[Editor’s note: Internet access on the ship was only available at an exorbitant cost, so I wrote my entries but didn’t post them. Additionally, I left at home the adapter that connects my camera to my iPad, so I couldn’t upload any of my photos. I’ll be rolling the photos into the posts and posting the entries over the next few days.]
zzz
…
This is the captain from the navigation bridge [read with a heavy Italian accent]…
…
zzz
…
This is the captain from the navigation bridge…
…
zzz
…
This is the captain from the navigation bridge…
…
zzz
…
This is the captain from the navigation bridge…
Sigh.
…
zzz
…
munch munch munch
glug glug glug
flip flip flip
…
zzz
phsh phsh phsh
click click click
That is a summary of the our first day at sea beginning with bedtime on Saturday night and ending at around 5 on Sunday afternoon. Lots of sleeping and taking it easy. Four emergency announcements between 2 and 4 a.m. Eating and drinking and reading a book, a nap, a shower, and some time roaming the deck taking pictures.
During the night (so I overheard), a man had a heart attack, and the captain summoned a helicopter to evacuate him back to Miami. Unfortunately, the helicopter couldn’t carry enough fuel to reach us, so we turned around and headed back toward Miami. When we got within the copter’s range, the victim was evac’d, and we are now four hours behind schedule. We’ll have to reschedule or cancel our excursion in Curaçao. (Heart attacks seem to be a loose theme to my cruises. Some of you may recall that on my very first cruise—which I almost skipped because of my irrational fear of large, moving ships—a passenger descending the stairs literally two arm lengths in front of me had a massive coronary. The medical staff later said that he was dead before he hit the ground.)
After being wishy-washy about it for two days, I finally broke down and bought the unlimited soda, juice, mocktails, and hot chocolate drink package. I turn into a cheapskate on cruises and struggled to justify the $7-per-day price. Because I’m prone to get dehydrated on vacation, I think it was probably the right choice. I can only drink so much hot tea and tepid water in a day.
I brought two books with me: Krakatoa, the story of the massive eruption and the world-wide effects of the eruption of the Javanese island of Krakatoa in the late nineteenth century. If I’m remembering correctly, it was the loudest sound in recorded history, and it pretty much destroyed the entire island and changed global weather for a year. I haven’t started that one. The other book I brought is called The Professor and the Madman. It’s the story of the Oxford English Dictionary and the confluence of the lives of the man charged with creating it (it took more than 70 years; he didn’t live to see it finished) and its most prolific contributor (with more than 10,000 accepted submissions), who happened to be imprisoned in the Broadmoor asylum for the criminally insane for killing a man that he mistook to be the phantom who, he imagined, had been plaguing him in his room at night. And when I said “Oxford English Dictionary,” you thought it would be a dry and dusty read, didn’t you?
I’m not going to caption the photos below; they’re pretty self-explanatory shots of the ship.
