Jen and Jerry's Excellent Adventure

  Jen here: Sailing days—or sea days—are adventures within themselves.   We’ve mentioned many of the on-board organized events.   Each evening after the 9:15 entertainment, the cruise director takes the stage and announces the late evening events and the next day’s scheduled events.   His playful sarcasm chides us about the abysmal number of people who show up at the late-night dance opportunities, “Come on, folks, tomorrow is a sea day, so why not sleep in tomorrow and join the 6 of us who stay up late? Oh, did I mention that 5 of those 6 are in the live band?”   Or, “Hey, folks, where are my Bingo players in the audience?”   One person claps.   “Yup, she’s the one who comes.   One person playing gets all the prizes.   Come and join us at noon tomorrow.” The clocks go back two hours as we near Hawaii so his playful announcements are, “Hey, you’ve been so good lately that we’re gonna give you a gift.   We’re gonna give you an extra hou...

  San Diego2, day 2 So, one of the foibles of this program is that you can only put eight pictures on a single point of interest.  I am pretty sure that you wanted to see the fuzzies from yesterday, and I think you will want to see pictures of the ships we visited at the museum on day two, hence a second entry for San Diego.  A quick word about the first picture.  It is an early map of the known world around the Mediterranean with the unknown world on the outside and placing Jerusalem at the center of everything.  I wonder what sort of map reading skills were needed to make this map work. Jen is continuing… The cruise ship distributes a daily newspaper of sorts with important numbers on the headline: the date, day of the week, and the numbered day in the current leg of the trip.   Our second day of the second trip to San Diego was headlined Sunday, January 9, Day 4 of this leg which ends on Day 24 in Papeete (Tahiti), French Polynesia. Numbers get a bit...

 Jen here to begin this next blog. So, as you just read, we were in Los Angeles when we learned we wouldn’t get to go to San Francisco for the weekend.   It was terribly disappointing since we’d hoped to stay overnight with Becky and she had already acquired tickets for an outdoor concert of the Santa Rosa Symphony.   Sigh.   You probably remember that the first “leg” of the cruise finished at LA and the second began.   The ship had about 180 new passengers and as their first night on board started, the captain announced that we’d be heading to San Diego rather than to San Francisco.   The newbies had no idea that we had just come from San Diego, and were surprised when we mentioned this as a backtrack.   Not wanting to burst their bubbles or dampen the joy of their arrival (horror stories of airports and weather delays), we put on our best faces and helped the crew welcome them with excitement.   Of course, we were all ecstatic that the trip wa...

 Ah ha.  Did you think we had gotten lost?  Did you think you were going to find us in San Francisco?  Well not so fast.  It was our last day in LA and we went to the Maritime Museum which was just down the street from our ship past the Battleship Iowa which we visited the day before.  There just wasn’t much else available.  The museum required our vaccination cards for entry.  The museum detailed the history of the LA port area.  The thing that is amazing in this and several other of the museums we have been in is the scale model ships that have been donated to them.  The lengths to which the model makers go to create exact replicas is amazing.  They go to archives to find the original plans, scale them, then spend two to ten years creating the models from scratch.  There are all manner of ships from ancient times through Viking ships, and ships from the age of discovery, think Columbus, to the sailing war ships of the great s...

Two days in a row we have landfall.  It's a minor miracle.  We are in Los Angeles, City of Angels.  Perhaps the angels are watching over us.  In order to facilitate filling up a ship on a world cruise, the trip is broken into "legs."  The legs can then be sold individually to fill cabins not filled for the entire trip.  We have now finished leg one, Miami to LA.  Many of the passengers for just this leg have been sorely disappointed because of the major changes to the itinerary from the original plan.  Grand Cayman was changed to Key West.  The cruise company removed San Diego and Cabo San Lucas as they added an overnight in LA for completion of an electrical update which allows the ship to plug in at ports so they don't have to run their engines for electricity while in port which is better for the environment.  San Diego was reinstated a day earlier than originally planned because we got on the ship and learned that Mexico was not goin...

 We are back in the US and have actually landed in a port.  Wow.  Seven days on the water.  That was unexpected.  We weathered it just fine.  Of course the idea is not to spend 196 days at sea without seeing any of the world, but we are just fine when confined to the ship.  We just enjoy our time together, eating, and doing shipboard activities such as bridge and evening shows.  We read, and we write, and we just relax.   But not on land days.  Because it was our arrival back in the US we had to go through immigration control.  Interesting how other countries have not really worried about that.  We went through the process then headed out to our shore excursion for the day.  We chose the hop-on hop-off trolley tour.  Many of you are probably familiar with the hop-on hop-off tours.  They are offered in many venues around the world.  Our little train tour in Key West was the same idea.  You get on a ...

Today was supposed to be Acapulco.  I was looking forward to seeing the cliff divers as we have not seen that before.  Not this time.  The vestiges of Covid are all around and are insinuating themselves into our world cruise.  It started with the dispatch of several people from our boat way back at Key West because of Covid.  Further along things started to change on the ship.  Our cruise director who gives a daily presentation on shipboard activities which is taped for broadcast on our shipboard tv was giving those presentations mask-less in the beginning and changed to masked four or five days into the cruise.  Reminders to wear masks at all times became more prevalent.  They began to cancel planned shipboard gatherings like an afternoon reception for their Oceania Club members (us) after they had held a reception for their ATW guests (us) that very morning.  They went to having two showtimes in the evening to reduce the number of people wa...