Day 17 à I am sitting on the 14th 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 14th 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 14th 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.