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The ship's schedule included 9 sea
days and 8 port days. On the sea days passengers could loaf to their
hearts' content or take in a range of dozens of activities from sports to
eating! With food available 24 hours a day, eating probably emerges as one of
the top ten favorite activities on board ship. One could start with breakfast
at 6 a.m., have a snack at 11:00, lunch from noon to 4 p.m., take tea
starting at 3:30 p.m., follow up with cocktails at 5:30 p.m., dinner at 6
p.m. (or 8 p.m.) for second seating guests), and finish with a late-night
snack and dessert bar, and if that wasn't enough, room service was
available, too!
The Lido deck featured swimming,
sunbathing, a bar, access to a spa and beauty salon, plus the additional
reward of hot dogs, tacos, and hamburgers all afternoon!
We can't let this page go without
mentioning the Indonesian and Filipino stewards and wait staff who made us
more comfortable. Our room steward (Leti) kept our digs neat and clean, in
spite of us! We tried to stay out of his way, since he had a lot of work to
do each day, and we did sincerely appreciate his attention to our needs. We
never did get his picture but we will remember him always.
Our dining room comforts were looked
after quite admirably by headwaiter Wayan S., who turned out to be quite an
interesting fellow.
A family man from Indonesia, Wayan
likes to send letters home to his son (who's in college) full of advice
and tales of his travels. Wayan plays several musical instruments and
performs as a dancer in the ship's crew show. He hopes to retire and
spend much of his time pursuing spiritual studies and helping out his poorer
countrymen. He told us several Indonesian folk tales featuring monkeys, gods,
and goddesses and interpreted several of the dances performed by the crew
during the crew show. We felt very much at home with Wayan.
Jefferson was our table waiter and
quite a wit! We enjoyed his company. He was interested in the night sky and
so we took him out one night for a little stargazing and
planet-watching.
We took this picture during the parade
of the Baked Alaska, surely one of the corniest, funniest presentations at
sea. Probably Holland America doesn't intend for it to be funny, but it
is in an old-fashioned kind of way. Even guests who have experienced it
before laugh and clap as the waiters come running through the dining room
hefting trays of Baked Alaska crowned with sparklers, all to the jaunty
strains of Johann Strauss's Radetsky March.
Actually what was more fun was
watching the guy with the blow torch at the back of the room lighting the
sparklers as each waiter ran out the door of the kitchen! Guess we'll
always be nerds at heart!
Carolyn finds time to loaf on the
Lido.
Mark preferred to do most of his
loafing in the stateroom! He'd play computer games or read one of the
Robert Sawyer science-fiction books he brought along for the trip.
Occasionally he'd do some Web
programming, too! We brought along an MP3 player and some speakers, giving
ourselves almost all the comforts of home!
This was the scene during one of our
heavy sea days. We had upwards of 70 mile per hour winds at times, rain, and
high waves.
When the seas were really bad the best
thing to do was hole up in the stateroom with a good book and hope for the
best! If the rockin' and rollin' got to be too much, there was always
a good supply of anti-seasickness drugs at the front desk. Fortunately,
neither of us needed them very much.
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On formal dinner nights we were
greeted with the most amazing array of decorations at the entrance to the
Rotterdam dining room. This ice sculpture stood near the main door on
the last formal night.
According to our cruise director
(Yvette Sechrist) one of the top ten "funny" questions that
passengers ask is, "What do you do with the ice sculptures after
they've melted?"
The Rotterdam dining room on formal
night....
...and the Petersens on formal
night!
(Do we clean up good or what?)
Here we are with Captain Jonathan
Mercer, a British officer and acquaintance of Carolyn's editor at
Cambridge University Press.
DESSERT!
One of the most popular events on any
Holland America cruise is the Dutch chocolate extravaganza. It's
basically a big dessert bar filled with the most fantastic treats you can
imagine. The decorations are carved chocolate statues, castles, swans, and
other creations. The cooks in the ship's bakery make up one whole dessert
bar just for decoration and photography, and a second one for consumption.
People turn out in droves for this!
And they waste no time in sampling
everything!
The chefs work all week creating these
lovely desserts and they deserve the huge round of applause they get from the
passengers.
How did the passengers work off all
the food? In the mornings and evenings the lower promenade deck thundered to
the beat of hundreds of walkers doing their daily "walk-a-mile"
program in an effort to stave off the dreaded pound-a-day weight
gain.
When we weren't eating, sleeping,
or running around the ship, we could indulge ourselves in reading in the
library, sports on various decks, kitchen tours, ice carving demonstrations,
games in the card room, shopping in the arcade, gambling in the casino, a
film in the Wajang movie theater, cocktails and dancing in the bars, coffee
in the Java Café, Email in the Internet Café@Sea, swimming in
the pools, exercise and a massage in the spa, and lectures and shows in the
Vermeer Lounge. Carolyn's lecture sessions were part of an
intensive lecture series focused on the geography, history, varied cultures,
exploration, and astronomy of each South American country we
visited.
In addition, the Vermeer hosted a
highly popular series of Broadway-style shows, concerts, Bingo games, crew
shows, and an Officers' Ball. It also served as the main gathering places
for shore excursions.
There were a few quiet corners here
and there where a solitary passenger could get away from everything. If the
weather was good, the top decks offered the perfect place to watch the
wilderness glide by.
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