The next day (Sunday) all but four couples from our caravan bus to Port Canaveral and board Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas, a colossus of a ship. At 4:00 PM, after a chaotic safety mustering, we check our cabin and find our bags have arrived, our wine cube undisturbed. (Later we hear Bill successfully carried rum aboard in a couple of old coke bottles. Beth and Lionel, however, were forced to watch as their newly bought hooch was poured down a drain. )
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| A just recovered booster from the shuttle launch, viewed from our ship. NASA Canaveral facilities in background. |
The Freedom, built in Finland, is less than five years old and until 2009 was the largest cruise ship in the world. We have about 4100 passengers (capacity 4300) and 1400 crew.
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| State-of-the-art pirate defense. |
She is clean and dining is elegant in a three-story restaurant, open in the center so there is one main floor and two horseshoo-shaped balcony restaurants. The main theater seats 1350. There are informal restaurants plus extra-cost specialty restaurants, an ice rink, a wave rider, a miniature golf course, a boxing ring, and all the more typical amenities of modern cruising. There are 14 public decks, including a long center promenade with stores, casino, entertainment lounges, and specialty restaurants. Cellphones work: $2.40 per minute; Internet access (including WiFi in the room) is $.65/minute. We use neither.
On Monday we awaken at
CocoCay©, 218 nautical miles southeast of Port Canaveral – a little more than a typical caravan drive day. On land we travel about 60 MPH; here, 18-24 MPH.
CocoCay© is the western-most island in the Bahamas and is for the exclusive use of Royal Caribbean. I don’t know the island’s real name. Princess has its equivalent private beach. Norwegian has the private use of another nearby island. We see no other cruise ships, but we can see many empty lounge chairs spread along the shore of the Norwegian controlled island.
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| Photo by Kathy Warren |
We beat the crowds and catch our ship’s tender about 9 AM for CocoCay.
CocoCay is only 60 miles east of I think Palm Beach but it is stage-crafted as everybody’s dream of an exotic isle – hand-painted signs lifted from performances of South Pacific, brightly painted food shacks with boards nailed sometimes at odd angles, restrooms labeled “men” or “women”, other times “male” or “female”. Lounge chairs as far as you can see on white beaches, beautiful emerald water, and parasails in the sky. Crew members wander proffering cooling CocoLocos (extra cost), a Bahamian band playing live in the central plaza. The beach sand is probably native but the small harbor for the tenders is too neat to have occurred other than from dynamiting coral. The sand in the central areas looks imported and deposited thinly over leveled coral. Royal Caribbean’s stage crafting works well but they are unable to control one thing: we are mostly seniors with only a handful of lithe and sexy young females. (Actually, one would be a handful.)
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| Marcia spots iguanas. |
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| A "monument" to Blackbeard, not a real grave. |
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| Yes, the water is very shallow, and cool today. |
We catch the 10:30 AM island nature walk (Guided, $15/person). It is promoted as 1½ hours covering 3/4ths of a mile of this 2x3-mile island. With difficulty our Bahaman guide stretches the walk to almost an hour. Other than just wandering or lying on the beach, this is the cheapest activity available. We then spend until 1:30 PM wandering or lying on the beach and return to the ship, reasonably satisfied.
Tuesday is a pleasant day at sea as we move to the eastern Caribbean
US Virgin Island of St. Thomas. At my insistence we attend the shopping advise tour in the theater. This consists of Jen (without guilt or break for even a gulp of water) heavily touting for 90 minutes certain stores and her “VIP passes” guaranteeing special care from the merchant. I think my favorite was a store selling a particular brand of watch containing a tuning fork tuned to the exact same frequency as planet Earth, thus protecting the wearer from cell tower radiation.
With this advice, we are anxious to get ashore.
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| We slip sideways in to our space at St. Thomas. |
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| Marcia checks the bow lines of the Freedom. |
The next morning, inch-by-inch the captain draws us nearer the St. Thomas wharf, parallel parking between two cruise ships; there is no detectible bump as we snuggle tight. This is the port city of Charlotte Amalie. The easily accessed area is nothing but long narrow buildings with stores offering jewelry, liquor, tobacco, watches, cameras, t-shirts, and (I guess) fine clothing. With three cruise ships in port everything is crowded. We were unimpressed with St. Thomas on a previous cruise so we sign up shipboard for a four-hour “Eco” tour of neighboring
St. John Island and site of US Virgin Islands National Park, new to us. It is 80+ degrees and the tour representatives are unable to tell us the amount or difficulty of hiking or much of anything else so we load up with waters and delay disembarking until just before the start of our 12:15 PM guided tour.
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| Sugarcane refinery, abandoned with the end of slavery. |
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| Kapok tree, with termite trails (nest to rear). |
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| The newest Disney ship departs St. Thomas. |
But I asked the wrong question: I should have asked how long does the ferry to St Johns take, as it turned out it consumes almost half of our tour time round trip, and the promised historical guide could not be heard over the engine noise. The “small group” nature hike is about a mile and consists of 13, and as number 11 in line I can hear nothing of this dialogue, either. We are also allotted 45 minutes for beach rest. Cost including all transportation: $69/each. Pleasant but expensive for what it did.
Back on ship, we go to the 9:00 PM theater show, featuring the onboard musical groups. While listening to a rock band, the leader introduces a special guest performer - our captain, an easy-talking Norwegian now living in Kentucky. That guy, in uniform but wearing dark glasses, shreds his electronic guitar impressively for about a minute, all the same chord, before the rest of the group joins in, drowning out whatever he may be doing. Multitalented, but when the time came, I bet he made the best career choice.
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| Somewhere up there is a Mick Jagger house. |
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| Lunch on the French side. |
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| If you really like your old car and your dead relatives, you plant them in the front yard. |
Thursday we arrive at Phillipsburg, the capital of Dutch St. Maarten. While disembarking I chat with a tall, slim cheerful man named Gene and learn he is on his 84th cruise, but the first since his wife died. He has many shipboard credits so they gave him a two-room family suite. He and his wife obviously enjoyed cruising and she told him to continue, and he is giving it a try.
We are leery of spending too much for ship-organized tours after our experiences but also don’t want the hassle of arranging something with a cab driver. So we settle for a ship arranged bus tour of St Maarten (as the Dutch call it) and Saint-Martin (as the French call their portion); $24/each. The island seems more interesting than St Thomas but it is difficult to get to know both since everything is so focused on shopping. We did note that signs in St Maarten are in English and prices are in US dollars, while in Saint-Martin goods are priced in Euros (dollars accepted) and signs are in French. Saint-Pierre, off the coast of Newfoundland, seemed far more French than Saint-Martin.
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| Friends forever. |
Later we stroll the pleasant shopping streets of Phillipsburg in St. Maarten and take a gamble that jewelry prices and quality really are good: Marcia now has a very nice diamond pendant and gold chain to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary this August. As for my personal shopping, there is a clothing store where if you walk in and say the store name, you receive a gift. I walk in and say the store name, then say it again at a semi-shout at their insistence, and I now own a nice necklace of bamboo and shell. I wore it that night to dinner, along with my island shirt from home.
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| Our wait staff sings Italian tonight. |
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| Our ship is reasonably stable in 10' swells. |
The food is becoming tiresome onboard, but we man-up and persist. The wait staff is from 24 nations and our waiter, from Bali, is personable and excellent; he has a wife and children at home. All the employees are affable but are not permitted to see passengers socially on their few hours off-duty. We don’t know what laws, if any, control this environment but it is a very tight ship. The visible crew seems to work two shifts daily for seven days a week, with weeks before any off-ship time. Tips certainly account for a good portion of their pay.
Saturday morning, tiring of breakfast at the crowded windjammer on the 11th deck, we go to the main restaurant. As usual, the staff guides everybody to one of the many handy Purell dispensers before leading us to a table. Another couple joins us – a very short senior man and his senior wife. We recognize them instantly: in one of the stage shows, a comedian grabbed them from the front row as part of a bit. In typical conversation the comedian asked them how long they’ve been married, and he answered a believable fifty years; she said four years.
Over breakfast we learn both lost their previous spouses, and four years ago they met and fell in love and married.
More interesting, he was a successful jockey for five years ending in his early twenties and knew the greats - Shoemaker and Arcaro – and raced everywhere including Santa Anita. Unfortunately in his last race his horse tried to jump a fence. Both tumbled, the horse breaking two legs and our new friend escaping with no broken bones but shattered hearing – from gunshots, as the horse was destroyed while he lay pinned underneath. He confesses to becoming a chicken (his word) at that point and spent the remainder of his working life in banking. He made and spent a lot as a jockey and had a good life. Banking also worked out for him, but there were a lot fewer groupies.
