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Wanderung 10

Boating around the Boot & Gallivanting through Gaul.

October 2005

Friday October 14, At Sea

Although I popped awake again at 5 a.m., I did some meditation breathing and went back to sleep until 8 o'clock; a handy trick, that, although it doesn't always work. When I again awoke Monika was dressed and on the way out the door to attend a Yoga class, so I took my time to get dressed and amble upstairs for a leisurely breakfast. Forty-five minutes later I was stuffed and on my third cup of tea and Monika still hadn't shown up (it turned out the Yoga class lasted a full hour), so I gave up and wandered around the deck a while taking pictures. The Astor was a very clean, white ship with a central mast that had three rotating radar antennas; Gustl judged that they were short, medium, and long-range radar.

The lifeboats were of course there, and I was relieved to find number 8, our designated lifeboat, on the port side of the ship nearest the stern. However, Gustl observed that it was not in the greatest shape, with a brown fiberglass or Bondo patch to the bow and a section of the side bumper strip missing. Still, it was good to know where I could go to use those newly acquired lifejacket skills! Monika finally returned and we repaired to our cabin for a couple of hours while she wrote about the Vivaldi concert in Venice and I took a nap. Slowly but surely I was catching up on missing sleep and missing meals!


 

I was rudely awakened by the chiming of 8 bells at noon and a report on our precise latitude and longitude over the public address system. This was, after all, a German ship and that kind of precision was probably expected by the passengers. In contrast, I was on a U.S. cruise ship once when the engines suddenly stopped in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. No one even noticed the ship wasn't moving until the Captain came on the loudspeaker to reassure us that we wouldn't be marooned there permanently!

For lunch we went to the stern part of the Lido deck for an outdoor grill smorgasbord. I had a Frikadelle (similar to a hamburger patty), chicken leg, and filet of fish plus tomatoes and potatoes and ice cream and bread pudding for desert. That was one meal I certainly didn't miss! I expect that someone, somewhere may have managed to starve to death on a modern cruise ship, but I certainly have never heard of such a thing happening. Quite the contrary, the abundance of food on most cruise ships puts most folks more in danger of gaining weight, I would guess, and certainly that is true for me.


 

After lunch I sat on some chairs on a stern section of the Lido deck and worked on the journal while Monika walked circuits on the promenade deck and worked up a sweat. That may sound like an unfair distribution of labor, but she rewarded herself with a glass of beer before we went on a tour of the ship's bridge at 15:00.

The bridge reminded me a lot of an aircraft cockpit, except it was much more spacious. Screens displayed radar contacts and the GPS position and velocity information, the autopilot was engaged, and the officers watched the displays for the ship's status and information about other traffic In fact, a collision warning flashed while we were touring the bridge because we were on a collision course with a small fishing boat about 4 miles away, but it turned off in plenty of time to avoid us. Apparently English is the language used worldwide for nautical navigation as well as aerial navigation, so the bridge contained a full set of English alphabet flags for backup communication if the radios failed.


 

I finished off the afternoon by processing some of the hundreds of pictures we had already taken during the trip. Besides writing the journal, my next biggest chore was downloading, pruning, and storing the pictures on the computer. Monika took another few turns around the deck with Heinke and Gustl while I did that, and by the time she returned it was time for dinner. After dinner I kept banging away at the pictures while Monika and the others listened to a guy playing the Pan pipes up in the lounge. Just like when I listen to bagpipe music, a little of that reedy wailing music goes a long way with me and I was just as happy to be processing the pictures of Venice, some of which had turned out quite well. But by the time Monika returned to the cabin a couple of hours later I was getting cross-eyed, so she finished up the Venice pictures and we turned in for the night.

Copyright2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog
Map
October 2005
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
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9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 27 29
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Epilog

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