In terms of turnaround days, this was one of the tougher, but more productive ones. We hit the ground running before 6:00am, and by the time we'd arrived at dinner, just after 6:00pm, I'd had only a bowl of cereal all day to see me through. Luxury living indeed!
We were on separate missions today, out of necessity; G was heading to the Embassy Suites to pick up friends Martha and Betsy, and I took a #40 Broward County Transit bus to the Apple Store at the Galleria Mall. My phone of 20 days had issues, primarily with the mute/unmute switch. It seemed to have a mind of its own. Unwilling to tolerate it another day, I had phoned Apple service yesterday from the ship using Vonage and set up an appointment at the Apple Store for 12:30pm, the earliest available today.
I was at the mall by 9:15am, and, honestly, my face must have looked like I was just off the farm and seeing the lights of the city for the very first time. Keep in mind that I haven't stepped into a mall for...well, I don't frequent malls at home, so I'm guessing it's been six months. Unless you count the Esplanade Mall at the cruise ship pier in St. George's, Grenada.
Definitely don't count that.
I've missed the entire Christmas season, all the commercials and ads, and the closest I've been to shopping has been jewelry stores and t-shirt shops. I hadn't really thought about it...until I walked through Neiman Marcus (a South Florida Neiman Marcus, no less) wearing my Teva sandals and carrying a backpack with my laptop, power cords, bus money and passport and felt like a 53-year old hippie. Wow. It was culture shock. I didn't know where to look first. Starbucks! PF Changs! The Walking Company (someone incorporated walking?)! Victoria's Secret (let's see how that holds up to the ship's laundry)!
It was all very exciting.
But I was a woman on a mission, and so, after finding the mall's touch screen directories non-functional, I wandered around a bit until someone pointed me in the direction of the Apple Store.
I was there before it opened, and had hoped that I might squeeze into an earlier appointment slot, but the guard- er, technical assistant- assured me that wouldn't happen. However, I was free to sit in the sofa and chairs seating area just outside the store in the mall and use wifi if I wished.
Wifi! They had free, fast, cool, quiet and shaded wifi! Forget shopping; they had wifi!!!! I powered up my laptop and updated and scanned, updated and defragmented, updated and downloaded, updated, updated, updated, quieting all those damn warnings that have been popping up left and right every time I start my laptop.
I could feel my blood pressure dropping.
Next, I tackled the phone, thinking it might be a firmware issue, and reformatted it. And updated and downloaded and updated and uploaded, and updated, updated, updated. ICloud! I could back up the entire phone to iCloud!
God, I've missed all this. I don't think I realized how much I've missed it until today, when it all came together so perfectly. When it was the closest I've been to being at home for 91 days.
I was so intent on what I was doing that an hour passed before I even looked around at the people sitting around me doing similar things. I looked at the guy on my left, then looked again. It looked like Andrew Phipps, one of the male vocalists from the Emerald Princess. It seemed so unlikely that I tentatively asked, "Are you Andrew?" Of course, he was. He was soon joined by the other male vocalist Garfield Hammonds and dancer Chris. It seemed that we all needed to feel close to the "real world" for just a few hours.
Well, by then it was appointment time, so I had my phone diagnosed and it was a hardware issue, not a software or firmware one, and I was given a new replacement phone. Which meant I then had to go through the process of restoring it a second time in just a couple of hours. Figuring I could accomplish the most by using the fast wifi, I gave myself until 2:00pm to accomplish as much as I could.
When I tried to backtrack in the mall to get to the bus stop where I'd been left off this morning, I could not, for the life of me, find it. I wandered around the parking garage trying to find the street from which I'd entered, but soon gave up. It was 2:30pm, and the bus only ran every 30 minutes. I could see myself cutting it close to the 3.30pm on board time, and so caught a taxi back to the Emerald Princess.
As I boarded the ship, I phoned G, and he said he was on the Promenade Deck with Martha and Betsy, so I headed that way first. OMG, it was so good to see them! It's also a bit strange, a melding of our winter world with the world we inhabit 8 months a year. G had proved the perfect tour guide, and they had already enjoyed lunch in the dining room and a tour of the ship's public rooms.
We went to the sailaway party up on deck, although I was the only one who danced. They were more interested in watching us sail out the channel and I can't say I blame them. For just the first time this winter, Mom spotted us on the ship on the Port Everglades webcam, and she called to tell me so.
While they toured the spa area, I got cleaned up for dinner. And when we arrived in the dining room, Sutti and Somphong had our two tables for two set up perfectly, just inches apart from each other. Sutti was so wonderful, so attentive. I forgot to mention that, G, Martha and Betsy had met Sutti and Surasit in Walgreens earlier in the day. It seems like we see them and half of the other waiters shopping around Walgreens and Ross Dress for Less every turnaround day.
After a leisurely dinner, G and Martha and I attended the 8:30pm Welcome Aboard show in the Princess Theater, then dropped into TV commercial jingles trivia. Yes, trivia. I went to trivia. Do you see what I mean about this cruise being different for us? It's fun, like seeing everything through fresh eyes. Martha keeps commenting on how beautiful the Emerald Princess is, and when she does, we look around, in a way we don't normally do. She's right!
But now it's 10:45pm, and we move clocks ahead an hour tonight. My eyes aren't fresh; they're exhausted. I'll post this and be asleep in minutes.
Photo 1: South Fort Lauderdale Beach
Photo 2: Garfield Hammonds, not at the Galleria Mall
