Holly Doyne

Yes, to the complete and total surprise of the town, we remained docked overnight. According to several passengers who partied on shore, several of the pubs stayed open past their normal 10 pm closing time in order to accommodate both passengers and crew. The drinkers assured them that our ship was not the Titanic and it was bound for Amsterdam.

I am not sure that the pub really cared as long as the Euros kept flowing.

I wandered off early and came back just about the same. The wind wasn’t as bad as yesterday, but the seas picked up immediately after we left the harbor.

White Lines Pier

Looking at town as we sail out

It is official and planned. Today will be our last day at sea in this run. Tomorrow morning we will dock in Cobh and leave there on Wednesday 1600. Yep, overnight. Dublin is completely a non-starter unless someone wants to take the train up on Tues and come back late the same day or the following day prior to sailing.

I don’t really care, but a lot of people really, really want to put foot in Irish soil. Most especially, I am assuming, the two Irish Immigration officers who boarded in the Azores. I don’t think that Amsterdam is in their plans.

Spent the afternoon sitting and relaxing with Carmen while we both did needlework.

I had been planning on using the second meal on my BOGO tonight. Mentioned it to Carmen and Stu, they decided to join me since they have OBC to burn. When I went to round them up in the Colony Club we added two more people to the party. Amazing that I received no pushback from the restaurant going from solo to three to five.  Lovely run dinner and I just made it back to the cabin.

Having been to Cobh before, I am going to avoid the mad rush off the ship and head off late morning. This is a stop with a couple of small museums, several nice hotels which serve tea, and a grocery store with yarn tucked up in bags over the dairy case.

This is a sea day. But what I meant to say is that there are a lot of reasons why people fail to maintain their weight or lose weight on a cruise. Now, if the food is horrible, this is not an issue. If it is your first cruise with a particular line, your lack of status usually means that you are spared various offering of food and drink delivered directly to your cabin.

I might have already mentioned being happily surprised when the room service person came back with a number of bottles of water to replace the bottle of wine (sparkling?) that I had politely but firmly refused about the second day of the cruise.

Since then there have been various deliveries of

• plates of small snacky things

• plates of canapes

a cheese plate

Today was the crowning glory –

no need for dinner

Just in case you can’t tell – there is a dark chocolate shell, caramel sauce, a chocolate dipped strawberry with almond. Inside the shell is a coffee flavored mouse with a dusting of expresso on top nestled on a bed of chocolate cake crumb.

and yes, the strawberry went first

I can sit in the cabin, stitch, relax and pretend that I am not a little old grey haired lady!

me – 14 April

Or Pinnacle Lunch if I am being polite. Which, in this case, I am not.

I received the invitation several days ago to a luncheon for the Pinnacles on board for 1200 in one of the specialty restaurants. Now, I don’t have much, if anything at all in common other than status level in Royal Caribbean’s program. But a free lunch is s free lunch.

Right?

Well…. my first error of the morning was closing my eyes for a few minutes which led to waking in a panick shortly after noon. Hustling down to the meeting place, I skidded in just as everyone was settling in for lunch. There were name cards.

At first I thought it was great luck to be seated on the end. Then the “gentleman” next to me started talking. He was loud, intrusive and seemed inclined to think we all wanted his opinions and stories.

I suffered through lunch. As an aside, the food in the Windjammer has been most excellent. Much better than this, beautifully plated but meh. The service was strange with one side of the rable receiving their meals 15 minutes before the second side. Fleeing the scene as soon as it was polite to do so, I rate the ship high on effort but well beliw the Explorer, Serenade, Splendour or Legend in execution.

Back into my cubby without voices ringing in my ears. Thank you very much

It might be a lovely city to visit, and I have done that, with nice weather and friendly people it is NOT, repeat NOT a place to change planes if you are flying Southwest. Since I am headed to Tampa, it was obvious that I was going to have to change planes somewhere. It is easy as pie to walk to my local bus stop and admire my neighbors fence while waiting for the bus –
 

which kind of takes away the pain of finding you have missed the 65 which heads down the hill every 20 minutes in the middle of the day by about… oh, let us say … 5 minutes which results in a rather long wait. Once on the bus, getting to Berkeley and BART to Oakland Airport is easy. Being gifted again with TSA pre-check, I sailed through security and had plenty of time to fix my lack of coffee while waiting in the terminal. Boarding – no problem.

And then there is San Diego. Gates 1 & 2 are physically separated from the rest of the gates used by Southwest. And by separated I mean you go OUT past security and baggage claim, past the checkin counters and have to run the gauntlet of TSA once again to reach Gate 6. There is no short cut, there is no pass by (which is routine at most airports where you have to go from one quasi-connected terminal to another). Even Frankfurt deals with this. Heathrow? Just one more of the reasons that I avoid Heathrow at all costs.

But where was I? Oh yes, going through security once again and hoping that I wasn’t going to miss my boarding position.

Then onwards to Tampa where I rounded up my luggage, finally tracked down the hotel shuttle (how was I to know that RED had both an area 1 and and area 2 pickup zone?) and checked in to the hotel. I felt like I had lived through each and every minute of those missing three hours of time zone change. Exhausted, I crawled into bed. Then couldn’t fall asleep……

Not us, but Southwest Airlines.

We didn’t find out our plane was delayed until after we arrived at the airport, dropped off bags and hustled through security.

0940 Departure said the board.

Oh. Apparently there needed to be a plane change due to a pending late arriving aircraft.

Then it was a mechanical issue and a new plane was coming in from LA.

Meanwhile, we waited and waited. The flight actually didn’t leave till 1120 or so…. I entertained myself by talking to a lot of different people. A nice lady was headed to Oakland for a couple of days of meetings but didn’t actually have anything on the schedule today other than coordinating with the colleague who would have the rental car coming in from a different city. A gentlemen heading to Las Vegas for four days. Working for Staples – he will be manning a booth at some kind of convention. Several others headed back to the East Bay, most of whom had planned on being at work by noon….

Oh – I know what I forgot to mention! George has to be in San Diego tomorrow. In fact, he has a 1545 flight from Oakland to San Diego. Now, if I had originally known about this, I would have simply booked him from PHX to San Diego. He checked with Southwest; they would rather not retrieve his suitcase and change flights as they were now predicting at least two hours between flights. (Bags checked because we were far enough down the numbers I didn’t think there was going to be overhead compartment room on the flight – my bad).

It was about 1330 when we arrived in Oakland. After claiming the luggage, George headed for check in and I found the car in the long term parking, paid the ransom and headed for home. I didn’t even unpack tonight, just decided to get some sleep.

Ring…..