Wanderung 33

When we awoke during the night, we stepped out on our balcony for a bit and saw an absolutely gorgeous night sky, completely black with hundreds of stars sprinkled across it. It was one of the rare times in my life that I have clearly seen the Milky Way band of stars, and it is the only time I have ever seen it arc straight up from the horizon and go straight overhead--all the other times I have been far from the equator and the Milky Way was at an angle across the night sky.

But the downside of seeing something so exciting so early in the morning is that we were up before 5 o`clock, and the earliest possible breakfast line in the Windjammer opened at 6:30. So perforce we waited for breakfast while enjoying a beautiful sunrise. After breakfast I was so tired I took a short morning nap, the first time in many months I have had to do so. Still, I was up again in time to attend the morning session on music groups from the 1970s. That was fun even though I only remembered a few of the tunes despite the fact that I was definitely alive and (arguably) an adult in that decade. Monika said she remembered more of them than I did, so either she listened to radio more back then or maybe I'm just losing my memory!

Afterwards we went for a walk on deck, which was very pleasant as the air temps were in the 70s and the sun was positioned over the bow in such a way that most of the walk on both sides of the Promenade Deck was in the shadow. Since the ship`s motion also created a relative wind, I found it very refreshing after the heat of the tropics. Monika broke off before 11 to attend the ship`s final Park West art auction, for which we had been given raffle tickets as a lure. I trusted her to judge whether or not to buy anything, and the weather was so beautiful that I continued walking until 11:20, by which time I'd put in 4 miles. I was rewarded by seeing a Northern Gannet, which was identified by a birder on deck who had a phone app with the common sea birds and showed me a close up of it (see pic).

But getting somewhat footsore and not wanting to get another blood blister, I called it quits and retired to the cabin to get in some journal typing while I waited for Monika to return. She returned empty-handed, but not completely unrewarded as she had snagged two free glasses of champagne whilst evaluating the available artwork. After an hour, however, there had been no sign that the Park West folks were going to get to the raffle drawing any time soon, so she gave up and returned to the cabin. Reunited and hungry, we headed up to lunch in the Windjammer.

During the afternoon, the wind on our balcony was turning just cool enough that we both considered donning another layer of clothes, but in the end simply went inside to read. At dinner we talked about a range of things, but one common thread was that the Internet service provided by the ship was weak, unreliable, and had odd glitches like keeping some devices logged in while steadfastly refusing to allow other devices to log in at all. Shannon compared it to old-fashioned dial-up internet service with a modem, where you had to carefully wait for each key press to take effect before pressing the next key, which we just aren't used to doing anymore! Since it was a formal night and we were all dressed up, we had Rey take a picture of all of us. (My tie in the picture is my Van Gogh "Starry Night" tie as Bugs Bunny was taking the night off.)

In the evening there was a parade in the atrium hallway of people in costumes. We thought Linda and Don would participate but they decided not to. There were many fun costumes including the outlandish costumes of a father and his daughter, and a costume based on Edvard Munch's "Scream" that was very effective and caught our eye.

Saturday, October 28: At Sea

And in fact when we tried to sign up for 1 day of Internet service for $20 US the next morning, the system simply would not let us created an account! Realizing that we would at best get weak, unreliable service for a rather steep price, we ultimately gave up the attempt although we had really wanted to check in with Neville and Lyn before arriving in Sydney.

Leanne Fiedler having a nice presentation on Sydney for the final port destination lecture, and we enjoyed that very much. She also snuck in a section on Melbourne as she apparently lives there and had made a nice video clip showing the highlights or what is truly a very pretty, civilized, and livable city.

Afterwards we picked up some Johnny Walker for Neville and then headed the Star Lounge to see a screening of the Walt Disney and Salvador Dali short firm "Destino". Although only 6 minutes long, it apparently chronicles a love between Chronos, the God of Time, and a prototypical Disney Princess. Some scenes seem pure Disney, but other scenes are pure Dali, and the mix of those two genres creates certainly one of the oddest short films I have ever seen. Like much good art, I get more out of this little gem of a film each time I see it, and this time we had a good explanation of some of the pieces by the Park West art historian cum saleswoman who presented the film. She also tried to sell prints based on scenes from the film, but that was just a fair part of the deal, and we were given a free print as we left, which we liked.

So we were in a good mood when we returned aft to the photo gallery to check for our pictures, which was far more difficult and unpleasant than we had expected. Our impressions of the Explorer of the Seas by the end of the cruise were decidedly mixed. On the one hand, the ship offered more of a variety of active recreation than most ships. In addition to a walking/jogging track, mini-golf, table tennis, basketball, and line-dancing which you would find on many if not most larger ships, the Explorer of the Seas offered a rock-climbing wall, a "Flow Rider" surfing simulator, "soft" archery, and an ice rink for ice skating. So for folks who like physical activities, this type of cruise might be wonderful.

On the other hand, we also found some very frustrating negative aspects of the ship. Maps or other information to guide passengers who wanted to go ashore independently of the ship`s shore excursions were completely non-existent except for cartoonish maps of Oahu and Maui which simply pointed out the ship-connected jewelry and clothing stores. As you can see, these maps had no streets depicted and were useless for walking around town. For the other ports, we were given no maps at all, and the pressure was clearly high to purchase the ship`s shore excursion packages.

The relentless "sell, sell, sell " approach was noticeable in all aspects of our cruise experience, from the blaring loudspeaker announcements of upcoming art or jewelry sales, to the salesmen in the Windjammer hawking overpriced wine or specialty dinning in restaurants like the Chops Grille ($39 per person) or Giovanni's ($35 per person). To be fair, selling speciality dining or wines is certainly also true of other cruise lines, but this ship just did it harder.

What also surprised us was charging for the arts and crafts activities. The adult coloring book class was free, but most other such activities charged fees. We have made items like bracelets or rings on other ships and never been charged, but on the Explorer of The Seas the jewelry class had a fee. I could almost understand that, but even such mundane activities as decorating cupcakes and scrap booking charged fees, and as a result we did not participate in them.

And some things on the ship were just, well, different. The large interior atrium of the ship on Deck 5 made it very easy to walk from bow to stern areas inside, and was pleasantly set up like a promenade in a small town with shops, bars, and cafes lining each side. But they shifted the lighting of the atrium from white to orange to blue at unpredictable times--I found the heavy blue illumination to be particularly off-putting as none of the colors of anything looked remotely normal.

The photo gallery was another aspect that was very different from the traditional "look at displayed prints and buy the ones you like" approach on other cruise lines. I suspect that the new-fangled "electronic display kiosk" system used on the Explorer of the Seas is the wave of the future as it reduces the overhead on the photoshop to almost zero and thus increases the profit margin tremendously.

The electronic kiosk, when it's working, can be used to display your pictures, which you can then order in physical or electronic form. The display aspect of that process worked fairly smoothly, except our cabin number had both pictures from previous cruises as well as pictures of people who were clearly NOT us mixed in with our pictures. So we had to sort through the electronic files in much the same way as we had to sort through physical pictures in the old system.

Many of the kiosks did not work, and when many passengers tried to look at their pictures on this last day of the cruise, the system just couldn't handle the traffic and it became extremely slow and unreliable. I saw several people give up in disgust and leave the photo gallery without ordering any pictures. We persevered because we thought there were several nice pics of the two of us, and we finally settled on the 6 best which we bought the digital images for $100 US. That's about $16 per image, which is ridiculously high for just a digital file, but I considered it mostly to be a "sitting fee" which you would otherwise be charged by a professional photographer. Also, you must consider that RCI has to cover the overhead of employing the staff of photographers on the ship and the operation of the computer system for those images, such as it is. They did also offer printing of physical prints, but I'm sure the number of prints is far less than in the old system, which prevents the waste of photo paper and chemicals that occurred under that old system.

But still, we struggled so hard to purchase our images with that glitchy computer that we were both totally frustrated at the end of it and had to go out and walk on the deck to calm down. And I have NEVER had that type of experience when purchasing cruise photographs before. I think RCI has to be very careful not to turn people off so totally that they simply avoid purchasing pictures all together and that whole aspect of the cruise business collapses as people resort to simply taking selfies with their smart phones rather than using the professional photographers. Argh!

Having recovered our equilibrium, we went up to the Windjammer for a finally luncheon. They had a put out a nice "Good Bye" cake and we sat by the window watching our wake.

Then we retired to our cabin for one last afternoon on the balcony. Today it was so cool that we were both wearing a light sweater to be comfortable outside. We came back inside after 3 o`clock to pack our bags, always a rather sad final day of a cruise, but it went fairly well until I went to stow something in my new carry-on and found that the seam at the bottom had ripped out. Well, I'm sure glad I had a spare sewing kit on hand and had discovered it in plenty of time to try to sew up the seam! So I spent half an hour or more attending to that little chore, and really hoped my emergency fix would hold as I do like the size and arrangement of pockets on that carry-on.

We had a last convivial meal together with out table mates that evening, exchanging email addresses with Shannon and Denise, Norm and Sylvia, Linda and Don, and Gretchen. The wait staff gathered and sang "Hey Look Me Over" for us as their farewell, and we gave some extra tips to Rey and Yuliya (pronounced "Julia"). Rey performed a last magic trick for us.

We retired to our cabin directly afterwards and as we had been forewarned that we might get good dawn pictures a our ship entered Sydney Harbor, we went to bed promptly at 9 o`clock.