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 they are going our 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