Day 116: At Sea

We had stayed up late last night watching the Pro Bowl. The preponderance of offense over defense made it surprisingly fun to watch; plus, the night was just perfect for football under the stars. We purposely did not want to wake up early today, and did not want to eat breakfast, as it was the day for our second Most Traveled Passenger luncheon of the season in the Emerald Princess.

We awoke to another day of perfect weather, sunny with just a slight wind, with a high of 79F degrees. After having just coffee (me) and hot chocolate (G) from the International Cafe, I went to the Fitness Center to so some cardio and weights and then enjoyed the steam room in the spa. By 11am we were both in the cabin to start the big clean up required to get us presentable by noon for the luncheon, which took place in the Botticelli Dining Room. We were honored to be seated at Captain Forteeze's table as #2 MTP; Phyllis was #1 this cruise and Andy #3. This was the first time we've ever been at an MTP luncheon table where we knew our fellow tablemates so well, and it made for a fun and comfortable experience. 

MTP luncheon cutoff:  366 Princess days

As it usually does, the big meal accompanied by copious amounts of wine absolutely ruined me for the rest of the afternoon. If I was still doing the sun worshipping thing, it would have been a perfect afternoon to lay out by a pool, but, since I'm not, I went to the Princess Theater for the 2pm afternoon movie, A Walk in the Woods. This title sounded very familiar, but it wasn't until I started to watch the movie that I figured out it is based on Bill Bryson's book about hiking the Appalachian Trail with a friend. While the book is laugh out loud funny (as so many of Bill Bryson's books are), the movie was only mildly amusing. Still, it kept me clean so that I did not have to shower again and re-do hair and makeup for tonight's formal night.  

G had arrived late for the 1:15pm veterans get together, and spent the early part of the afternoon chatting and having drinks with some of the guys he had met there. He ended up at the Wheelhouse Bar at 3pm for Happy Hour and struck up a conversation with a couple, Chris and Dan, who joined us for dinner tonight. That's a nice bonus of having our table for four!  Waiter Victor was a star, and had our table set for four without us requesting it. He said he just had a feeling we might have guests tonight. 

I was not even one slight bit hungry for dinner but still ordered French onion soup and a shrimp entree. While everyone else at our table had bananas foster, I was in the mood for passion fruit sorbet for dessert.

We exited the Michelangelo Dining Room just in time for the Captain's Welcome Aboard Party and Champagne Waterfall. G had a few glasses of champagne but I didn't have room for another thing. We are awaiting the start of Jammin Jay Lammont's 8:15pm show in the Princess Theater and then will be getting things packed up for (very) tentative plans we have tomorrow for in St. Martin.  Failing that, we will simply have another beach day with what is forecasted to be beautiful weather. 

Day 115: Finally...a day off!

We had moved our clocks ahead an hour last night, and maybe that's the reason we just couldn't get going this morning...but then what would be our excuse for the rest of the day?  For whatever reason, we were just wiped out today, and despite the fact that this was probably our prettiest Princess Cays day of the winter to date, we just could not muster up the energy to pack up snorkel gear and beach towels and make our way to the island.

We made it to breakfast, though, just before the DaVinci Dining Room closed at 9am and both ordered just fresh fruit and oatmeal, so as not to hold up the galley crew. While the tender service to the island of Eleuthera had already begun, we kept stalling, saying we'd do a load of laundry before heading over ourselves. 

Doing that load of laundry was slightly more difficult than it needed to be, because the token machine in the passenger laundry room was broken. I quickly ran back to the cabin to get G to either 1.) stay in the laundry room with the clothes in the washing machine, or 2.) run down to the Passenger Services Desk to get tokens, and I would do the other. He chose the sitting and watching job, so I went down to Deck 6 and waited while one clerk helped two passengers and the other four clerks stood at the counter staring into their computer screens and generally not noticing me at all. It took 14 minutes before I was able to leave the PSD with two tokens and return to the Riviera Deck laundry room. 

I started the washing machine and returned with G to our cabin where we immediately became engrossed in a movie on TV called The Walk, released late last year about Philippe Petit's 1974 high wire walk between the two World Trade Center towers. We rock-paper-scissored to decide who had to return to the laundry room to move the clothes into a dryer (there's no DVR on the Emerald Princess TVs), and, by the time I returned with dried and folded clothes, Phillipe Petit was stepping out onto the wire. Shoot!

This, of course, required that I finish watching the movie and then watch as it started again from the beginning.  And that is how the day got seriously away from us. At 1:15pm, we finally went up to get some pizza (I love the pizza calabraze, the specialty pizza of the day) and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon in a hot tub and pool. 

We were showered and dressed for dinner by 4pm, choosing to watch from Skywalkers as the Emerald Princess sailed south from Eleuthera along the length of Cat Island in the Bahamas. It was herbed goat cheese night in the PES Lounge, so, naturally, I had to have a Breeza Marina, but was once again irritated when the drink order I placed at 5pm wasn't delivered until 5:20pm. This is ridiculous, and has me swearing off any more drink orders up there. We heard in the hot tub today from others who have purchased the unlimited drink package and can't get a drink, and I've written it up in my post cruise surveys, too. 

Dinner went a long, long way to unruffling my ruffled feathers. It was Italian night, and, after I finished the Breeza Marina I didn't have time to drink in Skywalkers, Darko (not that one) brought me my bottle of Bordeaux and headwaiter Francesco was making penne arrabiata in the dining room and life was very good. I teased Francesco (from Italy) when we walked past him to our table, asking if he knew anything about making arrabiata. Francesco's arrabiata is what made me fall in love with arrabiata years ago on the Emerald Princess, and he said that just one taste would jog my memory. ;-)

We had a decision to make after dinner...attend the 8:15pm performance of production show I Got the Music (which you know we love), or be lazy and just go up to the Calypso Pool to watch the Pro Bowl on MUTS. Now, as far as football goes, the Pro Bowl is pretty much the bottom of the barrel, but, somehow, we decided to spend our evening as the lazy slugs we'd been all day. Of course, there were plenty of loungers to choose from (plenty), but we were up there early enough to catch the tail end of the sunset anyway.

Tomorrow's sea day brings with it a couple of commitments for us; instead, we turned today into our 'relaxing day at sea'. 

A picture is worth 1000 words (especially 'cause I'm not mentioning nothing). We could be watching this non-game Pro Bowl in the comfort of our cabin, but need to keep our fannies in shape for hours of lounge chair sitting next Sunday. 

:-)

Day 114: Fort Lauderdale (turnaround day)

I am going to keep this rather short tonight. We were up very early, had a busy day and now are faced with moving clocks ahead an hour overnight. Our current smooth seas are hopefully a good indication that we'll be able to tender into Princess Cays tomorrow, so I don't want to be up too late tonight. Besides, with only a couple of exceptions, it was a fairly standard Fort Lauderdale turnaround day, with the usual shopping to restock items, several phone calls and extensive use of our AT&T Internet to check on things at home, pay bills, text and generally Google ourselves silly. 

We were in the Botticelli Dining Room for breakfast as soon as it opened at 6:30am. By 8:30am, we had received and organized the usual embarkation day paperwork (invitations, schedules and shore excursion packet) and minibar setup for this cruise and were walking off the ship. Even though we were at Pier 21 today, we were thrilled to see that there was a Global Entry line with no one in it, allowing us to bypass a long queue of disembarking passengers going through immigration. Honestly, now that Port Everglades has Global Entry lines for disembarking passengers, there is no better value than the $110 for 5 years that we paid for it. 

We immediately caught a shuttle bus from Pier 21 to Pier 2, returning passengers back to their cars they left at Pier 2's parking garage a week ago. We had left the ship so early this morning that there were only two other couples on the bus, one of them doing the same thing we were:  saving the time of walking and the cost of taking a taxi the 2+ miles to Pier 2.

Once at Pier 2, we walked over to the condo building called The Port, right across the street from Port Everglades, to tour the property. We are definitely not ready to buy, but might be in the market to rent there in the next few years. Following that, we toured the marina behind the condos (see previous post). I was really impressed by the whole development.  

We briefly split up then to divide and conquer the list of things we had to complete. I mailed a couple of things to Mom at the auxiliary post office on the north side of 17th Street and shopped at Publix; G went to Walgreens and Chase Bank. We walked back to Pier 2 and were able to catch the shuttle back to Pier 21. Though it was nearly 11:30am by then, there were still 100 passengers from the Emerald Princess needing to get back to their cars at Pier 2. 

Traffic around Pier 21, with the Westerdam and Independance OTS at nearby piers, was completely gridlocked. I'm sure there must have been some critical reason that the Coral Princess, just returning this morning from a dry dock in Freeport, Bahamas and with no disembarking passengers had to be at Pier 2. I just don't know what it was, but things were surely a mess as a result. After sitting in traffic right across from the Emerald Princess for 15 minutes, G and I asked our shuttle driver if she would be allowed to drop us off right there in the midst of the unmoving congestion. She said she couldn't, but if she opened the doors for some air and we just happened to hop out...  So we did. At noon we were walking back on the oasis that was the Emerald Princess. 

Following lunch in the DaVinci Dining Room,  we grabbed charging cords and an extension cord allowing us to plug into a single outlet in Skywalkers and made phone calls and Interneted until muster drill. The seven short and one long blast on the ship's whistle kicking that off signal shower time for us, but the Emerald Princess sailed right at 4pm today and I didn't make it out onto the Terrace Deck until we'd passed through the channel into the open ocean. Still, we popped the cork on another bottle of Barefoot Bubbly (it landed in the Terrace Pool but we were able to fish it out after it drifted to the side) and toasted our 11th sailaway of the season.

I had the same butterflied shrimp and basa filet I've had before for embarkation day dinner, but changed from my usual flourless chocolate cake in favor of a Norman Love chocolate soufflé. It was...okay. The description was quite appealing but it wasn't too dissimilar from a regular chocolate soufflé. Not that there's anything wrong with that. ;-)

We went to the Welcome Aboard show just to see another new comedian (for us). Jammin Jay Lammont, but were thrilled to see that Deputy Cruise Director Frenchie had come on board today. We sailed with Frenchie most of the winter three (I think) years ago and she is a treasure, truly one of the best. Jay Lammont does mostly musical impressions but with lots of percussive sounds and was very entertaining. 

That was our day, and I'm finishing this up just before 9pm (10pm tomorrow's time). Go me!  But I need to take just another few minutes to point out two occasions in less than a week where ship time and local time have not been the same (because this is a common question among cruisers):  last week in Roatan, where the Emerald Princess stayed on EST though Roatan is on CST, and tomorrow; when the ship will be on AST though the Bahamas are on EST. 

It happens. Occasionally. Just not often. Unless you've been on the Emerald Princess lately, in which case it has happened. Often. Not just occasionally. 

Fort Lauderdale field trip

We are continuing to do our research about possibly living in Fort Lauderdale again one day. Today we were checking out The Port condos, right across from the northern entrance to Port Everglades. 

While there, we were invited to tour The Port Marina located just behind the condo building, and this was the most interesting thing I'd seen in awhile. The two attendants/operators who work there invited us to watch as the totally automatic boat lift system retrieved a boat and lowered it into the water awaiting its owner's arrival.

This warehouse is Category 4 hurricane rated, and that apparently lowers the boat insurance premiums considerably. This is a previously unknown industry for me and gives me a whole new world of things to explore. 

The warehouse is huge and meticulously maintained. 

The attendant electronically requests the lift to retrieve a boat, and that's all that he has to do until the boat is in the water. The lift moves to the boat's location...

...and rises to the correct level automatically. 

The lift moves under the boat...

...and lifts it up, pulling it out of its bay. 

Once it is again in the center section of the warehouse...

...the lift turns 90 degrees to orient the boat correctly for the canal into which it will ultimately be placed. 

Once the boat is correctly positioned...

...the lift is positioned over the canal and the boat lowered into the water. 

This is when human intervention is finally required. The ignition is started and the boat is steered backwards out of the warehouse...

...and docked outside awaiting its owner. 

This time it was my turn to be fascinated by how something works. Just yesterday, we were asked again whether we get bored staying on cruise ships for months at a time. I truly cannot imagine such a thing. There is always something to explore or do or experience. I would still be watching this process at The Port Marina if we hadn't had a bigger boat to board. 

Cruise #5: 7-nights to the Eastern Caribbean