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Voyage to Bermuda
Monday, 23 April 2018: At Sea
We both enjoyed a nice omelet for breakfast, and coincidentally Linda and Jerry came up to the buffet so we could eat together, after which we explored the ship a bit. A lot of the decor had changed since our trip with Phyllis and Bill about 10 years back, but many of the sculptures were the same. The library had, however, disappeared in the intervening years, and we could not even find a shelf where passengers could exchange the books they had brought along, which disappointed us greatly as we were hoping to exchange the paperback books we had brought along when we were finished reading them for some other books.
We participated in a "stretching, footprint analysis, and arch support sales" class at 9:30, and the stretching part of that was quite good. Our footprints looked quite different as I have flat feet while Monika has an exaggerated arch, but we declined to buy their $199 arch supports at the end of the class.
We also attended the port lecture on our first port of call, Bermuda, at 11 o'clock. The lecture turned out to be a history of the founding of Bermuda rather than a "what-to-see" port lecture. I enjoyed the history, which focused on the wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609, but would have liked more current sightseeing info for Linda and Jerry.
The afternoon lecture was an overview of the ports we will see in the next two weeks, and the introduction was good and had particularly nice pictures, but necessarily such a broad focus gave little detail specifically on Bermuda.
So after our afternoon nap (almost a cruising tradition!), I grabbed Monika's recipe page from a cocktail-mixing class she took in the early afternoon and drew a rough map of Bermuda on the back. Then I took that to dinner to see if our oft-traveled table mates Bob (no relation) and Janet, could help me remember what to see in Bermuda.
It turned out that despite having been there several times, they really couldn't remember anything at all notable about Bermuda! Instead, Bob gave me a nice lecture on his collections of model cars, fancy ceramic plates, and old quarter coins, which take up two of the spaces in his 3-car garage. He keeps the model cars in their original boxes in the hopes that they will increase in value. In that I wish him luck as Merlin tried collecting things like those fancy, "limited-edition" plates and never made a dime off of them as far as I know. Wendy collected Beanie Babies back when they were a craze, and kept them in their original boxes in the hopes that they would skyrocket in value, but I don't think that has worked out for her either. Personally, I do not place much faith in amassing "collectables", plus the fact that I only have a one car garage and really don't have the space to store such things for decades.
After dinner we went to the Billboard Lounge, which features two baby grand pianos facing each other, and were entertained by two singer-pianists who cooperated in playing and singing some of the songs from the 60s-80s. Linda could sing the lyrics to most of them, which astonished me as I could barely remember the refrains from the most popular songs. Still, listening to live performances by two guys with really good voices was a lot more fun than just hearing a recording, and we enjoyed ourselves .
That was enough for us, so we returned to our cabin for a riotous hour of working together on a NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle , which was quite challenging, and then turned in for the night. More typically we jointly read books, but when we left home we had mistakenly brought a book we had just finished reading, plus a new book that neither of us liked enough to continue reading, so we are now using my back up plan of doing crosswords before bed time until we find some more books. Unlike the previous cruise ships, the Zuiderdam, besides lacking a real library, really does not even provide a "passenger book exchange" shelf for us bibliophiles to donate our finished books to and retrieve new ones to read during the voyage. That lack I find inexplicable as it requires zero maintenance, money, or staff effort to just have a shelf marked "Passenger Exchange Book" somewhere on this huge ship. Is reading now passe?
Tuesdaly, 24 April 2018: At Sea
We thought we had stretching exercises again today, but Monika was feeling a little queasy after breakfast so we opted out of that, only to find out that we had signed up for the session the day AFTER Bermuda rather than the day before. So we missed nothing, and instead went for a walk on the Promenade Deck for exercise.
The Promenade Deck is one of the big pluses of the Zuiderdam, because like many of the older cruise ships the Promenade forms a complete circle around the periphery of the ship. That makes it ideal for exercise as you can simply walk lap after lap whilst enjoying the view and the sea air. On the Zuiderdam, each circuit was exactly 1/3 of a mile. The wind was whistling around us, with strong headwinds coming up the starboard side to the bow and tailwinds going back down the port side.
I also obtained a nice sewing kit from the Customer Services desk down below, and put that to good use sewing a button on Monika's blouse, sewing up a hole in my underwear, and sewing the tip of my shoes shut. My right foot is a bit longer than my left, so my right shoes often wear through where the big toe meets the leather. Although the leather will stretch to some extent, finally the sewn seam joining the leather pieces at the toe will start to give way. I hate to throw out a pair of shoes just because the seam is giving out, so I usually attempt to fix the seam. In the past I've used Shoe Goo to glue it together, but that has typically failed to hold, so I have shifted my repair efforts to sewing the seam together where it is starting to part. That makes it hold for a while, but sewing through leather is quite hard, especially without a thimble, so it's quite a challenge. In this case I found I could use the needle case to push the needle through the leather, but in the end I broke the eye right off the needle and had to stop at that point. Hopefully it will last through the trip! (The shoes held up, which was important as I only had 1 pair on this trip!)
We had lunch with Linda and Jerry at the buffet, and Jerry convinced me to have ice cream for desert, not that I needed much convincing! Jerry and I both liked the cinnamon flavored ice cream, but Linda and Monika did not. We regathered for Trivia contest at 1 o'clock, but once again we scored only 10 out of 16. We would have been even more disappointed if there had been real prizes at stake, but HAL is economizing, and apparently one of the first things to go was the prizes offered for trivia contests. It could be worse, as Carnival has apparently done away with tablecloths in the dining rooms!
At 2 o'clock we attended a port lecture on Bermuda that was very good. Despite being given by the ship excursion representative , the talk centered around what to see and how to get around on your own in Bermuda, which was extremely useful for us. We learned about special buses from King's Wharf to Horseshoe Bay Beach, and that the combined all-day fare for the buses and ferries was $19, a bargain if you will be traveling a lot. He also discussed the taxi system--which is quite expensive--but did not mention the motor scooter option. Given the dangers of inexperienced folks riding underpowered scooters on the wrong side of narrow, congested roads, I thought that was just as well. After the presentation, I confirmed that the bus stops were marked by blue poles on all routes going AWAY from Hamilton, and red-pink poles on all routes going TO Hamilton, which was useful info.
We regathered for Happy Hour but this time at the open bar at the aft of the Lido deck. Jerry found out that they served both sides of the deck there, and smokers were only allowed on the starboard side so the port side was quite nice. But we broke up early as it was formal night and we had to dress in our finery. As I had forgotten my sport coat, I wore my dark gray sweater with a collared shirt and tie, together with the dark gray pants. Fortunately history did not repeat itself and I was this time allowed in the dining room of a Holland America ship. At least for this voyage, the dress standard for men for formal nights apparently is a collared shirt and tie, so I passed muster (and didn't have to worry about the bulk and weight of lugging along a suit coat!).
After dinner was the "Captains Greeting" complete with champagne. The captain is, of course, Dutch, but speaks very good English. After that we saw a live performance by the The Vox Urban 4 Tenors, who sang rather nice harmonies of a couple classical pieces plus popular tunes. I enjoyed the show but also thought that I might have preferred something like the harmonies of the King Singers where each male voice has a distinctly different range (tenor, baritone, bass) rather than 4 voices in the same basic range. But they were both individually and collectively very good, classically trained singers who enunciated and emoted well, and it was very nice to hear a good quality live performance. And so to bed.
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