Amsterdam, June 12

Yesterday evening was the last of the cruise for a lot of people. At dinner they did the "Parade of the Flaming Baked Alaska" thing in the dining room. For the first several decades of my cruising experience, there were actual flames involved with a little can of sterno in the top of each Baked Alaska, and they turned out most of the dining room lights as the assistant waiters paraded around to martial music while passengers clapped and waved their napkins. About ten years ago, the real flames went away (either by law or by lawsuit), and were replaced by sparklers, but the parade was still fun and fairly spectacular. Now, for pity's sake, the sparklers have been replaced by things that look like a cross between LED Christmas candles and flashlights. It's just totally not the same any more. It didn't help that at 9:30 pm it was still broad daylight outside. Sheesh!

But the good part of the dining room, at least on this ship, is that the rules have evidently been relaxed somewhat, because the captain of our area allowed our assistant waiter, Imanuel, to bring his guitar up tonight, and after dinner he serenaded our section with several numbers. Also, a few nights ago the dining room captain let our waiter, Sugeng, show us some of the shirts his mother had painted along with photos on his iPad of the gorgeous dresses and other things that she paints and sells. Jill and I are going to get her website URL, and I will share it so you can see her beautiful work. She will be in Amsterdam for 2 weeks this summer as part of an Indonesian arts show.

Well, we managed a morning tour from Amsterdam without getting rained on, but it was completely cloudy, cold, and very windy. We had an excellent guide who kept us all laughing and groaning with horrible puns.

We left Amsterdam and drove to Zaanstad which is a small town that has become an unofficial open aIr museum and enormous tourist trap. I didn't even try to count the buses in the parking lot. It does, however, have one of the largest groups of windmills in one place, and what would a visit to the Netherlands be without seeing a windmill or four. There was also a cheese shop and a wooden shoe workshop/museum, plus a plethora of souvenir shops. Huge hordes of tourists roamed the place, with large numbers of Japanese all trying to take photos of each other standing in a pair of giant yellow wooden shoes.

Then we went to Edam (pronounced A-dam, not E-dam) which is a charming small town with virtually no tourists at all. I am very glad I went on this tour and saw Edam, but now I. Am. Wrecked. We got off the bus on one side of town, and walked for over 30 minutes on cobblestones, up and down over bridges to the other side of town with only one 4 minute opportunity to sit and rest. By the way, they do not make cheese in either Edam or Gouda (and I won't even attempt to tell you how that is pronounced properly). These two towns were the sites of cheese markets rather than cheese making.

Back on the ship, I gobbled some Tylenol (which didn't help a whole lot), then Jill and I phoned for room service and collapsed for a while as new people came on board, including about 300 Dutch. The ship has now added a Dutch cruise director in addition to "Miss Toodle-oo For Now" so every announcement takes twice as long. That's not really a problem, but it did keep us standing out on deck twice as long for the obligatory emergency drill before we sailed this afternoon.

Jill's next door neighbors at home, Peter and Mary, also boarded today for the next two weeks. I will meet them at dinner this evening. We are at a table for six, so we are wondering if there will be anyone else joining us for this part of the cruise...and sure enough, there was another couple at our table: Jan and Curtis from Birmingham, Alabama, although Peter and Mary are still unknown as they must have decided to eat elsewhere tonight. During dinner we saw our first North Sea oil platform shining in the sunset.

Thank heavens we have a sea day tomorrow. Maybe I will have recovered by the time we get to our next port of Alesund, Norway.

At sea

This morning we are bounding cheerfully over the main which is also bounding. Oh, it's not terribly rough, but it is significantly more motion than we have had in the past two weeks. You'd think that all the wind would blow away the fog outside, but it hasn't yet (11:00 am). The other thing that I didn't manage to pack was a hat, so I guess I'll have to see about buying one somewhere, at least before we get to North Cape. (Later) I found a hat, scarf and pair of gloves in the shop on board, so I'm ready.

All day today it has been cold, cloudy and windy. We are sailing directly into both the wind and swells, and it had gotten pretty roller-coastery by afternoon. These conditions do make for interesting interactions between the whitecaps on the swells and our bow waves. The captain has the "pedal to the metal" which would ordinarily mean that we would be making about 21 knots, but we are only doing about 18 knots. Hopefully, this front will be past us by the time we reach Alesund tomorrow.