Tuesday April 15th 2008
Noon position: Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda
Bob: I had rented a moped to drive around the island, but it was raining quite steadily when we disembarked and I decided to not risk driving an overloaded moped on slick streets with limited visibility on the wrong side of the road in a foreign country. My Risk-O-Meter assessment center for driving motorcycles was certainly rusty, but there seemed to be a lot of negative factors for going ahead with our original plan. Also, we had not brought along proper motorcycle rain gear, and I knew by bitter first-hand experience on motorcycles that we would end up cold, wet, and miserable even if we did safely survive the ride itself. So we paid $12 each for a ferry + bus pass and hopped on the next ferry out of the harbor, which happened to be going to Hamilton, the capital of Bermuda. The ferry ride to Hamilton gave us some excellent views of the Navigator of the Seas tied up to the pier as well as great views of the waterfront in Hamilton as we approached the end of the 20 minute ride. A Regent cruise ship, much smaller than our ship, was docked right downtown in Hamilton. According to our map, the piers at Hamilton are only about 600 feet long, so clearly the 1,050 foot Navigator of the Seas would not fit even if they could wind it through the narrow channel leading to the town harbor. |
Monika: It was still raining this morning. Bob had rented a motorscooter for us to pick up. But he looked at me and asked: "Are you really all set on the motorscooter idea? The streets are wet, it is a little foggy, the streets are new to me, and we have to drive on the wrong side of the street on an overloaded motorscooter; what could go wrong ?" Well, I never had been the driving force behind the motorscooter idea. So I gladly agreed to forego the motorscooter idea this time. Instead we bought to day tickets for the ferry and bus system. We first took a ferry to Hamilton, the capital of Bermuda. On top of the ferry, we could get great pictures of our ship. We then sailed between myriads of little islands to Hamilton, which is in a little inlet. At Hamilton, we saw a much smaller cruise ship at the dock. But sailing between the islands, it was quite clear that something the size of the Navigator of the Seas could never have made it. |
Bob: Our tour of Hamilton was brief. We walked along Front Street past the "birdcage" where traffic cops can stand and regulate waterfront traffic, but no one was there that morning (not enough traffic?). After we passed the Cenotaph and the Cabinet Building we curled up one street to walk by Bermuda's parliament building, called the Sessions House, and continued back on Reid Street to the Par La Ville Park and thence back to the ferry dock. Since Hamilton was mostly boutique shops, we decided to press on to St. George on the eastern end of the island and see what that was like. |
Monika: In Hamilton we decided to walk around a bit till we could catch a ferry to St. George, the oldest of the towns on Bermuda. Hamilton is a business town, with plenty of banks, insurance companies, and of course shops for the tourists. Most of them looked rather high end. Lois would love the layout of Hamilton. Streets are laid out in a grid like a proper Midwestern town, going straight and at right angles. We walked up along Front Street right next to the water to the Parliament building, a rather nice looking building and then back along Reid street, the "shopping" street. We did not get to see the cathedral, since we did not want to miss the ferry to St. George. |
Bob: To get to St. George we had to take an Orange Line ferry back to the Royal Naval Dockyard and then from there to St. George, which was another 40 minutes. By this time it was raining cats and dogs, but we still set off to walk around St. George and maybe find a place to eat. St. George is much smaller than Hamilton, but we had a lot of fun walking along the waterfront and seeing a reconstruction of the Deliverance and a statue of Sir George Somers. Sir George Somers' ship, the Sea Venture, wrecked on the reefs around Bermuda in the early 1600s. Using the wreckage, the marooned colonists built a smaller ship called the Deliverance and continued on to the Virginia Colony at Jamestown. But after one season there many of the settlers decided to return to Bermuda and settle there for good, which was how the island ultimately became part of the British Empire. |
Monika: St. George is at the northeast end of the island. So the ferry first went back to the Dockyards, before going along the whole length of the island to get to St. George. When we sailed past the Navigator of the Seas, we saw that they had lowered the lifeboats on the portside during the crew lifeboat drill. It looked like a lot of little boatlings hovering around biiiiiig momma ship St. George is much less commercial than Hamilton. The settlement of Bermuda started, when a ship captained by Sir George Somers bound for Virginia shipwrecked and the sailors went on land. They took the timber from the shipwrecked ship to build another one and go on to Virginia. After a few months in Virginia, they decided to sail back to Bermuda. Having been in Jamestown in the summer, I don't blame them....less heat and mosquitoes must have been very attractive! A replica of the ship that they sailed to Virginia is right there at the waterfront as well as a statue of Sir George Somers. |
Bob: The prettiest part of our walk was our visit to St. Peter's church in the middle of the old part of town. St. Peters was very old and very picturesque. The interior had dark wood beams criss-crossing the ceiling and a nicely decorated altar and pulpit. The plaques on the wall commemorated parishioners from the previous centuries, and I could well imagine many decades of worship that had taken place there. To me, it felt like the quintessential church. The most curious part of our perambulation was the Unfinished Church at the top of a knoll up from the waterfront. What you see are the ruins of a quite substantial church built in a Gothic style, kind of a pocket cathedral. The church had actually been completed and roofed over, ready to move in, when the congregation decided to renovate their old St. Peter's church down the hill rather than move into the new one! Over the decades the church fell into complete disrepair, and finally the national trust had purchased it to preserve the church in its unfinished state. While wandering around and waiting for the 2:00 ferry back to the Royal Naval Dockyard, we also checked into some of the gift shops where Monika found a couple of Bermuda sewing thimbles, plus a trivet and some post cards. We ultimately were walking well over two hours and naturally became quite hungry but found that the prices at the pubs and restaurants were really outrageous. I remember seeing $15 for a basic hamburger and other things were correspondingly dear, so we found a food store one block back from the waterfront and bought a couple of large rolls plus a beer for Monika and a Coke for me. The rain was still coming down in buckets, so we ate our meager repast under an overhanging balcony, consoling ourselves with the thought that we would have a great dinner back on the Navigator. |
Monika: It was 12 o'clock and our thoughts turned to lunch. But looking at the prices at the various restaurants, we thought better of it. So we decided to head back to the ship for lunch and in the meantime just walk along. We chanced upon the first church on Bermuda, St. Peter. It was a beautiful, simple, old church with exposed beams. The design was different from the usual cross-design. It was rather a T-shaped design. With the entrance leading to the T, where the altar was on one end and the organ on the other. Very interesting. We did find a grocery store and I decided to have a beer at grocery store prices rather than pay the ship's prices. Mindful of my ultimately fruitless quest for beer in Hawaii during Wanderung 16, I picked a Samuel Adams, an American brew, that should have a twist off cap. When we got outside I found out that in Bermuda, even a Sam Adams did not have a twist off cap! Bob, however, became creative and used a stop sign to pry off the top. So, while I enjoyed my brewski we headed back to the dock for the 1:00 o'clock ferry. But the ferries did not come every hour on the hour, they came at 12, 2, and 3. So we had another hour to kill in St. George. By now it was seriously pouring. But it was a relatively warm rain so we went through a little park, up to the ruins of the "unfinished" church. This church was supposed to replace St. Peter. But money ran out when they were almost done and so they just let it go to ruins. It seems a shame. We walked back to the town. Stopped again at grocery shop, this time for a sweet roll each and a coke to share. We found a house with an overhang to munch under. Then we went to a few of the souvenir stores and bought the necessary magnet, postcards, thimble, and spoon rest. Finally it was time to head for the ferry. This time we sat inside to warm up. We sat next to a couple of older women from Florida and were entertained by stories of their children. |
Bob: By the time we boarded the ferry back to the ship, we were soaked from the waist down although our rainjackets had kept us somewhat dry from the waist up. We dried off a bit during the 40 minute ride back, and the rain finally let up by the time we reached the Royal Naval Dockyard, so when we disembarked back at the ship we spent an hour touring the craft stores and a small shopping mall that kind of ring the harbor. I found two silk ties that I just had never seen before, one commemorating Gutenberg and one celebrating mathematics, so I broke down and picked those up for my collection of oddball ties. After changing into dry clothes, we returned on deck to watch our ship edge away from the dock, spin slowly about 180 degrees so that the bow pointed at the ocean, and slowly edge its way out through the narrow channel through the coral reef that surrounds Bermuda. |
Monika: Back at the Dockyards, we looked at a craft store and then browsed through the shopping mall where we picked up a couple of rather unusual ties for Bob. Back on the ship I had enough time for a nice hot shower before we went back up on deck for the 4 o'clock Walk-A-Mile. Luckily the rain had stopped. So after walking we watched the ship slowly turn around and depart ever so slowly through the marked channel. While turning around it seems to be stirring up the sand. It looked like there was not that much sea below the bottom of the ship. Looking just past the channel markers there seemed to be shoals and coral reefs. I could imagine that without channel markers and in bad weather these would be dangerous waters to sail. |
Bob: We went down for an eagerly-anticipated dinner and ended up having Pad Thai and a lot of very nice conversation with our tablemates. We once again talked nonstop with George and Don and Helen and Jeff (Vicki and Sue left just before the rest of us settled in for dessert) until they turned the lights up on us to chase us out of the dinning room. It really is amazing how pleasant having a table full of interesting people can be and what a nice way it is to end a day. The entertainment that evening was the Broadway Show, a potpourri of song and dance routines adapted from various Broadway musicals. It was, as we expected, energetically and expertly done, with fancy costumes being quickly changed and fast-paced medleys of tunes accompanying the dance segments. The only problem I had was that the sound amplification was so high that I spent much of the performance with my fingers stuck in my ears, which made it deucedly difficult to applaud. Although the ship's nightlife beckoned, it was not strong enough to counteract the pull of quietly going to bed, which is what we did instead. |
Monika: Dinner was again a cheerful event at our table. Our waitress, Alison from Trinidad, however, was stressed to the max, since the kitchen seemed to have messed up our orders and we were late getting our entrees. We did not mind, we had enough to chat about, but it turned out that we did not finish until shortly before the next seating and Alison had to hustle to get her tables set up for the next seating. The evening show was one of two production shows with the normal complement of 4 lead singers, but they had 10 dancers (6 girls 4 guys) instead of the normal 8. It was quite good but we were sitting in the top close to some speakers. It was a great place for photographs, but the songs seemed overamped. Especially, one of the female leads had a very strong voice that probably needed less amping than the rest, so when she was on we both were holding our ears because the sound was so overwhelming. But beyond the volume, we enjoyed the show very much. |
| Prolog | Map of Trip | Epilog |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||