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Published: March 20th 2014
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Today we officially ended our cruise around New Zealand, but we started another cruise up the East Coast of Australia. Technically this is now our 10
thcruise. It is the first time we have taken a back-to-back cruise and we enjoyed not having to deal with the activities of leaving the ship.
The final two days as sea were very restful and should appeal to the traveler who packed as much reading material as they packed clothes. We will have a few of those “sea days” of restful cruising this trip, but we will also have some excursions too. So this segment of our vacation story should have parts to appeal to everyone.
We got to sleep until after 7:00 this morning but enough people were in the hall that we woke up anyway. We had been told that if we waited to eat until about 8:00 then most of the passengers would have already gorged themselves with their last meal and it would be much quieter in the Horizon Court. That’s exactly what happened and we had the most peaceful breakfast buffet of any day
Janet
in nearly empty International Cafe so far.
Our only required activity this morning was to report to the International Café at 10:00 to get our old cruise card cancelled (show that we left the cruise) and to have our new card activated. This only took a minute or two. We stayed in the café for a while (enjoying a pot of tea) and David took a few pictures with all the venues being empty. We later found out that there are only 68 trans-passage passengers and it almost seemed like a ghost ship (except for the crew cleaning and preparing for the next load of tourists).
This was a good day for us to do the laundry and replenish our supply of clean clothes. We weren’t the only ones with this idea, but we got it taken care of with just one problem (one machine broke while we were washing and we had to start again after we emptied another washer). The only day which is truly critical for laundry is the last day at sea on this cruise, which will allow us to start the following
phase with clean outfits again. Today was just kind of a convenience.
We went up to the sail-away buffet and had a light lunch. The ship is now loaded with new passengers and many of them had to stop and stare at every item on the buffet before they could choose what they wanted to eat. They should learn the routine in a couple of days and it will go more smoothly soon.
On the previous cruise we were certain that we were in the younger half of the passengers – it turns out the average age was 68. This group has some older folks but also some younger ones. We may not be as clearly in the “young crowd”. On the earlier cruise, there had been 1650 Aussies, 120 USA, 60 Canadians, 30 UK, 10 NZ, 10 China, and a mixed variety of 70 from other countries making 1950 total passengers. The breakdown of nationalities for this cruise was again 1650 from Australia, 95 from UK, 63 from USA, 62 from New Zealand, 30 from China, 24 from Canada, and 26
from 10 other countries. Maybe they reserve 1650 for Australians and the rest of the world has to scramble for the other slots.
The weather this morning was 68 degrees and sunny with a mild breeze. By mid-afternoon it had gotten close to 80 degrees and still sunny. David switched to shorts and t-shirt and we both enjoyed the warm temperature. Some of the locals were complaining that it was a little hot, but we remembered the weather when we left St Louis and we have no complaints here. We haven’t heard anything about storms back home, so hopefully those folks are having Spring weather (but not enough to make the grass grow too fast).
It turns out that we were actually exempt from attending the Life Boat training this cruise, but we went along anyway. It doesn’t hurt us to get a refresher course, and there really wasn’t much of anything else to do anyway. Our Muster Station is still in the Vista Lounge. Afterwards, David went back on deck to take pictures of us sailing out of Sydney again, but
those pictures look a lot like the batch from 2 weeks ago. Janet watched the Bridge Cam on TV and saw the same thing from our cabin.
Before dinner we had a couple of glasses of wine. We went to the dining room for dinner this evening and we had successfully gotten ourselves reassigned to a smaller table (for 4) in the same section with our previous waiters – Mel & Kim. Our tablemates did not show up L What’s wrong? Looking over at our table from last cruise there were 8 of the 10 people there. For dinner this evening, Janet had shrimp cocktail, double beef bouillon soup, and prime rib. David had lobster pate, pina colada soup, and prime rib too. For dessert, Janet had banana & crunchy nut parfait and David had flourless coffee torte,
We went to the “Welcome Aboard” show in the theater this evening. There have been a lot of crew changes during the transition between cruises. We still have the same Cruise director (Martyn Moss) who is terrific, but there is a new Deputy Cruise Director (Simon left), new Head Waiter and new Maitre D’ in the dining room, new Hotel Manager, and even a new Ship’s Captain. After this cruise is over, there will be even more changes as the ship’s next destinations move to Asian ports and all the crew are required to speak Japanese. But tonight we got to meet the cruise staff, hear some good jokes from Martyn, and the Irish comedian (George Casey – from Branson Missouri). Janet had missed the welcome session last cruise, so she enjoyed it even more than David, although George used the same jokes he had told on the previous cruise.
After the show, Janet went to watch a movie (August: Osage County) in the Vista Lounge and David returned to the cabin to send the blog. So that is about all for the first day of our second sailing.
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