Sunday, May 3

San Juan, PR (again). This was most-everybody-else-gets-off day. The 50 or 60 of us who are staying on for this coming week still had to get up early to get breakfast in one of the dining rooms. Then about 10:45, after everyone else had disembarked, we grouped up in one of the lounges, trailed off the ship, through the terminal (which looked very strange and empty without any luggage in it), were handed our new key cards, and trouped back onto the ship again. It all went extremely smoothly, so maybe this week will show some improvement in their attention to details (which was rather lacking last week). The new lot of passengers began trickling on board around lunchtime.

This week I made it a priority to be first in line at the Shore Excursion Desk. So I got all my questions asked about accessibility of various tours. Presumably the answers will come back from the various islands and tour operators over the next day or so. And hopefully, I’ll be able to do some snorkeling and other neat stuff this week in addition to my much-anticipated visit with Cathy and Greg and Nicole and maybe et al. in Grenada.

When I finally touched base back at my cabin this afternoon, I found a whole second complimentary mini-bar set up on a tray! I haven’t used any of the stuff in the fridge from the first week, so have asked a rather startled Adan to take the second set away. Being a multi-multi-returning passenger has some nice perks: like enough Internet credit to take care of everything I need to do online, the free mini-bar set up, free laundry and dry cleaning, plus 10% off everything in all the shops on board, and a few others I haven’t used yet like afternoon tea in the cabin and hors d’oeuvres delivered to your cabin on formal nights (you need to plan ahead and place your order at least 6 hours in advance for these two...hey, I’m on vacation...who’s planning ahead!).

Speaking of food, it will be interesting to see what happens at dinner this evening. They have again got me assigned to a completely different table from Mark and Mary, and who knows where they’ve put Mark’s cousin and the couple from England who are supposed to be with the 3 of us this week. Mary assures me that she’s got it all fixed with the Maitre d’ this time, so we’ll see. Later: yes, everything worked out okay at dinner. We were joined by Mark’s cousin, Pat, and an English couple, Tony and Cath, whom Mark and Mary met several years ago when Tony and Cath were on their honeymoon cruise. It’s a good group!

I didn’t take any photos of San Juan today since we’re docked at the same place as before...way away from the old picturesque downtown area. There are commercial docks visible from the port side and, if you’re high enough to see over the passenger terminal building on the starboard side, about all you can see is an air strip for small planes. Not worth spending battery power and pixels on (sorry, Tom, I know you’d be interested in the planes.)

Monday, May 4

At sea. Our second and last sea day of the trip. I spent a big chunk of it in a comfy deck chair on Promenade Deck.

Deck chair day dreaming –
the sea breeze, the waves and the
fitness folk marching.

It’s a long time between lunch and second sitting dinner, so eventually I came back inside and collected a couple of cookies to take back to my cabin. The buffet on Lido Deck almost always has really excellent brownies...of which I try to limit my intake...and one flavor of cookies. The latter are large and quite durable (yet not crunchy) with a minimum number of chocolate chips included. A couple of these do definitely fill the void and give the old jaws a workout.