Ok, so we officially hate time changes—again. I suppose it is the rate of change that’s the real problem. We have travelled across two oceans by ship, no problem. The same distance by plane and it takes one day per hour of change to get back to normal. Despite the difference in time our bodies put us to sleep this night at about the same time as at home. Then we awoke feeling rested only to discover we’re still in the same time zone as we began and now have three hours to wait for 7 AM local time and seven hours until our cruise port transportation is ready.
There are some positives I suppose. Our luggage will depart ahead of us and may be waiting in our stateroom when we arrive. We also have considerable loyalty status with the cruise line so pier side checkin usually happens quickly. In retrospect what does the time change really matter? For the next two weeks we have virtually no time sensitive events on the calendar anyway. Ah yes, I remember now. It’s the reverse trip where we do have things scheduled only now our bodies are working three hours late.
We managed breakfast, cereal purchased at a nearby shop where we also purchased wine, the real reason for visiting the shop. Our suitcases were picked up before 8:30 AM but we had to wait several cups of coffee until 11:45 for our turn to travel to the port. The actual bus trip took 30 minutes, check in was over and done with in 15 minutes, the longest wait was on the gangway where the identity pictures seemed to be taking extra time. Never-the-less, approximately one hour got us from the hotel room to stateroom. Despite the head start our luggage did not beat us to the room, for that we had to wait until 2:30 PM, meanwhile we had our embarkation day cheeseburger…and ice cream. The only minor glitch was the room setup with twin beds rather than queen. The steward fixed that but as it turns out, that was how it was booked and neither of us noticed.
The evening unfolded with a couple more “glitches”. At dinner I presented one of our gift coupons for a bottle of wine. Apparently, the particular item is no longer stocked. I was offered a chardonnay as a replacement for the cab sauvignon. Really? No! When a couple of other suggestions (at least red) failed in my opinion I asked the head waiter to simply refund the value of the gift certificate to my room account. I think I could have asked the head waiter to punch the captain and he would have been less offended. Eventually, he promised he would find a suitable alternative and send it to our room. That was how it was left until about 9 PM. The knock at the door was from room service with a bottle of the Mondavi originally ordered but twice the volume. I both won and lost that battle.
Battle number two occurred a few minutes after the wine arrived when a person arrived to deal with the balky TV remote with only half of the buttons operational. He seemed incapable of understanding why I wanted to disable closed captioning, one of the failed buttons. After a brief “discussion” he ran away and returned in a few minutes with an almost completely working remote—except for the on/off button. Oh well!
Backing up a bit, during the evening we renewed acquaintance with entertainers Dave and Leialoha who are again operating the Hawaiian Cultural program on board. We missed the only performance by the Sun Shine Duo but as we exited the theatre to escape a rather unfunny comedian, we heard a voice call out to us, we turned and it was Anna, one of the two women who are the Sun Shine Duo who made us promise to come and dance with them on Thursday.
I believe that pretty much finished the day.
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