about 45 minutes or so. From there we decided to go back to the room and close our eyes for a few minutes. As I mentioned before, the TV here has some decent movies so we watched a movie called Italian Job before getting cleaned up to go to dinner. On our way to dinner we decided to do the picture stops before eating. There were three picture stops which we accomplished in about 20 minutes. We’re becoming efficient at these too. For my appetizer I had a mushroom and spinach quiche. For my entrée I had beef stroganoff. Mary also had the beef stroganoff, but with her appetizer she had a double order of salad. She calls it the big salad. We brought one of the red wines from our room to the dining room. It was pretty good, but we’ve had better now. The lady in the grocery store in Cetua did a pretty good job of picking wines. We have one red left which we will probably try tonight. At dinner we spent a while talking to an older couple from London. I don’t remember their names if we actually got them. After dinner we went to the casino. Mary decided to play blackjack. I only watched for a while before finding that TV that had the US open tennis matches. Mary played blackjack for probably 45 minutes or so. She actually made some money. The casino host gave us a free beer and Mary had a Drambuie. After that we came upstairs. We started watching a movie called Light Between the Oceans. We both quickly realized that we had read the book for this movie, but we watched it anyway. I should say we watched part of it because about 20 minutes into it we decided to go to bed. Day 19 was going to be a busy one. Day 18 was back-to-back adventure. It was a good day. Despite having an event after an event much of the day we were not rushed. We did get a nap in the afternoon which helped.

Day 17 à I am sitting on the 14^th floor. I am by myself because Mary went ashore in Copenhagen. You wonder why I did not go ashore? I will say that I tried. I can say that I was actually on land in Copenhagen. I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit though. We needed to be at the Wheelhouse bar by 930 so we got up around 8 o’clock I guess it was. Mary had breakfast delivered so after we both got cleaned up we had breakfast. Two days in a row I had the breakfast sandwich – eggs, bacon and cheese on an English muffin. Two days in a row the bacon was a big chunk of fat which I could not swallow. I did have two danishes and some orange juice. Mary had cereal and fruit. I believe she also had scone with her tea. It was a quick breakfast. By time we were done and we had our stuff in our bags we wandered down to the seventh floor. We were little early but we ended up waiting almost 40 minutes. I’m not sure what the delay was but we didn’t leave to disembark until about 1015. We were given blue stickers with the Group 3 written on them. This means that when we get off we should look for bus number three. It took us a while to get downstairs and off the ship. They used a very bumpy ramp to get off the ship. I had to hang on for dear life. The weather was about 45° and rain. We both had on our Baltic jackets with the hoods up. We got off the ship, had our pictures taken and made our way to where the buses were. We saw the number three bus but there was no lift. If you have read this log to this point you know that this has happened on every Princess managed excursion – all three of them – we’ve done to this point. This time the screwup was the number of the group we were supposed to be with. We were supposed to be with group 6 because group 6 bus had a lift equipped bus. The group 6 bus left about a half hour earlier so there was no way for them to reconfigure one of the buses to allow us on. There was only one lift equipped bus and it was gone. The Princess excursion lady tried to appease us but both Mary and I were out of words. It’s okay to screw up once. Being somewhat lenient, even the second screwup was okay. There is no excuse for the third screwup, especially after we specifically went to the excursions office the day before to make sure we were okay. Now we’re standing in the wind and rain with the excursions lady trying to say she’s sorry. Mary and I went back on the ship and decided to go to the fifth floor for tea. We knew there was no easy recourse for this. The excursions lady did find that we could go on Hop on and off Bus which toured the city. She couldn’t guarantee that all of these hop on and off buses had lifts so I did not want to go that route. With my luck, we would hop off at some point and there would be no lift equipped bus to get us back to the ship. The next option was to provide a wheelchair-ready taxi. This would require us to call a taxi and have him drive to the ship. With him/her we’d be able to tour the city on our dime. I think more out of frustration than anything, we decided against this option too. We explained to the excursions lady that want to speak to her management. Her management happens to be on some special exercise today so we may not see him or her today. We will make a point of it to see them tomorrow. Mary was frustrated to the point of tears. We managed to calm down over a cup of tea on the fifth floor. We decided there wasn’t much we could do about it. We decided Mary would go ashore to do some souvenir shopping and picture taking. That’s where she is as I write this. In my many years of corporate life, process breakdowns like this are one of three things – the process is broken, or those using the process are not trained on it, or the people doing the process just don’t care. They definitely have a lot of process around it so I’m not sure it’s the first one. It is most likely the second one – lack of training – I hope. Because if it’s the third one, people just don’t care, that is almost impossible to fix. If and/or when we talk to the manager I will ask him or her which one he or she thinks is the issue. They have three or four more chances to get it right because we have three or four more excursions booked with them. That pretty much brings me up to date. As I mentioned I am sitting on the 14^th floor. There are a lot of other people up here so not everyone made it to shore today. It is an interesting view. I’m looking south to an area that has probably 50 or so land and water based wind-based power generators. It’s the first time that I’ve seen them on the water. They look the same except they are just standalone in the water. Earlier, as I was sitting here, several military/navy ships went by. Mary captured it in one of the pictures she took for me – a lighthouse on a small island. There are several buildings on the island that is only reachable by boat. I wonder if it’s related to the navy.  It is a very pretty picture especially when the sun breaks through the clouds. I will spend some time now until Mary gets back editing – fixing typos mostly – the log before I publish the dates that haven’t yet been published.

Friday, September 6, 2019

I need to pick up the story from day 17 which is three days ago already. I may have mentioned this earlier, but I’m going to need a vacation from our vacation. We run pretty much from sunup to sundown. Although we have been catching naps in the afternoon, which help, we have to get out of that habit. We’ve been going to bed too late and getting up too early. We’ve been eating too much. We have not been drinking too much though. Mary has, over the last few nights, had wine with me at dinner. I’m not so sure I like sharing my wine. 😊 I’m sure when we get home she will stop that too. I don’t know that we’ve gained weight but I can’t imagine we have lost weight. Anyway, back to the story. It is day 17. I am on the 14^th floor by myself because Mary went ashore in Copenhagen. She came back about two hours later. She took a cab at the port and drove around with the driver. I don’t remember the count but she probably took about 200 pictures. She did stop at a bakery and brought brownies and cookies from some famous Copenhagen bakery. They were good cookies and brownies. They did not last long though. We wolfed them down in a matter of minutes. Mary explained some of the things that she saw on her trip. She said she spent too much money on the taxi ride. I didn’t ask how much mostly because I don’t want to know. It might make me unhappy. Just kidding. She said she saw the city square. She watched the gyrations the palace guards go through. She missed the actual changing of the guards but every 15 minutes they changed their position. While she was out she picked up our souvenir magnets for the family. I wrapped things up on 14 and we came back to the room. We both took a quick nap because we wanted to go to the future cruise office before dinner. The future cruise office is on six. To somewhat of a surprise the future cruise lady, Melissa, was in there by herself. I fully expected there to be a line. We went right in and explained what we are trying to get done. The conversation was twofold – what are we gonna do in the near-term and what do you want to do long-term. We discussed our thoughts on doing a world cruise and the fact that many of the stops on the world cruise are tendered which means I can’t get off the ship. For example, on the world cruise when we go to Australia. There  are four stops and three of them are tendered. It doesn’t make much sense to go all the way to Australia and sit on the ship for three of the four stops. The cruise lady explained why this is the case – it’s a priority system. Ships that make the trip regularly, like on a routine basis, get the port spots. Ships that only come through those ports occasionally get a lower priority and may not have a port spot so they end up tendering. So instead of the world cruise there is a another option called the grand voyage. What this basically does is move ships to other parts of the world. They also call it repositioning. For example the ship we are on is going to be repositioned to Australia. They are starting a grand voyage when we get off the ship which will take them to Australia. Along the way from Southampton to Australia is about 50 days of cruising and stopping at all the ports between here and there. I don’t know the exact tour but it goes from Southampton to New York to the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal down to India then towards Malaysia and Singapore finally to Australia. Now if you are booked on this 50 day cruise you would have stops in all the major ports along the way. So what this boils down to is that we need to look for these grand voyage is if we want to go to areas of the world we haven’t seen yet. We don’t plan on doing anything like this until 2025 but we have to do the research in the meantime. We might be able to put some money down on a trip in 2023. That takes care of the long term. The near term is what cruises can we take out of Fort Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale serves most of the Caribbean. They have countless options. Just to put something on paper we chose a seven-day cruise out of Fort Lauderdale which goes to the Eastern Caribbean. It is dirt cheap and won’t have to fly because Fort Lauderdale is only about three or four hours from the house. I believe we set it for next March or maybe it was May. At least we have something scheduled. We can always back outr until February. We don’t know what our jobs are going to be completely yet so we may not be able to go. So this conversation with the future cruises lady took about an hour. Our next stop was dinner. We went down to the fifth floor. I had salad and a chicken breast entrée. As an in between course we both had penne pasta with tomato sauce. Mary had soup of some sort for her appetizer. For her entrée she had spaghetti and meatballs. For dessert I had the brie and Gouda. Mary had some sugar-free hazelnut tart of some sort. We were in and out of dinner pretty quickly. You should know the routine by now – we stopped at for picture stations to have our pictures taken. It was informal night so Mary had on one of her tops and I put a collared shirt over my T-shirt. We were both in blue jeans. From there we went to see picture place where we picked up the pictures from the previous night. As you can see, this is become the routine. Part of the routine includes going to the casino before going to bed. As it turns out there were people there playing Texas hold ‘em. Mary and I both played for about an hour. I think I actually made money if I remember correctly. It wasn’t much but it was a positive. Mary stayed about even if I remember correctly. Despite the day starting out on a bad note, it turned out to be an okay day. We did receive a voicemail on our phone from the excursion office manager saying he would call in the morning. I’m sure, as part of the routine, Mary went and got tea. We watched part of the movie before getting into bed and crashing.

As I write this, as I mentioned above, it is day 16. We are at sea on our way to Copenhagen. I slept lousy. I was pretty much awake from 2 to 6. After 6 o’clock Mary rearranged me and I fell asleep. I slept hard until about 830. By then Mary had already been up and showered and was getting ready. Ship is really rocking and rolling. After I got ready, Mary and I discussed what we wanted to do for the rest of the day. I did not want to go chasing all day although that’s probably what will end up happening based on our discussion. I am writing this update while she is down playing bingo. We don’t both need to play bingo. I can get this log updated and she can see if she can win some money. Tonight is formal night so we have to get dressed for dinner later in the afternoon. There are other things we want to accomplish like the future cruises desk and the excursion desk. We are supposed to go to an art lecture at 1 o’clock. I’m not sure we’ll make it. I’ll stop for now. I will wrap up day 16 either tonight or the day after tomorrow.

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Picking up the story from yesterday, Mary came back from bingo about 1230. She did not win anything although she did say one of her cards only had one number left. After she came back we decided to go to the pub lunch. We worked our way down to the fifth floor and were seated with a couple from Northern England. Their names were Tim and Amanda and they both worked in a nuclear energy plant. It was noisy in there and Tim spoke softly so I only picked up bits and pieces. Amanda didn’t say much of anything. Mary and I both had fish and chips. I toyed with the idea of trying bangers and mash but decided against it at the last minute. Amanda had curry chicken. There’s something about curry I just don’t like. I don’t know what it is. It has something to do with the smell. Anyway, the food was good. We sat and chatted with them for probably an hour. From there we decided to try to get to the art lecture that started almost an hour earlier. We made it to the Explorers lounge just as they were wrapping up the lecture. We wandered around and looked at some of the artwork. A lot of it is stuff we’ve seen before so we only spent about 20 minutes or so. From there we went to the fifth floor to see if the excursions office was open. By chance it was. We went up to the lady – the one we’ve dealt with on the bus mishaps – to verify the fact that we needed a lift bus for all future excursions. She took our room number, looked it up on the computer and said that yes every excursion has a lift bus. It was literally a three minute conversation but we felt assured that we would be okay going forward. (This plays a role into what happened the next day.) Across the aisle way is the future cruises office. It was closed but there were fliers for many cruises available to pick up. They have very limited office hours. We kind of talked about what we wanted to do for our next cruise. It seems to be centered around doing the Caribbean in and out of Fort Lauderdale. We looked at some of the options, but didn’t really land on anything solid. We have to figure out when next we can go. We initially thought in spring, but then we decided it might have to be fall or early winter. We spent some time looking at other cruises like those around the British Isles and Norway. The Norway cruise looked cool. One of the items on my bucket list is to see the northern lights at some point. Part of me hopes that we might be able to see them when we get up into Helsinki on this trip. The Norway cruise would almost guarantee that we would see them because it goes very far north. As I write this, we are as far east as we have ever been. We are also as far north as we have ever been. This will change tomorrow as we go further north and further east, but at this point in time we are at the extremes. After spending probably 45 minutes at the future cruises office by ourselves we came back up to the room. Mary wanted to take a nap. We started a movie where the spoken words were in French with English subtitles. I don’t remember the name of it right now but it had to do with a guy who fakes being in a wheelchair to pick up a caregiver. As it turns out the caregiver sister was in a chair and throughout the rest of the movie until the end he fakes being in a wheelchair to make time with the lady in the wheelchair. Kind of a pretty screwed up Hallmark movie. I only watched about 10 minutes of it before I decided I needed a nap. I did not nap, I zonked. I think we both slept for about an hour and a half maybe two. By time we woke up it was about 5 o’clock. It was formal night so we had to get dressed because we had dinner reservations at the Italian place – Sabatini’s – for 630. Mary put on her white flowered dress. She looked good. Mary had put me in black jeans that morning so all she had to do was put on a shirt and tie for me. I took the tux jacket with me. We headed out the door and were on time – somewhat of a surprise. The restaurant is a specialty restaurant which costs extra money. We were seated next to an older couple from London. I ordered a glass of Chianti. For this dinner we had three courses. For appetizers, Mary and I both had fried calamari. The calamari was good – not great. She also had their equivalent of caprese salad – mozzarella cheese and tomatoes. She liked a lot. I had a cold shrimp appetizer that was very good. It had white beans and onions. It sounds like a weird combination but it worked well. The next course was pasta. I had a seafood spaghetti dish. It had shrimp and scallops and clams and a red sauce. It was pretty good. Mary had a penne pasta with ox tail. She liked it a lot. Along the way, we were eating supersized breadsticks which were really good too. Each one had to be about a foot and a half long. For our main entrée, Mary had a New York strip steak. I had a piece. It was very good. I had their dish called lobster three ways. There was a nice size lobster tail. They had a lobster risotto. And lastly they had a nice size piece of lobster claw. They did a nice job. It was very good. For dessert, we both had coffee tiramisu. It was tiramisu with espresso and dark chocolate throughout. I like that a lot. Mary is not a big chocolate fan so she liked it less. Throughout the dinner and afterwards, Mary had an extensive conversation with the folks from London. If I remember correctly their names were Victoria and Alan. We wrapped up the conversation about 815 or so. By time we paid the bill and added a small gratuity it was 830. The special dinner cost us about $75 extra. Part of me says the deal was not worth it. The other part of me says it was a special dinner and that the cost should not be the determining factor. The food was good. The service was excellent. We took our sweet time. There are other specialty restaurants on board. There is a steakhouse which we originally tried to get reservations for but they were booked tonight. We might try them another night. So after dinner we had to stop and do pictures. There were six or seven picture taking stations. We hit them all. It took a while because some of the photographers were not at their stations when we wandered by. They also have to go into the dining rooms and take pictures so they’re not always that their stations. We managed to make all six or seven stations by 930. At each station they are taking about 5 to 8 pictures. There is a fair amount of posing involved so each session probably takes 10 to 15 minutes. My body was not very happy for some reason so I spent a fair amount of time fighting spasms. Every so often my body goes into a funky mode. With the pictures done, we went to the casino. We were hoping there would be someone there to play cards, but there wasn’t. Despite our naps, we were both tired. We decided to go back to the room. Mary went back downstairs and got tea. I turned on the French movie we were watching earlier. Over the next hour or so I drank two of my beers we bought in Belgium. We initially thought we had a time change so we decided to go to bed only to realize that the time change is not for a couple more nights. I fell asleep pretty quickly. Mary said she stayed awake for a while flipping through the stations – the few that there are. We were watching an update on hurricane Dorian. As was projected early on, it has swung north so only the outer most bands of the hurricane are affecting Florida. This morning I texted Tom and Linda and they said that they’ve only got about a quarter of an inch of rain so far. I guess we dodged the bullet. Mary did say though that Jacksonville is under an evacuation order. Her aunt is affected by this. Areas of South Carolina are also under evacuation order. That made us feel better. In one of the updates though they said there are three or four other areas that are under watch for potential hurricane. That takes care of day 16.

Day 15 finds us in the Belgium port of Zeebrugge, Belgium. This is the sea town about 20 miles from the town of Brugge. We are scheduled for a bus tour so we made our way downstairs by 830. Mary had breakfast delivered to the room so that saved us some time. We were a few minutes early and had to wait for our time to go downstairs. We disembarked on the sixth floor this time. We made it through security and down onto the dock. As with the first excursion with Princess, there was some confusion as to which bus I was supposed to be on. The initial bus they pointed us to did not have a lift. After about 15 minutes of discussion they figured it out. I was put on a different bus. This bus had four other wheelchair users. We use the lift to get up onto the bus. He tied me down pretty well. The drive itself was only about 15 or 20 minutes. Belgium, from the viewpoint of the bus for 20 minutes, looks like a nice country. I later read that Belgium is the bike capital of the world and I could see that from the bus window. There were bikes everywhere. The weather was about 50° and mostly sunny. Mary initially put on her jacket. I didn’t because I wanted to wait to be cold before I put it on. The tour guide in her speech on the bus went through the map we were given. We were going into an old area of Brugge. I honestly don’t remember the time that this area was built but it had to of been back in the 1600s or earlier. From what I read much of Belgium was destroyed in World War II. This particular old area of Brugge was spared apparently. Again, guessing from the map, it is an area of about 3 square miles. We were dropped off in a parking lot south of the actual area we would wander through for the next five hours. Right off the bat I knew we were going to be in for some challenges because it was cobblestone everywhere. I said to myself that five hours of cobblestone is going to be a challenge and that’s the way it turned out. Our goal was to go to the market area, which on the map was about a mile and a half away from the parking lot. The thing was there was no direct way to get there. We ended up going a ways west before turning north and then having to come back east to get to the market. The way I wrote that implies that these were straight lines. In fact, they were anything but. There were countless little streets. Some of them had street signs so you had an idea where you were and others didn’t. Some of them sounded a lot alike – Wollenstraat and Wollestraat. Some of them they were crazy long names and only part of the street was named on the building whereas the map had the full name so we had to do some translation. Ultimately, we made it to the market. The by now it was about an hour and a half into our day. On the corner was a place that sold Belgian waffles. We stopped. We each had a waffle covered in stuff. Mine had strawberries and chocolate. Mary had cherries and strawberries. They were very good. They were not lo-cal. After we finished our main waffles we asked for a plain waffle just so we could taste the waffle itself. They were very good. Very light. We sat there for about an hour. It was a good people watching spot. The waiter spoke English well so he was able to help us through the menu and other questions we had. One of the strange things about this town was the fact that you had to pay for bathroom if you could find one. Leading up to the waffle house – Keizer Karel – Mary asked for bathroom in about five places. They all said no. The waffle house did have a bathroom if you were a customer. Mary said she went to the bathroom there and it was down a very narrow set of stairs that went into a basement area. She could not imagine anybody having to go badly running down those stairs. The waiter directed us to a spot where there was a bathroom for disabled people. It wasn’t far from the waffle house so we went there next. This was a public toilet of sorts. There was a bathroom attendant at the door collecting $0.50 euro. The attendant said this was the only disabled ready bathroom in all of Brugge. We believed her. She was quite animated and talked nonstop. There was someone in the disabled bathroom when we got there and was taking several minutes. The attendant banged on the door telling the lady to hurry up because I had to go when in fact I really didn’t. The person who was in the disabled bathroom came out and then Mary and I did the thing. It was a whole different concept. Paying to go to the bathroom. I can kind of see why they do it. The bathroom was new, modern, clean and big. It could probably accommodate 30 or more people at a time. Because we don’t understand the money, Mary initially gave the lady what was $0.05 euro. She was quickly corrected. Mary dug out the right amount of change and we were free to pee. I half joked that the toilet made more money in a day than the museum it was part of. I can see the toilet making 1000 euros a day. Because we were at the far point of our travels we decided this head back towards the bus stop. It was about 1 o’clock in the afternoon I guess. Knowing that there was no direct route and that we probably went out of our way I tried to set a more direct course. I think I was semi-successful but not completely. Again the street names caused us some confusion. Along the way though we stopped at a place called Bottle Shop which, conservatively, had 500 different kinds of beer. We went in there and picked six bottles – mostly for their labels. We did pick four IPAs. The others just had fancy labels which were interesting. Up one of the streets from there we saw a tea house. Mary went in and bought some tea while I sat on the street across and watched the people. Further up the street there were several chocolate places so we stopped at one, appropriately named, Mary. This is a chocolate house that is the oldest in Brugge according to the sales lady. It is also the company that provides chocolate to the Royal family. We wandered around in there for about 20 minutes. They had every conceivable type of chocolate you could think of. I picked up a bulk bar of dark chocolate. We then picked up I think it was six or eight individual pieces. Mary also bought some cookies. We spent about €20 on chocolate. It was good chocolate because the lady gave us samples when we first came through the door. There was a step into the place and we had trouble getting in because there was a lip which made the one step more difficult. Anyway, coming out was easy. We then managed our way up the cobblestone. By now we had about three or more hours invested in bouncing across the cobblestone. I was tired of hanging on for dear life. Mary was tired of doing the pushing. We had talked about stopping for a beer but decided to go straight to the parking area. We had both had about as much as we could take. After some more confusion we found our way back to the parking area. We were about an hour early. I sat in the sun. It was fall like. I could be mistaken, but I think even the trees had started to change colors. There was that fall bite to the air too despite it was only the first day of September. Earlier, one of the tour guides from a different bus said that the cobblestones were part of the charm of this area. After bouncing around them for four hours I thought to myself I want to put his ass in a wheelchair and have him bounce around for four hours and see if he still found it charming. I bet not. Once in the bus we had to wait for about 30 minutes because there were two people that were missing from the tour. I’m not exactly sure what happened but we left without them. We made it back to the ship in about 20 minutes. This allowed us, again, to see the more modern Brugge. It look like a small European town. Again, a lot of bikes and a lot of trails for those bikes. Back at the ship, we got off the bus and onto the ship. We came straight to the room. We unloaded our stuff and breathe a sigh of relief. We had made it back. I think we would’ve been okay with the cobblestones had there been only three hours of them. It was that last hour or so that push us over the edge. Other than that it was a very nice visit. In hindsight, I had the bus been able to drop us off closer to the market that would’ve helped us too. Mary mentioned it this morning that we didn’t learn much about the history of Brugge because were spending so much time navigating the street names. We went into one church while mass was actually happening. That was a different experience. Mary went into another church – I think it was the Cathedral – while I waited outside. Even the place where we went to the public toilet was actually part of the museum, but we didn’t learn much about it because we knew we had to figure out our way back. I guess what I’m saying is there are ways that this could have been made more enjoyable. I mentioned it to Mary that we came, we saw and we bounced. We were frustrated and beat up, but in hindsight I’m glad we did it. We chilled out in the room for a good hour. Mary took a quick nap. I flipped to the TV stations. We left for dinner around 7 o’clock. Again we went down to the Savoy only to be handed a pager. This time we went and did picture taking times three. There was one on the sixth floor and two on the seventh floor. Just as we finished up the third one the pager went off and we made our way back down to the dining room. We were seated in the same aisle where we were seated in the previous cruise. We were by the porthole so we had a great view of the sunset. By this time the ship was off the coast of the Netherlands heading northwest towards Denmark. We got some nice sunset pictures. For dinner we both had beef satay for an appetizer. I had seafood stew which was bass, mussels and clams in a white cream sauce. Mary had a pork chop that look really good. It was huge. I had key lime pie for dessert. Mary had some type of sugar-free tart which she liked. We set our goodbyes to Meow and Nick. We decided to go to the casino to see if anyone was playing cards. Initially no one was and we were almost ready to leave when a guy came up. A fourth guy trying to we played cards for about an hour. I was doing okay – up almost 50 – when I ran into a buzz saw. I had three queens in the other guy had a flush. This cost me quite a bit. After this I could not catch up. We decided to go to bed around 1130 and I was down another 30 bucks. Mary lost money to but I don’t know how much. It wasn’t much and she was only taking from her winnings the night before. She went to five and got her tea. We then went up to 12 to our room to bed. We tried to watch the movie Cold Pursuit but it was difficult because it kept cutting out. It had been a long day. In hindsight it was a good day with some frustration built in. Not bad for Day 15.

Day 14, today, is the start of the second leg of our trip. We are sitting in the port of Southampton. As I write this there are people piling on board for their first day. Mary and I got up pretty early. We were downstairs by about nine I think it was. The only place you could get food was the international Café on five. I had a chocolate donut. Mary had tea. We sat down there for a couple of hours. We wanted to get out of the room so that our room attendant clean it. We were curious to see how many people were taking on the second cruise like we were. I was a little surprised by the number. There were several people throughout the morning that came and went. I pushed around in circles to get my pushes count up a little bit. Mary sat with a couple from Australia. They have 500+ days of cruising. They were on an extended cruise now which will get them home sometime in November. I did not talk with them much but Mary spent a good part of an hour with them. I wandered around and looked at the art and other things. I took several pictures with my GoPro to learn how to use that better. It was about 12 o’clock or so when we decided to come back upstairs. Our room was not cleaned yet but no big deal. On the way up we picked a sandwich. I had a toasted tuna fish sandwich. Mary had a ham and cheese sandwich. I am finishing up writing this log for the day while Mary does laundry. She’s back and forth to the laundry area.

Monday, September 2, 2019

It is Labor Day back home. The ship is on the west side of Denmark. It will have to go up over the top of Denmark and then down the east side a little bit to get into Copenhagen tomorrow morning. The ship is really rocking and rolling. I think it’s probably the worst it’s been so far for this cruise. Not a big deal for Mary and me because we’ve experienced worse. I am positioned up against the desk as I write this so I don’t have to worry about it too much. As I write this it is day 16 – a couple of days to catch up here. I will pick up the story from Day 14 in the afternoon. To reset the stage, we are on the ship in Southampton waiting for the new passengers for the Baltic cruise. As I mentioned above, Mary did laundry. We called our friends Mike and Trish just to catch up. Mary also talked to our neighbor in Florida, Kathy, because she had called a couple of times. They talked about the hurricane, Dorian, that is making its way towards Florida. As I write this it appears that the hurricane will just graze the eastern coast of Florida. Because we are more in the center of the state we will receive some wind and rain but not anything that horrible. Of course, this could change because hurricanes are unpredictable. As I mentioned above, I believe, there’s not much we can do 2000+ miles away. We have people that are watching the house so that’s the best we can do from here. Anyway, back to the story – after Mary finished the laundry she decided to go up to the store area to see if she could find hairspray. She came back and said that she will make an appointment for her hair to be colored. I’m not exactly sure how you go from hairspray to hair coloring, but I don’t ask. By now it’s about 5 o’clock. I’ve spent some time napping and watching a movie on TV. There is a pretty good selection of movies. This one happened to be Mission Impossible Fallout. The movie itself was kind of dumb but it did pass the time. Mary said that the hair coloring should take about an hour and a half. Well, 2 ½ hours later she came back. I don’t think she was happy with the results. Her hair was colored but much darker than she intended – not much you can do with it so we just go with it. The ship left Southampton around 430 in the afternoon. It was about 630 when Mary came back. We did our little routine to get cleaned up for dinner and then headed out the door. Because we knew the Baltic trip was going to be cooler than the Mediterranean side, we went to one of the little shops on the seventh floor to look at jackets. From our previous cruises, Alaska and South America, we have jackets from those cruises. They are Princess cruises jackets that say, respectively, Alaska and South America. Mary had talked to one of the shop salespeople a week ago or so and they said that there would be Baltic specific jackets. We were able to pick up two Baltic jackets for $75. They are nice jackets and they will serve us well for the remainder of the trip. We didn’t know how cool Brugge was going to be but we were glad to have a jacket in case we needed it. We did not bring jackets on the trip because that was just more to carry. From the jacket place we went down to the dining room. We decided to go to the same dining room we went to on the first cruise. By time we got down there it was about 730. There was a line so we ended up getting a pager. This allowed us to go to our first picture taking stops of this trip. There were three of them on two different decks. By time we were done with the third one the pager had gone off. We made our way back down to the Savoy dining room. We were seated in the same general area as the last cruise. However the people managing the area or different. The waiter, actually a woman, is named Meow. She is from the Philippines. And yes, that is her actual name. The busboy is also from the Philippines and he has a long name but he is called Nick. They are much more animated and funny than the previous crew. We had brought along the Roxanne bottle of wine we bought in Florence. This time we were charged the $15 corkage fee. This is the fee that they charge you for opening your bottle of wine. It is just another way for the cruise line to squeeze more nickels out of you. Mary says that we were charged a corkage fee the Mediterranean cruise for one of the bottles, but I don’t remember seeing it. Either way it’s not a big deal. We spent about $15 for the bottle and the $15 for the corkage fee. This still makes it less expensive than if we were to buy a bottle off of their menu. Some of the wine that we bought in Cetau was less than $10 a bottle so if we are charged a corkage fee for those we are still saving quite a bit of money. Anyway, for food, as appetizers, we both had crispy spring rolls. They were good. Mary had prime rib. For my entrée I had pasta shells with lamb. It was very good. For dessert, Mary had ice cream and I had a milk chocolate soufflé. We were happy with our choices. It was a good dinner. The new waiter and busboy made it a little more fun too. After dinner we headed towards the casino. There were a few players playing Texas hold ‘em so we sat down and played for about an hour. Mary caught a big hand then she was up about $100. I seesawed up and down and ended up losing about $37. By now it was 11 o’clock or later. We were tired despite not doing much all day. We went to five, Mary got her tea and we came back up to 12 to our room. We started to watch the movie Cold Pursuit. That pretty much wraps up day 14. It was our first experience where others get off the ship while we stayed on. We could’ve gotten off the ship in Southampton but we decided to stay on. The timing would’ve been pretty tight. It was a good day because we accomplished a lot. It was a little funny watching the people who got on the ship earlier that day for the first time wander around trying to figure out where everything was while we were seasoned and knew exactly where we were going. It is a big ship. There are things to do from the fourth deck all the way up to the 17^th deck. Admittedly, we pretty much spend our time on five, six, seven, 12 and 14. (There is no deck 13.) We know these decks very well. Both Mary and I are looking forward to the Baltic cruise. In some ways I’m looking forward to it more than the Mediterranean side. When we wake up on day 15 we will be in Belgium.