World cruise 39

April 4

We spent the day poking along in the southeastern Mediterranean. The original schedule had us at Aqaba, Jordan. The skip-Egypt-revised-schedule had us transiting the Suez Canal today. Like I said, Plan J or K. So, tomorrow we should be back to the revised schedule.

April 5 (Easter Sunday)

Okay, yes, we are at Ashdod, Israel on Easter Sunday, and this is the port for Jerusalem. Most of the tours from here go there and take 9 to 10 hours on a normal day. It appeared that most of the passengers and some of the crew went off on tours. Margaret and I didn't. Item 1: neither of us likes big crowds. Item 2: neither of us is so religious as to overcome Item 1.

I was here in Ashdod back in 2010. That time I skipped the 10-hour Jerusalem tour I had booked because I was so exhausted from the 13-hour tour from Port Said to Giza the day before. My description of that day is maybe the 4th or 5th post for that cruise way back down this blog. From reports of friends who did go this time, Jerusalem seems to have survived my multiple absences just fine.

April 6

Haifa, Israel. Morning started cloudy, but cleared up nicely. As with Ashdod, I was here in 2010. This time I didn't find any tour that I hadn't done that I thought I would be able to do, so declared it an "at dock" sea day.

After lunch Margaret went out for a ramble. It's pretty much all uphill from here as you can see in this photo taken from our back deck. She went up to the Bahai gardens, but the shrine and most of the gardens were closed. That's the gold/beige domed building in the center of the photo. The gardens extend both up and down the slope, and in the photo the garden terraces look like white horizontal bars.

This is the world headquarters of the Bahai faith which originated in Persia and whose members were persecuted and driven out of their homeland. More about it at www.bahai.org.

I stayed on board and worked on a very complicated necklace that I'm crocheting from silver colored thread wrapped with what I think is a tiny strip of mylar to give it sparkle. It does indeed sparkle, but also causes the thread to twist up which is a royal pain.

April 7

A sea day like most others until the evening. At a fancy cocktail party before the evening's formal dinner, we were hobnobbing with the nabobs. Stein Kruse, CEO of Carnival's Holland America Group (which also includes Princess and Seaborne), his wife Linda, and the new Holland America Line President Orlando Ashford joined the ship in Haifa and will be with us until Athens. Lots of fancy doings are scheduled ... some for all, some for us repeat customers, and some for those with 1,000 and more days on Holland America ships ... and there are a goodly number of those latter folks on board.

Well, we weren't exactly hobnobbing as that's not how a big cocktail party on board works. You get all dressed up (most of the men and a few of the women hate that). You go wait in line to get in (unless you're late). You nod and smile to people in the reception line (no more shaking hands...too unsanitary). You find a place to sit (very little wandering around or mingling). Waiters pass among you with trays of pre-made drinks and hors d'oeuvres (the drinks are pretty predictable, but the hors d'oeuvres might be almost anything the chefs have dreamed up). Once everybody is there, the nabobs get up on stage for speeches. The speeches are usually short because everyone is ready for dinner (heaven forbid that anyone should miss or be late for a meal).

This afternoon I finally went and weighed myself on the fancy electronic scale up in the gym. So here's the fatty-flabby trundling past all the sweaty, slender, hard-bodies, but I don't care because, while the actual number will remain private, the number is at least 4 less than in my doctor's office 3 weeks before I left on this cruise. As Jill used to say, "It's farther from my cabin to the dining room than from my living room to my kitchen."