Cruising is not everyone’s ideal vacation, but to do what we will do in the next two weeks without a cruise ship could require no fewer than six airport visits. Not only that, there is also the packing, unpacking, re-packing, boarding passes, bag checking and luggage hauling associated with each stop. The trade off is the length of stay at travel destinations. You rarely get to visit a port for more that eight to 12 hours. For us, cruising works, particularly to a warm location during a Canadian winter.
So, Tuesday we made our way to San Pedro and the awaiting Star Princess. At about 8 AM our luggage was picked up from our hotel room to be delivered to our stateroom. Just after 11:45 we boarded a motor coach and by 12:40 we were in our stateroom. We had barely emptied our carry-on bags when our checked luggage was delivered. We grabbed a burger for lunch and Gail had her first chocolate ice cream cone of the trip.
It is interesting to wander about the ship on embarkation day. You needn’t wait long to see the “deer in the headlights” look. There seems to be a conspiracy to confuse as many passengers as possible. Stateroom addresses use a letter to denote the deck and odd numbers for rooms on the starboard side with even numbers assigned to the port side. The elevators, or lifts if you prefer, denote floors by number. therefore, you first need to know that elevator floor 12 has room addresses beginning with “A” then 11 equals “B” and so on down. It seems easy but there will be some still working this problem on day 10. The antics when passengers leave the elevators is equally interesting. There are signs in every elevator vestibule indicating port and starboard sides and the correspondence with odd and even numbers, however there are three columns of elevators some of which face forward and others face aft. Passengers who have associated port with left find themselves quite lost for a moment when they leave an aft facing elevator. I leave it to you to work out why that might be so.
Dinner and the first evening passed quietly. the lounge musicians lill be quite enjoyable if the first experience is any indication. Having injured her left rotator cuff just prior to leaving home Gail is struggling to get it back in shape to dance. Before leaving home she paid three visits to the chiropractor and this morning, Wednesday, spent 30 minutes with one of the massage therapists on board. She managed to negotiate what we will just refer to as “a preferential rate” while we are in the port of Ensenada, Mexico.
We did not disembark at Ensenada but I did take a couple of photos of the dock area. There was only one lonely, perhaps, harbour seal on the rocks. We departed bound for Honolulu at 4:30 PM. There are more photos almost daily and the link is available on the photos page. You should find the link in the top menu. ———————30————————
