Monday, September 16, 2019
If you’re paying attention to the date, you notice that I actually skipped day 27 and day 28 and 29. They 27 was the last day at sea. Day 28 was our trek home. Yesterday, day 29 was our first day home. As I write this, I am sitting in my office at home in Florida. What I will do over the next day or so, because it might take some time and I have other things on my plate, I will cover days 27 and 28 and I will try to give some closing thoughts on our vacation. As I write this, Mary is at work – her first day at the new job. You might think that the rest of the trip was uneventful, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m getting ahead of myself, so let me start with the 27. Day 27 was Friday the 13th, a day at sea. When I woke up around 8 o’clock I said to Mary that I would like to take at least two hours in sit on the deck and act like a person on vacation. This to me meant sitting there reading a book and/or napping and/or watching people – basically doing nothing for two hours. In the previous 26 days we did not do that. There was one day early on where I pushed on the seventh floor while Mary listened to her lectures, but other than that we ran. So when I woke up Friday I hoped that I would achieve this goal. As it turns out, and as you will read, that did not happen. I was actually up after having a real shower by about 9 o’clock or so. The first thing we did was sit down with the Princes Patter to decide what we were going to do for the day. After we circled the things we wanted to do it look like we had some free time in the afternoon and there was time after dinner. We decided that we were going to go to pub lunch so that we did not need breakfast. Instead, Mary went and played bingo at 11 o’clock. This was a good thing because she actually $150. If I added it up correctly, she/we made $600 in bingo wins. I did not count up how much money we spend to get those wins, but I’m hoping we made some money. We wanted to go to the 1 o’clock art auction in hopes of winning the cruise map. By time Mary got back from bingo it was like 1215. After bingo she stopped and picked up the last pictures that were taken. If you remember we had 203 pictures taken on the first cruise. Amazingly, we had 253 pictures taken on the second cruise for a grand total of 456 pictures of Mary and me in various close and with various poses and with various backgrounds. I don’t even want to get into how crazy that is. There was no way we were going to go to pub lunch and make the 1 o’clock, so we decided to skip pub lunch. Mary had a load of laundry in which she finished before we went downstairs to the fifth floor to pick up sandwiches. I had a toasted tuna sandwich. Mary had her ham and cheese. We found a spot on five and ate our food pretty quickly. I was trying not to eat that much knowing that travel is coming. The only reason we wanted to go to the art auction was to see if we could win the cruise map. This is an actual document maintained by the ship’s captain and crew that shows our exact route on a map that is probably 4 ft. square. On the Mediterranean cruise, the map was auctioned off for a mere $150. All the money goes to charity. We learned later, that the lady who did the hundred and $50 to not even pick it up. The map was returned to the ship’s captain. I was hoping to get the Baltic cruise map for somewhere near $200. I don’t know where we would hang it if anywhere but it would be a cool keepsake. The auction went off like all the others. I told Mary not to raise her card because we were not buying anything more. Of course I should’ve saved my breath. The movie cel of Mickey and Donald Duck came up for auction. Mary was looking for something Disney related for our friend Trish for her birthday. I don’t remember exactly now but the cel was valued at something like $1200. The opening bid was 200 and Mary raised her card. We were now the owners of Mickey and Donald Duck. I’m not complaining. It will be a cool gift. Several other auctions went and in between they had a raffle. We won one of the raffles. There was a print that we won very early on but decided not to take. Guess what? We won it again. It is a print showing a red lounge chair on the shore of either a lake or the ocean. I’m not particularly thrilled with that but it costs us nothing. Finally, the cruise map came up. The auctioneer started the bidding at $100. Mary raised her card. The bid went up to 150 and another guy raised his card. This went back and forth until it was $300. Mary looked at me and I nodded signaling her to raise her card. The auctioneer then said $350 and I thought the other guy raised his card. My limit was $300. And as it turns out the other guy did not raise his card so we were the winners of the cruise map. I honestly thought we lost it until Mary said we were winners. The art director said that we got a steal. There are some maps that go for thousands of dollars. We set an appointment to go down to the art area at 550 I think it was. After we left the Explorers Lounge, we went up to the casino. We were going to try to play and a blackjack tournament but we misunderstood the time and it was over by time we got there. I didn’t mind because I had no interest in playing, but Mary was a little disappointed. I suggested that we take the money that we would’ve lost at the blackjack tournament and apply it to scratch offs. We ended up buying $60 worth of scratch offs. This gave us six cards each. We didn’t do anything with them at the time. We took them up to the room. By now it was about 3 o’clock I guess. Mary did some packing while I sat out on the balcony and played with my goPro camera. Mary had a raffle ticket for some prizes that were being given out at the picture studio. I decided to stay back while she walked down there to see if she wanted anything. She didn’t. She came back and we got cleaned up. As I mentioned, we had an appointment with the art director at 550. So, back down to five to talk to the art director. We needed to finalize what we bought and add the couple of pieces that we won that afternoon. After some initial issues with the financing company we get that straightened out. The Mickey and Donald Duck picture will be delivered along with the red chair picture separately from everything else. Initially, the intent was for us to carry the cruise map home in a big tube that was about 4 foot tall. I couldn’t imagine lugging that through the airport for 20+ hours. Thankfully, the art director, Gareth, offer to ship it to us from New York when the ship gets there and early October. We don’t need it that quickly and if he’s willing to ship it, it will make our life a lot easier. We said our goodbyes to the art director and the art salespeople we had been dealing with – Kristin Scott is the only one that I remember now. I don’t remember now exactly why but we did go back up to the room before dinner. After leaving the room we gave Rosalee, our room steward, her tip. I don’t think I mentioned it, but every day an optional gratuity is added to your cruise bill. For us it was $29 a day. This money goes to people like the room steward, our waiter, our waitress and other people that we deal with – many we don’t know. Mary decided that she did not like this and ask the front desk to remove the optional gratuity from our bill. It came to more than $800. Instead, what we did was give the people that we dealt with most direct tips. Rosalee got a nice chunk. Meow and Nick got nice ones too. The people Mary dealt with at the tea station where she got probably ten teas a day also received tips. We felt better about this knowing that people that helped us directly were getting money directly in their pocket. The optional gratuity was a bit nebulous on where the money went. You weren’t exactly sure. So off to dinner we went. We took the Carlo Rossi wine with us. If you remember, this was the five dollar bottle of wine we bought in Poland. I was not expecting much. Nick opened it for us and we both took a drink. It was not bad but it was not good either. It was like grape juice. Very sweet – too sweet. I guess we got what we ask for when we asked for a six dollar bottle of wine. Because it was being careful with what I ate I only had pasta alfredo and the burger. Mary had potato soup and a burger. For dessert I had a cherry sorbet. Mary had some type of ice cream. For some reason, I don’t know if I ate too fast or what, I got really tired suddenly. To the point where I could barely keep my eyes open. As we finished our dessert and we finished talking to the Australian foursome that we had dinner next to several nights we set our goodbyes to Meow and Nick. They were very good to us. We headed back up to the room in hopes of catching the sunset. We did. Mary took pictures. I took pictures and a video. They turned out really nice. We caught the last sunset of our 28 day adventure. I thought that was pretty cool. After that my job was to stay out of the way. Mary was finishing packing. I really should’ve taken a video of that. You cannot believe the amount of stuff she was able to stuff into the suitcases. You know the saying 10 pounds of crap in a 5 pound bag? Mary was doing 20 pounds of crap and that saved 5 pound bag. I actually find it admirable that she was able to do that. We had a mini scare for a few minutes because Mary could not find her passport. That would’ve been ugly but she found it. It was about 931 the bags finally went outside the door. The signal the end of our cruise. I did some playing around on the laptop. Mary flipped through the stations. We decided to go to bed early because we knew the next day was gonna be a long one. We were in bed by 10 o’clock and probably asleep by 1004.