Cruise 2025 - The Rock and Roll Cruise - Part 2 - Curacao Revisited

Hiding from over two thousand, six hundred and four other passengers on a ship less than a thousand feet long is really very easy, just stay in your room and order everything from room service. We don’t use room service except for the daily bottles of drinking water, but we do love being on the balcony during sea days. We aren’t hermits, but we love what can only be done while cruising on the open sea and the best place we’ve found to enjoy it is on our balcony. This trip is no exception. 

We head into the appropriately named Windward Passage early on the morning of our second day with a brilliant sunrise to the east just as Cuba comes into sight on the horizon to our west. Ilse and I go up to the open top deck and watch the awakening pool activity two decks below. The Windward Passage, the channel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea between Cuba and Hispaniola, has always intrigued me. We’ve sailed it four times now, and while we’re certainly not maritime experts, we’ve come to expert a different type of cruising here from anything else we have experienced. The appropriately named passage is always an interesting part of any cruise headed toward South America or the Panama Canal from the northern hemisphere. While it’s called the Windward Passage for good reason, the introduction, the first section has always been calm for us, almost a cunning lie to seduce unaware sailors. 

With Cuba in the background, we enter the tranquil Windward Passage toward Curacao

Breaking into the open Caribbean south of Hispaniola several hours later has always been enough to make whichever ship we’ve been on shudder and shake and the Rotterdam is no different. The wooden coat hangers in the closet even rattle. This is as pleasant as any other trip through here, and far from the worst when we had gale-force winds at 54 knots across our bow and fifteen to twenty foot seas while on the Crown Princess. The staircases on the Crown Princess squealed and banged in warped protest and water in the closed off pool deck sloshed higher than than the hand rail on the deck above. This passage was sedate by comparison, but still with enough personality to remind everyone why it is so named. We won’t be coming back this way as we will swing around the other side of Cuba for our return trip. We are headed toward Curacao, then Cartagena, and a quick stop at Gatun Lake, part of the Panama Canal, then we will visit Georgetown in Grand Cayman, a repeat of our 1993 visit way back in the last century, before heading back to Ft. Lauderdale by way of the Yucatan Channel between Cuba and Mexico.

MS Rotterdam, Willemstad, Curacao Dec 2025

The floating Queen Emma Bridge in the foreground, and the soaring Queen Juliana Bridge in the background, Willemstad, Curacao

The Queen Emma bridge is cool, even if it is over 137 years old. It started swinging open while we were walking on it, along with a bridge full of other pedestrians, and drew oohs and aahs along with probably two or three thousand cell-phone photos from the pleased, conscripted “passengers.”

 A bridge unexpectedly swinging open is a thought that would normally instill visions of chaos and panic, not the pleasant giggles and laughter that enveloped the bridge. The “Old Swinging Lady” is world famous, and famously slow. It doesn’t raise up like a draw bridge or swing on a pivot like some of the old railroad bridges. Instead, it floats open on a hinge. The pontoon bridge that lifts and falls with the tides has an operator’s shack on the picturesque Punda side of Saint Anna Bay. 

The operator remotely closes the pedestrian gates on either end and starts the diesel motors that slowly propel the bridge away from from the abutment and the bridge “sails” open. Those on the bridge laugh and ride as if at an amusement park, it had enough undulation to make us hold the handrails, but the veterans of Old Swinging Lady didn’t even bother to look up. One woman hopped over the small gap between the bridge and the abutment as the bridge swung closed as she looked at her phone.

The famous floating market of Willemstad

Being the good Samaritan that I try to be, I walked over to a couple sitting in what appeared to be a parked, brand new, locomotive pulling several open, surry-type sightseeing cars. Obviously a tourist tram waiting on passengers. Only this one was the little engine that couldn’t. The middle-aged driver was grinding the starter over and over again, but the shiny new engine only ground away mercilessly. It simply would not start. His wife, I assumed, sitting next to him was obviously getting desperate. They were both well dressed, obviously waiting on ship passengers for a local tour of Punda, on the other side of St. Anne’s from Otrabanda, which incidentally means “the other side.” He stepped down from the driver’s seat as I approached and I asked if I could possibly be of assistance.

“I don’t know,” he answered, “We just got it, it is brand new! It started fine when we drove it here!”

“Probably the choke valve is stuck open,” I answered, based on being from Miami and growing up putting my hand over carburetor throats to start cars and jeeps. I’ve done this many times before. “Well, open the engine cover and let’s see if we can fix this,” I answered.

Surprise, surprise! The fuel injected engine is part of a dedicated towing vehicle, not simply a converted jeep or truck chassis. It is state of the art and beautifully laid out, meticulously painted and labeled. It is spotlessly clean. Every label or tag, however, is written in Chinese. Well, basics still apply, I told myself and began following tubing and air ducts until the intake went out of sight behind the engine.

The woman had called an associate who arrived just as I reached the upper level of my expertise, I believe it’s still called the Peter Principle, looked at me and said ‘Hmmm.” He reached behind the engine somehow and within a minute or so, said, “Try it now.” After several half-hearted coughs, it started just as a bus showed up and people began climbing into to the waiting tram. The woman came over to me and thanked me profusely, even though I hadn’t fixed it. “He did something inside the air cleaner, so, yes, you did.” By the time she picked up her microphone, they had a full tour loaded and ready to go. I got another big smile and a wave.

Next – Coming soon -  Cartagena Revisited

Cruise 2025 - The Rock and Roll Cruise - Part 1 - Another look at Cruising

The Rock and Roll Cruise – 2025 - Part 1 - Another look at Cruising

I'm writing this sitting on our wind-blown balcony six stories above the ragged Caribbean Sea, watching flying fish sporadically erupt from the white caps below to escape our nine hundred and ninety ton behemoth as it plows toward Cartagena. This is the prime reason we cruise. To us, there is nothing else like it. On our first cruise back in the last century we had to go on deck to experience this as the best cabin back then had only a small, round porthole. It didn't open and we could hardly see out of it, but we were thrilled to have a view of the open sea. The majority of the other two thousand, four hundred and twenty two passengers on board the M/S Rotterdam are either immersed in their cellphones as they lounge throughout the observation lounge, busy playing bingo, dozing around the pool, or symbolically pulling the magic silver arm of the ever present one arm bandit. The mechanical arms have long disappeared, though, now players simply hit the big, lighted "repeat bet" button to spin the animated characters that mesmerize them into pumping continuous, uninterrupted sums of money into the machines for the enjoyment of doing it again, and again and again. The new machines even have WiFi built in so you can swipe your room card or even a credit card which your room key is already linked to before you sail, and continue spending money without interruption. These cruisers don't even know there are flying fish or endless stretches of Sargasso seaweed that stretch to the horizon. 

We enter the Windward Passage headed to Curacao with Cuba in the distance 

We stopped cruising altogether for ten or so years in protest of the drastic drop in quality of the dining experience when the cruise industry decided to force customers into the added expense of "specialty" dining at an additional charge to the passage. That was our last cruise with our once favorite line, the one we first cruised with and had previously cruised with three times, but no more. We have since sailed with Princess, Celebrity and now with Holland America, all of which are similar in services and costs. The itineraries are even similar, but the corporate philosophies are different enough to distinguish them from each other. Unfortunately, paying exorbitant prices, even for common beer, has became the de facto standard now across the entire cruise industry, and what an industry it is.

We departed Port Everglades in Ft Lauderdale and were the fourth of seven cruise ships awaiting our turn to head to sea. These are not little ships. Almost all of them carry over two thousand passengers and many carry as many as five thousand paying customers. As soon as we cleared the breakwater, we could see three more behemoths south of us from the port of Miami also headed toward open water. Many are most likely toodling to the nearby Bahamas as the private island gig has become another source of cruise revenue subtly included in the itinerary. Our first stop is one of these islands as this corporate controlled type of "destination" has become a standard among the traditional basin cruisers. Keeping the revenue stream in house, so to speak.

An opinion is worth exactly what it cost to hear. It doesn't take long to evaluate the unsolicited linguistic barrage to determine its value to a listener who has knowledge, but may unfortunately be misconstrued as fact by an avid, naïve, trusting listener. The main difference between opinions and knowledge? Opinions are free. You hear them all the time. They may be entertaining, but usually not worth repeating. I cautiously listen to opinions because every once in a while a great story emerges from the vast self-indulgent wilderness of ignorance. Such as one we heard recently from a woman who advised a potential cruiser that food on Holland America's ships was heavily geared to the Dutch palate. In her case, that’s not even an opinion, simply an assumption, but most certainly not knowledge.

But then, maybe it simply doesn't matter. People are going to enjoy whatever they've spent their money on regardless of how much pain, agony and disappointment a little research may save them. We watched in awe this morning at the street market in Curacao as a bewildered vendor had a middle aged American tourist, obviously from one of the four cruise ships crammed into one of our favorite port cities, ask him if three US dollars was enough for a banana. Not even the entire bunch he had offered her, just one, single banana. He slowly shook his head up and down and said, "Yes, that is enough." Obviously she has never before in her life purchased a banana. The old, bedraggled vendor avoided looking at us as I think he was as embarrassed as he was surprised. But let's face it, nobody turns down free money. 

My wife and I started cruising way back when weekend trips to the Bahamas were introduced to compete with Miami Beach hotels which could offer Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis, Jr, but not gambling. The cost of getting passengers on the ship was basically the break-even point. The covers came off the one arm bandits and the poker tables as soon as the ships crossed the US territorial limit of twelve miles. All passenger spending from that point on was profit. Kind of the Black Friday of cruising, just on a per-cruise basis.

While that basic philosophy still holds, is cruising far more costly now than when we first started? Not really, if all you consider is base passage. The formula is unbelievably complicated and convoluted, but the base fact is larger ships and more passengers per cruise have kept the costs per hour of operation low so the occupancy recovery rates have not soared with the inflation index in general. The difference, however, is in the total cruise cost to the passenger. Aye, matey, and there's the rub! Today’s pirates of the Caribbean are all MBA’s.

We are the only people we can see sitting on any of the balconies. Watching the azure seas topped with wind blown white caps is as captivating as watching the graceful seabirds soar wistfully alongside our balcony as if to study us as well. We even know where we are by the types of seabirds that accompany us, or leave us as the case may be. They occasionally plunge headlong into the sea, usually chasing a flying fish startled into flight by our bow wake. We are easily pleased. All we need with our priceless serenity is good service, good food and good evening entertainment. This cruise we might opt for a warm, cackling fireplace, which might be nice too, since the ship’s temperatures are kept quite chilly. We could adjust the room temperature or even turn off the air conditioning, which we could not do on a previous Princess cruise ship.

The main dining was cold enough for most women to carry sweaters or at have least covered arms. The low temperature may be to help control the insidious norovirus, the most common cause of gastroenteritis that stows away on today's cruise ships. In the old days they used rat collars on the mooring lines to keep unwanted pests off the ships, today it is soap and water placed outside the communal food areas. That analogy would get me a question mark in English class but the effects of both are the same: protection from something that would spoil the cruise.

One thing that did not make this cruise pleasant was the foul-smelling casino on deck three, the same deck as the shopping area. Oddly, the casino was jammed, even during the morning hours. So was the overflow area on the deck below, temporarily filled with arcade style slot machines that had many of the same players sitting for hours on end as if rooted to their chairs. At least the area on the deck two is a non-smoking area. All of the players are "older" than the average age of the sister line Carnival's passengers, and we simply did not find this market on the last four cruises we did on previous Princess Cruises or Celebrity Cruises. The casinos on the Millennium, the Eclipse, The Island Princess, the Crown Princess and even the old whichever Princess we started with were barren by comparison. The Eclipse had far more employees and staff in the casino than players the entire ten day cruise to Barbados.

When we booked our current twelve day cruise through the Caribbean on Holland America Line we were told the entertainment on the ship would be more sedate than we had experienced with other cruise lines. Princess and Celebrity both had on-board bands for live music with their evening theater shows, which we both really enjoy to cap off our day of sailing. Holland America has elected to go with prerecorded soundtracks for their stage productions. The singers are singing to backing music, which while flawless, still feels like karaoke. The other ships also had continuous music in various locales around the ships during the day, from small popular music groups to single entertainers playing piano or guitars. Holland America, we were told, had classical music ensembles for daytime enjoyment, but we've found on this cruise there is only one string trio that has played regularly, and we’ve only come across them in the evening once. They later had a single steel-drum, or pan, player, who was very good, if not oddly out of place.

The daytime activities, other than the Crow's Nest game room seem to be dominated by fee based activities such as bingo that has a card fee. The entire pulse of the ship appears to be broken into forty-five minute segments and oddly many seem as afterthoughts. Almost like musical chairs. Time's up! Time to run to something else to get a good seat for something that will last for exactly the next forty-five minutes. It tends to be exhausting. The pool area and the casino seem to be the only activities that even resemble cruising from the bygone eras, but they also have a different flavor. The only activity that seems to stay packed is the casino. There are many activities to keep many cruisers occupied, but for the first time ever on a cruise, we surprisingly found by the second afternoon we were bored. We are obviously not gamblers and we don’t cruise to play bingo. Time for the balcony and a good book.

The on-board music channels are not even on the level of decent elevator music. The five onboard channels all sound like the AM radio on my fathers old 1957 Ford and at times the music even sounds familiar. We use a small blue-tooth speaker – Holland America allows small speakers for in-room use – to listen to our own music because the ship’s fare is just plain terrible. By contrast are the live bands and their consistently great performances, especially the outstanding performances by the Rotterdam’s house band, the Rolling Stone's Lounge Band. They play three, forty-five minute sets each night, and they stagger their start times with the other two music venues so as to create a continuous availability of entertainment, but moving room to room to stay entertained can be aggravating. I think it has to do with beverage sales, but I'm not sure how. Again, life in segments.

Here's another opinion, one that seems to have taken a foothold in the cruising industry itself which is surprising with the unabated, ingrained numbers crunching associated with cruising operations: Old people only like classical music. The fact that all of the Rolling Stones, the iconic rock group whose name dominates the entertainment motif of Holland America Lines are all over eighty years old. So are many of their fans, and that is not an opinion, that is a fact. I don't know how long the current band members will be on board the ship, but the group we saw were on par with any professional band we've seen. Definitely the entertainment highlight of the cruise. 

Thinking we belong on the younger "party" ships? I'm eighty-three, but remember, most of the real Rolling Stones are older than I am. Swifties would be disappointed, but not my crowd. Rock on! They even packed the dance floor. Not much past 11:00 PM, but the jubilant fans were there in strength until the age appropriate sandman entered the room. We found the great group in the BB King Blues Club to be a bit too brassy for us, and definitely tuned solidly to soul music, not rhythm and blues. If you’re expecting rhythm and blues in the vein of Keb ‘Mo, BB King, or any of the great R&B artists, you’ll be disappointed. On the other hand, if Mo-Town is your sound, while they may a bit loud for most, they are perfect for that genre. They are really talented musicians and entertainers.

The food in the main dining room is very good, as opposed to the cruise line we abandoned for trying to force us into the specialty dining venues. Holland America would prefer that here as well, but they have only reduced the availability and selections here, not the quality of the food itself. The added costs to the base passage are the biggest changes in cruising. One of our fellow cruisers just paid an additional $65 dollars to dine in the Pinnacle Grill and then paid an additional $12 dollar surcharge because he ordered a certain cut of steak, and it wasn’t even Chateaubriand. He could have dined in the main dining room as part of his passage, so in effect, he paid three charges to have his steak. That's not an opinion, that is a fact. Whether it was worth it or not is an opinion.

So, if you pay a couple of thousand dollars for a cruise using today's business model, plan on paying half of that amount in addition to your cost before you disembark if you plan to replicate our memories of hedonistic indulgence of days gone by. One new cost is Internet, something we don't miss like the media-addicted traveling companions we share deck space with. Cell phones are everywhere on the cruise ship, from the always fully occupied Observation lounge to the pool areas. When Wi-Fi was first introduced on cruise ships, it was an added value, now it is simply another lucrative revenue stream. A rather large one if you plan on cruising with your teen age children or football addicted spouse.

New cruisers don't know there was a better way, so they pay outlandishly for the once-included services that attracted us to cruising in the first place. Even on higher end cruise lines such as the three I've mentioned, the facial tissues now are so poor you have to blow your nose with great caution. Bet you never read that admonition before, but it is symbolic of everything from the odd paper towels to even the basic dining selections that cautiously skirts passenger rejection. Even the famous drink packages, where you supposedly prepay the costs of drinks, all drinks, not just alcohol, actually only cover a portion of each drink. On Holland America, the difference of cost of any drink over $11 on our ship during this trip will be charged to your account. House brand red wine, either Cabernet or blend is $18 a glass, so you will be charged $7 a glass even if you bought the drink package ahead of time. Read the fine print and budget accordingly, unless of course, money is no object.

Some of the former services are no longer available at any cost. But then again, it all depends on your own opinions. Kind of like happily paying three dollars for a banana.

George

Next - Part 2 - Revisiting Curacao

Cruise 2024 - The Anniversary Cruise - Part 4 - Dominica and St. Kitts

Day 7 – Dominica

As we leave Barbados, headed for our next port of call, Dominica, the passengers are all tired but in really great spirits. After dinner, we take in a show with singer Crystal Stark who really puts on a great performance. Everyone then heads for the Grand Foyer between the glass elevator banks for a special sing-along. Sing-alongs aren't usually my thing, but I can't pass up Queen. Yes, that Queen. The one that enthralls both the Brits and the Scots and the Irish and the Welsh and anybody else living on earth who likes classic rock music. You can't miss with an iconic music group that everyone over the age of thirty reveres, regardless of where they're from. We had an entire boat filled with Queen fans.

Mike, our cruise director, caught up in the fervor of a scheduled semi-pro karaoke event, dedicated to the music of Queen, showed his vocal prowess in the center of the ship's atrium surrounded by the ship's eight glass elevators, and was eventually joined by just about everyone. 

There are four elevators on one side, and facing them across the space directly behind the music stage, are the other four. As the show gets under way with well known Queen hits, more and more passengers join in. By the time we get to the finale, We Are the Champions, the entire mid-section of the ship is raucously singing, including the passengers in the elevators who make several trips up and down without leaving the elevators just to be part of the show. Great stuff. Great activities director, even if he was as excited as the rest of us. Do it again, Mike!

I'm back in my old habit of lying in bed with my eyes open at 5:30am while Ilse sleeps soundly. The sunrise is off our balcony, so I quietly take my camera and go sit outside and watch the beautiful sunrise.

The approach to Dominica is as dramatic and beautiful as any I have seen while cruising. The weather surrounding the island created a mysterious, beautiful, shrouded destination that I knew little about. We had already decided to forego going ashore at Dominica after reading the flier for the port and just lay back and enjoy the ship and our free time, but I couldn't help but spend an hour on top taking photographs as we docked. 

I'm writing this as we are tied to the second of two docks in this small port town. This stop isn't high on the YouTube "must see" list yet, but going by the high lush hills and the beautiful pristine waters, I'm sure this small, unassuming port of call will soon be very popular.

There's another intermediate size cruise ship tied up to the main pier and if the town is as small as it appears, it will be full of tourists from the other boat. The ship turns out to be the German Aida Perla, currently sailing from Barbados as her home port. We don't feel like walking the half mile or so from our dock to town and back, so Ilse uses our free time wisely and locates the unheralded free chocolate soft ice cream dispenser on the 12th deck. Yes! Free!

Roseau, Dominica

We are astonished as we enter the main foyer! Santa and his elves have pulled off a stunning surprise! The entire ship is decorated for the Christmas holidays! The crew must have worked all night to decorate the ship. It is really well done! 

We stop by the Customer Service desk and casually inquire if they've found a hat with Brookgreen Gardens written on the front. The young officer disappears and returns carrying, quite cautiously, my missing golf cap. I joke about the worn condition of my hat and he smiles politely. Ilse said I should have told him that hat has traveled farther than he has. I think he could tell.

Everything is just like the brochures promise, even a beautiful rainbow to highlight the coming beautiful day! 

I call John, the constable from Scotland and ask if British Airways has located his missing suitcase. “Yes, It is still Miami,” he answers. It never made the catch-up flight to Antigua. They asked him if they should ship it to his home in Scotland. He answered, "No, thank you, I'll pick it up in Miami myself in a few days!" We'll meet tonight for the theater show and catch up.

Day –  8 – St. Kitts

We didn't make much of a night of it last night. With swollen ankles and still tired feet, we decided to catch the show in the theater and mosey back to the room. Time to cut back on the rich food and the now foreign-to-us heat.

Nevis

We slept in again this morning, but I get to take a few snapshots from the balcony just about daybreak as we passed nearby Nevis, the sister island to St. Kitts. 

I've been doing Eggs Benedict every morning just for the consistency. We found back on the first day – Day 2 –scrambled eggs and omelets are made from the industry-standard, pasteurized liquid egg product, and the staff can't seem to get real eggs-over-easy the way I like them. Over medium seems to be better, but usually too cooked instead of under cooked. Coffee at breakfast is still free, but for the evening meal it is five dollars a cup. I have a feeling it is going to get worse. It won't get better because it was better before, and obviously they didn't like it. 

I figure I drink at least fifteen dollars worth of coffee at breakfast at that rate and wonder how long it will take some astronomically rewarded executive to figure out how to offload the cost onto my room charge. I still love to cruise, but I really do miss the good old days when they at least pretended to value our patronage. 

We take our time walking in to the port on the new pier, just strolling along and crowd watching. We always take our passports with us just in case we get stuck in the country we're visiting and need to fly out for some reason. It is a habit we got into years ago and luckily haven't had to use them, but it makes for a more relaxing visit for us. We have friends who simply rely on the ship's issued passenger card and don't think a second about taking anything other than their cameras and their credit cards. What ever floats your boat, it is all about having fun and enjoying wherever you are.

After shopping in the port area for an hour or so, then sitting in a bench in the shade just watching the passengers from three huge cruise ships disgorge into the small, man-made shopping enclave, surrounded by construction fences and new buildings, we decide to make one more tour through the port area. It is in direct contrast to Puntarenas, Costa Rica, which we visited earlier in the year. 

We have a grand time just people watching. From the young, formally dressed police officers who silently and deftly responded to a vendor's request for assistance with a matter that obviously required discretion, to a jewelry store front clerk standing twenty feet away loudly asking my wife where she was from because he didn't recognize her accent, the atmosphere is distinctly different from other port of calls in this cruise.

We stop at several shops in the well-defined port shopping area and notice the banks all have two policemen standing nearby. We compare prices of chotskies and knick-knacks that will collect dust in various households and find there are few deviations in price between the shops, and we end up looking at a jewelry store off of one the side streets. We are tired and looking for shade, and the store owner walks over and hands me a bottle of water.

"Take a look at our jewelry," he says as his anxious wife walks up. We did not buy any jewelry, but that did not deter them from being gracious and actually quite warm with us. They started their own business after spending fifteen years working for other shops in the area and deserve to be visited. So if you are ever in St Kitts and you are interested in beautiful local jewelry, visit Ocean Jewelers in Port Zante, and if you know me, you know I do not give recommendations to anyone as I feel it isn't fair to my readers. But then again, I will always remember that bottle of water.

One of the other cruise ships has a logo in her funnel I don't recognize, so I politely asked one if the crisply dressed young representatives standing at the end of the dock waiting for passengers to gather for an excursion, which cruising company the ship was with. "Tui," she said rather detachedly. We were the only people near her, so, knowing I wasn't interfering, I asked where the ship was from. She looked at me with disdain and said, "Oh, you're Americans... of course, The UK, but we're registered in Malta," then resumed her duties of staring down the long, empty dock. Scratch Tui.

We end up sitting on our cabin's balcony, after the window spray washing is finished, and someone cranks up a sound system blaring old, homogenized American pop music. Some of it was old back in 1960, so you have a frame of reference. That doesn't deter them from cranking up the volume to rival that of the delusional tourist attraction that dominated the dock in Antigua. I move to a different location on the ship and find to my surprise, the music is coming from the welcome station beside the ship that greets returning passengers with lemonade and cold towels. The canyon effect in between the two adjacent, towering steel hulls creates a perfect anechoic sound chamber. I decided the DJ in Antigua at least had a better playlist.

Our Florida friends and perennial cruisers, Marcel and Joanne, cautioned us last time about the famous sugar cane train that specializes in taking cruise passengers around the island. They had taken the famous train on a previous cruise and had to be rescued by jeeps after the train broke down. They returned to the port just in time to board. If they hadn't gotten back to the dock in time, the ship would have left without them. (Remember my comment about passports?) 

It happened again yesterday when the train, which now costs $160 US dollars per person, ran off the tracks, thankfully without further incident. The two bus loads of passengers made it back to the empty, waiting dock after the hawsers, the ship's mooring lines, had already been pulled in. Even our perpetual music group was long gone by the time they got back to the ship. Ten minutes after the last passenger was on board, we were under way. 

We've seen couples several times on earlier cruises waving frantically from the dock in the twilight as the ship, only feet away, silently departed into the night. Using the official cruise excursions desk to book on-shore sight seeing has an intrinsic value called peace of mind.

Day 9–At Sea

Today is flying fish day. Captain Leo has just announced over the ship's public address system that we are doing nineteen knots in fair seas over the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, the Puerto Rico trench. Either that or his convertible asparagus has a huge green volume in the left side of the ship. Either way, it is beautiful on the ocean today. The return trip to Florida from the Caribbean has always been the smoothest, most leisurely part of any cruise we've done, and today is one of the best. 

If you've read any of my past scribblings, you know I'm an addict for sitting on the balcony watching the fluffy, scattered white clouds and the deep Navy blue ocean roll serenely past. With an occasional school of flying fish scattering across the wave tops, panicked by the huge, steel hulled intruder, there is no other sign to show we share this beautiful planet with anything or anyone else. No blaring music or induced enthusiasm other than being in awe of our fabulous, endangered home we call Earth.

The winds are the same as the outbound trip, but this time we are going their way and even though we are sailing almost five knots faster, the trip seems far more relaxed and quite a bit slower. The majority of passengers seem to be taking advantage of the post-card setting and have filled the pool and deck areas. The ones headed back to snow and ice are making the best of it.

The old traditions have been modified and the last dinner of lobster has been moved up to the night before last of the cruise. My half lobster tail - I had the surf-and-turf - was barely six inches long, which is getting awfully close to questionable carapace length, but never-the-less, it was delicious. So was the baked Alaska, but I pity the new-comers to cruising who never got to see the waiters and servers conga-line dance through the dining room to Dexter Poindexter's "Hot Hot Hot" with the traditional desert, topped with candles, on their heads. The last time we saw the once-traditional, last evening event was on a Princess cruise to Aruba in 2012. The candles back then had already been replaced with little battery powered lights, and we knew then the tradition would soon be starved to death by regulations and economics.

Nature has a way of changing pitiful, impotent human plans, and tonight is a perfect example. The winds began picking up drastically and the outdoor party scheduled for 10:00pm is cancelled. We are soon headed into a fifty knot headwind for an over-the-bow wind of almost 70 miles an hour. Time to close and secure the doors. The night is spent with the ship shuddering and jerking in the heavy wind and seas, but by sunrise, all is right once again with the world.

Day 10–Last Sea Day

Last day blues sets in on the ship, but at least we are headed back to Florida and we aren't going back to freezing temperatures. We take a walk around the ship and then head to the cabin to read and enjoy our day on the open sea. I catch up on my note taking, when Ilse says once again, "look, birds!"

I spend quite a bit of time trying to find a viable spot near the bow to take photos as we scare flying fish into panicked flight only to be chased down by the huge Brown Boobies. I finally find a spot on the fifth deck and finally satisfy my need to photograph birds. Don't ask me why. It will take me days to comb through the photos.

Time to check the on board charges and wonder where our onboard credit evaporated. Still, a great value for the money, but Celebrity needs to tread cautiously. The Eclipse is a somewhat newer and better ship than the Island Princess, but we feel the Princess has the edge in dining. The Celebrity Eclipse, however, has the definite edge when it comes to its state of the art, smartly located fitness center. The difference between the two cruise lines is a fine line. There are many, many little items, some small, some more obvious than others, that the once famous quality is fading. From deck chairs strapped in position with zip ties and TV remotes with the battery compartment taped together with black duct tape, to rust around pipe fittings and cabin curtains with rips and holes, the older ships are showing their age. Still, our cabin was spotless and the attention to detail, and our room service, was outstanding. Our bed and plümo - Eifelplatt for comforter - were always perfect. The cabin service was the standard the rest of the ship should strive for. 

I don't see how the newer, bigger ships could offer the same comfort level as the ships they replace, so I'm not sure how we will plan our next cruise. Still, it has been a great, memorable vacation cruise, one I highly recommend.

We'll dock early tomorrow morning in Ft Lauderdale. It won't be too long before we start planning our next cruise. Where there is a will, there is a way.

George

Previously: Barbados -  https://piddlepaddler.blogspot.com/2024/12/cruise-2024-anniversary-cruise-part-3.html