Sunday nite to Wednesday

Wednesday – May 20th 2009

Time sure does fly when you’re having fun – and we are! I can’t believe it’s Wednesday already. I’ll resume with where I left off on Sunday.

We never got a response to our comment card – guess they figured we should be happy being assigned to Mail Seating late dinner as requested. And basically we are.

We are at a big round table for 9. Our table mates are a retired doctor and his wife from somewhere south of San Francisco, a matrimonial lawyer with her husband and 23 year old daughter from Toronto and a computer systems couple from Mountainside, NJ (about ½ hour from us and she and I already have agreed to meet at Short Hills mall for lunch when we get back).

Dinner was quite pleasant, the food was good and once again our table was one of the last to leave the dining room. We made our post dinner contribution to the casino and went to bed.

The weather has been horrible since about an hour outside of New York Harbor. Fog so bad you couldn’t see 10 feet beyond the railings. Lots of rain and mist. On Monday we arrived in Halifax and it was pouring. We delayed getting off the ship until it stopped for a bit. By the time we got our jackets and took the elevator to the gangway deck, it was pouring again. We spent about an hour touring the inside of the pier building. It was like going to a craft show. Lots of booths with crafty stuff, most made in Nova Scotia but not much that we needed. I did buy a funky beaded jacket and you may see it in the photos at some point..

By the way, about the photos, they take a lot longer to load than I expected so smaller numbers will be coming your way while we are still on board. The notification that the photos are posted comes from my google gmail (which is the same as my aol address except it’s @gmail not aol at the end) so you may need to check your spam folder which is where I found mine.

Crossing the Atlantic the clock changes can make you crazy – we’d lost another hour, then gained a half hour the night we left Halifax, then lost that half hour when we left St. John’s. Between here and Belfast we have 4 sea days and 3 more hours to lose

We haven’t been to any of the shows on board yet – so far they’ve had a comedian, a magician and a piano player, and we get out of dinner usually about 10:15 ish so we’ve just headed to the casino to make our donations each nite. I have found a few penny and 2 cent machines that allow me to play for an hour or more on $10.00, so I figure that’s OK. Bob has been luckier and has actually collected $60 or $70 a couple of nights on penny and nickel machines. The casino is very small on this ship and doesn’t get a big crowd.

The ship has a well equipped gym which I’ve used twice so far and Bob has gotten up there once. There are treadmills, rowers, bikes, ellipticals and all of the Cybex weight machines that we use at the J at home. They do have some early morning classes, but I went to the first one and it was four women lying on the floor doing sit ups. On the floor is not for me so I just did some treadmill and some weights. The staff in there are part of the Spa concession and so there’s only one person in there at a time and they are there to sell personal training at $80 an hour or at a bargain rate of $750 for 10 hours. If they aren’t training you, they really don’t want to talk to you. We did bring swimming gear knowing that the pool has a roof that opens and closes, but even when it’s closed it’s been very cold up there – so I think that the swimming stuff will come home unused. That’s too bad because I was hoping to get in some water exercise.

Yesterday we were on the island of St. Pierre which is actually part of France not Canada. We went ashore by tender and it took about 15 minutes. The fog was so bad that they had to send the tenders in convoy fashion and even still, one got lost on the way back. Some of the people at our table were on it and it took them over an hour floating around looking for the ship. We wandered around on the island for a couple of hours, but there is not much there. It’s basically a fishing village with brightly colored houses and not too much fishing anymore. It was very damp, cold and foggy so we headed back to the tenders. Had to wait on line in the cold wet for about 45 minutes till they were able to load us on and deliver us back to the ship. My recommendation – if you have no need to go to St. Pierre, don’t.

Although the weather has been awful, the seas have been relatively calm and other than a bit of rocking around when you walk down the hallways, it’s been smooth sailing. No green faced days yet. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it will stay this way.

Today we were in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Here they are having unseasonably warm and sunny weather. We went out wearing about 7 layers of clothing based on what we’ve experienced so far and the ships weather forecast and had to shed layers all over the place. It got up to about 70+ degrees and it’s a nice little town with lovely shops and pubs. We wandered around from about 10am to 3pm and had a nice visit to this nice town. If it weren’t so far away, I’d like to come back here. There were signs in all of the shops welcoming the Rotterdam, and the local chamber of commerce equivalent, had tons of people wearing red fleece vests with a huge question mark on the back, stationed all over town with maps and guides and helping people find whatever tourist attraction they wanted. It’s a very friendly town.

Sailaway was at 4:30 this afternoon and since the weather was good, it was daylight and it’s a pretty harbor, there were tons of people out on the open decks to watch it and look for whales and icebergs in Iceberg Alley. We did see lots of interesting birds, no whales and 2 icebergettes. One was too far away to be seen in a photo as anything other than a white speck but I’ve got some shots of the other one and it will be included in the next batch of pics.

Tonite’s entertainment is an oboeist . Spell check says that’s not right but it’s suggestions looked worse. Anyway – it appears to be a lady who plays the oboe as a soloist, so I guess it’s the casino for us again.

By the way – thanks Roberta for letting us know that you got the blog, and thanks to Steve for letting us know that the photos got out. Also thanks to Steve and Judy for following the blog. If anybody else has sent email in the last day or so, I haven’t seen it yet. Logging on thru the ship’s system is horrible, so I’m doing all the typing off line and just copying it into the blog when I get a chance and usually check mail after its loaded and sent.

That’s all for now.