World cruise 44

April 16

A day at sea -- for real. Nothing unusual. I began another baby blanket using Project Linus yarn. This one is a shade of pink so hot you could cook on it. I've named it "Penny Pimk" as it's one of her favorite colors.

In the evening we went to see a Beatles tribute band perform. They were excellent and got the majority of the audience up and dancing in the aisles. Margaret had never seen anything Beatles-related before, but said she enjoyed it and had heard some of the melodies before. The first time she had seen anything like a popular music band perform was a couple of weeks ago when we saw an ABBA tribute band called ABBAFab here on board. She enjoyed that one also, although none of it was familiar.

April 17

We are just a short walk for most people, but a forever distance for me from Cartagena, Spain. It is a lovely city with a beautiful harbor as shown here.

Holland America's Eurodam is docked nose to nose with us adding a couple thousand more tourists to our own batch. Margaret went on a walking tour of the downtown area including more ruins and the castle up on the hill, but she can tell you about that.

This evening we went to hear an excellent flautist named Nestor Torres. Although certainly classically trained, he is very much into the Latin styles. I do not, however, understand why a flute should be electronically amplified, and nor why it needs reverb. It was, as with most musical acts here, painfully loud. I understand that the geriatric set mostly needs loud or at least can tolerate it, but I have a difficult time with it. Thus I seldom go to these things, but I thought a flautist would be do-able. Wrong again. Next time it's back to the balcony where I can duck out if necessary.

April 18

Well, Malaga, Spain was again inaccessible for me. When I was here in 2013, I didn't book a tour. The Royal Princess was docked so far out on the pier complex that you had to change shuttle buses just to get downtown, so I couldn't usefully make that trip. This time I had an "easy" tour booked, but once I headed for the tour buses, it turned out to be almost half a mile to walk with a third of it down a slope just to get near the bus parking lot. About 2/3 of the way there, already dragging and slowing down, I turned a corner, saw an unknown distance ahead with no sign of a bus, and just gave up and went back to the ship.

This kind of thing happens a lot. In most ports, the gangway location and the entrance to the terminal building plus the distance to the building's exit are set up to make passengers (and crew, but they're mostly young and healthy) walk as far as possible. Sometimes, if you're on a tour, the buses might board a little closer to the gangway, but then they probably bring you back to the far side of everywhere to make you walk past and sometimes through the terminal's duty free shops. Oh, and if there's no terminal building, there's a looong pier with vendors' booths at the shore end.

End of rant ... unless I think of something else. Now to hike back to the Front Desk to turn in an official rant form.

Later in the afternoon after she got back from her tour to the village of Mijas, Margaret pushed me in Leviathan (the rented wheelchair) down to the shops in the terminal. There a certain amount of fun but relatively inexpensive shopping got committed. We also greeted and were greeted by a number of both crew and passengers sitting in the terminal's free wifi zone. Back on board, we celebrated the lovely day by having a fancy drink out on Lido deck by the pool. (Thank you again, Jill, for the fine weather we've been having.)