We woke early has we had some shopping to do for heavy toiletry items that we did not want to pack on our outward journey from North Carolina. There was a pharmacy fairly close to the hotel so we set off to walk there on a perfect sunny Californian morning. We noticed that there were many homeless people on the streets, but remarked that if you were going to live somewhere as a homeless person San Diego must be the perfect place to do so with it’s pleasant year round climate.
On our return to the hotel we enjoyed a late breakfast and then checked out of the hotel around noon to await our driver for the short transfer to the cruise terminal. On the way there we asked him to detour us slightly as we had forgotten to buy toothpaste that morning!!!
On arrival at the cruise terminal, we were confronted with an enormous queue of people waiting to drop off their bags for the cruise. It took us well over 30 minutes to achieve that small task and then on entering the cruise terminal we faced an even longer queue through security and check in. All told it was 3 hours before we finally made it onto the ship! As you can imagine there were many upset cruisers in the queue, but we made the best of it and had lots of laughs with the standees around us!
Once on board, we were impressed with the ship, the MS Westerdam, and our cabin, 1098 an ocean view cabin, is very comfortable. After the obligatory lifeboat muster we met up with the rest of our travelling companions, 12 others from the ‘hood and enjoyed a cocktail before we finally set sail around an hour late. Someone noted that probably Holland America would have to paid a large fee for the late departure from the dock!
The late departure caused further problems at dinner as one of the tables assigned to our group had not cleared its previous early diners so our group was split up for our first night’s dinner. The Maitre D’ has assured us that this will not happen again, we shall see.
After dinner Jill and I checked out a few of the bars and entertainment and were very impressed with the band in the B.B. King’s Blues Band Club. We’ll be back there again.
The clocks went back another hour so a nice long sleep for us!
Having issues adding pics of us leaving San Diego, more experimentation required, but I will definitely have it figured out by the time we reach Honolulu!
No comments:
Post a Comment