May 24 - 25

May 24, cruise two begins. After a night and morning luxuriating, and a lovely room service breakfast splurge at the St. Ermin's Hotel, at 12:15, a bus-load of us are finally headed through the rain and London traffic, albeit slowly, toward Southampton. No photos as it's raining and I'm too far back in the bus for a good shot.

We've just passed where the Horse Guards are usually stationed, but each horse and rider were standing guard in a separate, fancy, little stone shelter, still looking resplendent in their red and gold get-ups. Next was a very wet statue of Lord Nelson presiding over the traffic at Trafalgar Square. There seem to be an unusually large number of red buses clogging the streets. Our driver says that there are always more buses about when it rains. A brief glimpse of St. James Palace, but no Royals living there at the moment. 

Even stopped in traffic (as we are stopped more than moving ahead) the shop windows are so very interesting, and the more up-scale, the more stylish. Of course Harrod's is still there...I haven't been in there in decades, but our driver says you can still get almost anything at all at Harrod's.

Part of the reason for all the extra traffic is the Chelsea Flower Show. We went by it yesterday, and are evidently going by or near it again today. There was a program about it on tv last might. I certainly wouldn't want to go there in this weather! Another factor for bad traffic was the start of the Bank Holiday weekend. Our driver says he's never had it be that bad all the way out of the city. 

Finally, after more than an hour, we got out of London, and reached one of the Motorways which are the equivalent of our Interstate highways. We whizzed along for a while, then made an unscheduled (at least for us passengers) stop at a service plaza because our driver was going to run out of drive time before we get to the dock. There are strict rules about drivers taking breaks, so we had to stop for at least 45 minutes. So at 3:15 we got moving again with, hopefully, only about an hour left to go.

We got to the pier about 4:20. After checking in, we had to wait another 45 minutes in a very drafty, yea, even windy, building at about 48F because the gangway had shifted somehow. Finally we were allowed to move to an unheated but not actually windy space with chairs for another good wait. I got to my cabin about 6:20. Evidently others were even later as we were supposed to sail at 5:00 and didn't get away until after 8:15. Probably the emergency landing at Heathrow this morning that closed one runway for most of the morning delayed flights all day, then add in the weather and the bad traffic on the roads. During dinner we finally slipped away down Southampton Water toward the Isle of Wight.

My table companions this cruise include Ray and Irene who live just outside Southampton and rode the train just two stops to get to the ship. The others are a party of four from Istanbul, but I don't know their names. I would guess they are a couple plus the wife's sister and niece, but am not sure. They do speak some English, but my Turkish is non-existent so I don't how much we'll be able to converse. There do seem to be a lot of Americans on board. Enough for now.

May 25 at St. Peter's Port. Guernsey, Channel Islands. Another photo-less day. Although the sun has been out, the temperature is still in the low 50s, but as one lady on the tender said, "One step at a time."

I had a brief, late morning tour scheduled. I say brief because we were only at Guernsey for a bit over half a day. As it turned out (and I should have remembered), St. Peter's Port is too small for a ship our size, so we were anchored off at a spot that looked to be almost halfway to Sark, and tendered in. I managed to board the tender without too much drama, and got back off it at the dock as well. Then I looked up. This area has very high and low tides, and it was low tide at this point. There was a concrete stairway of between 20 and 30 high, narrow, wet steps with one spindly-looking handrail on the INSIDE rather than between you and the water.  I tried it, but only got about six steps up (with help from some of the shop's crew) when I decided to back out and return to the ship. They told me that in the early morning when we arrived, there were only about 6 or 8 steps showing up to the pier. 

When I visited here in 2000 with Mark, Jeff and Simon, not only was the weather warmer in March, but I saw much more of the island than this tour covered, so I don't feel too bad about missing the tour. I came back, had a sandwich and a couple of hot chocolates, and met some folks from Houston before taking a nice nap (an inside cabin is really great for naps!). It's been a good while since I gained weight on a cruise. If I do gain on this trip, it will be the hot chocolates to blame!