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 17th 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.