The Panama Canal Cruise - Part 2 - Cartagena

 

Our Coast Guard companion with Cuba in the background

The sun hadn’t yet cracked the horizon when I walked out on deck the first morning at sea. I can not sleep late while on a cruise ship, do not ask me why because I don’t know. I usually wake up well before sunrise and I have been doing it on each and every cruise I’ve been on except one, when drinking heavily may have been involved. I’ve learned to lay out my shoes and clothes before bedtime so I can dress silently, grab my camera, and slip quietly out of the cabin without waking my wife. I have seen some remarkable sunrises and an occasional thunder storm or two, and sometimes just other early risers to chat with, but it is always worth it.

The twilight hour just before sunrise is one of my favorite times of the day. Well, when I’m on vacation, at any rate. The weather on our first full day at sea was warm, a nice change from the December weather in Georgia, which everybody tells me is mild. Being a relocated Florida boy I’ll just take their word for it. I look around to see a few other early risers milling about and the several people who are always jogging around the upper deck track that we now find on every cruise ship. There are a few photo takers against the rail and several people just walking and chatting. The weather is absolutely beautiful. Trundling along abeam of us, not too far away, is a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, silently picketing between us and the island of Cuba just behind it. She isn’t keeping up with us so we gradually pull ahead of her.

Today will be a sea day as we traverse the famed Windward passage between Cuba and Hispaniola on our way toward Cartagena, Colombia, our first port of call early tomorrow morning. The Windward passage connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Caribbean sea and is the straightest path from the Panama Canal to the eastern seaboard of the U.S. It’s almost 6,000 feet deep at the point where the seas always display how the passage got its name. Today turns out to be brisk and we get to see whitecaps again, but the ship is unfazed. Most passengers are blissfully unaware of the sea and enjoy a great first day of what we find out, is a three month long cruise around the world. We had no idea our short fifteen day leg was a part of a longer cruise. The Island Princess will be back to Ft Lauderdale sometime in late March.

We spend a day touring the decks, looking at art work – no, not the auction - and checking out the eateries. Of course we check again with the Customer Service desk. No word yet about the missing Kindle. We are beginning to accept the fact it has been permanently lost. The ship’s staff have been incredibly helpful and more than courteous, they have been very friendly. We decide to head to the main dining room for early dining after checking the shops and ship’s amenities and meet a friend from Florida who coincidentally happens to be on the world cruise. We form a group with her friends and the Maitre d’ arranges for us all to sit together at the biggest table in the dining room. My wife and I have our traditional bowls of French onion soup, and enjoy a really delicious dinner, a great omen for the dining ahead, and the great conversations about their upcoming three month adventure.

As we are eating and chatting, one of the officers from Customer Service approaches through the busy tables, a big smile on her face. She stops, and hands my wife her missing Kindle! The story of recovering the missing Kindle is worth a book of its own, but it is really inspiring to know how many people handled the forgotten tablet, from the hotel maid and the front desk staff, the shuttle bus personnel, the cruise port staff, the loading crew, and the ship’s customer service team, each doing the right thing to return the forgotten Kindle. A really great cruise became even better. We finish the evening with a show in the ship’s theater and then head to the cabin to charge our batteries for the day tomorrow in Cartagena.

Cartagena

I'm on deck as the predawn twilight slowly breaks to our right, looking for the best spot to catch images of the rising sun against the city that sprawls before our silently arriving behemoth. An odd feeling as I thought we were sailing south and expected the sunrise on my left, but we are actually sailing north after entering the Bahia de Cartagena. The city surprises me with its contrasts, with high-rise apartments and condominiums that rival Miami Beach on the left, while small, working fishing boats heading out on the other side exemplify the working port that extends out in front of the orange ball of fire rising behind the hills on the horizon. 

Within an hour, we are docked and the gangplank is open. While the passengers who have scheduled on-shore tours rush down the gangplank as soon as the hatch opens toward the massive row of waiting, air conditioned tour buses, we go and have a relaxed breakfast. I count twenty five buses when we dock, but by the time we disembark the number is down to just a handful.

Cartagena has a really nice welcome garden at the end of the dock with exotic birds and flowers and is a great introduction to the city. After spending time feeding monkeys and trying to remember names of all the exotic plants, my wife and I decide to walk into the old town and just take it easy and see what we can see.

We always stay in safe areas when we walk in strange cities, the dangerous areas are well publicized on social media and the Internet. We are no longer young and fleet of foot, so to speak, and we make sure we look where we walk. Figuratively and literally. Pedestrian infrastructure is notoriously below the ADA compliant USA standards in most other countries, especially in the Caribbean islands. We have seen holes next to broken sidewalks that a horse would fit into in several port cities we have visited. Nevertheless, there is no better way to see a city than walking it, so after studying maps for several hours, we start off toward old town, just a mile or so away.

Just outside the gate of the port welcome center, we run into another couple, Del and Cynthia, laden with back packs and water bottles who are far more prepared than we are to hoof it in the heat of the day. We join forces and end up an hour or so later walking over the Puenta Roman bridge into Old Town.

The walk through the suburb is more than interesting as we pass an above-ground cemetery ala Key West, a sure sign high water here is not unexpected.

A quick summary: Yes, we would like to come back. The people we met are friendly and several helped answer questions and give directions. We visited the Convention Center which was hosting a native arts and crafts fair at the suggestion of a gentleman we met at a bayside park. 

After visiting the modern convention center and walking through town, the four of us caught a taxi back to the port. The taxi driver spoke perfect English, and it turned out was an off duty police officer. We had another great meal back on board ship, and enjoyed another really well done show by the ship’s entertainers although they did have one piano player do a one man show who was just plain awful.

Other than that, it has been a great use so far and we can’t wait until tomorrow when we traverse the Panama Canal.

Video:  A 26 minute video of this blog, including Cartagena, is at  https://youtu.be/MeKFr8bPaFs

Next: The Panama Canal transit: 

https://piddlepaddler.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-panama-canal-cruise-part-3-transit.html

Previous: The Love Boat  

https://piddlepaddler.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-panama-canal-cruise-part-1-love-boat.html

The Panama Canal Cruise - Part - 1 - The Love Boat

 

Our return to cruising back in December of 2021 was a marvelous experience, not just because of the ship, the Celebrity Millennium, or our itinerary in the eastern Leeward Islands of the Caribbean, but also because we had the classic, spotless ship practically to ourselves. COVID restrictions were being slowly lifted and cruising had just resumed following the industry-wide shutdown caused by the COVID-19 epidemic. We happened to pick the second cruise of the Millennium’s return to full service. There were only several hundred passengers on a fully staffed ship designed to carry over two thousand. There were as many crew as there were passengers, and needless to say, the service was outstanding.

We concluded the ten day cruise following the mask and cleanliness requirements, especially when in the many ports of call and did not suffer any illness of any kind. There were several passengers confined to their staterooms who apparently had tested positive for the infection and we found later one deck had been assigned as a restricted area for those who fell ill to COVID, but the affect of the precautions on the cruise was unnoticed by most of us. 

The cruise was so enjoyable we visited the future cruise office on board the Millennium after the mid-point of the sailing and booked our dream cruise, a full transit of the Panama Canal. The Millennium was being repositioned from Ft. Lauderdale to Los Angeles early next year and the timing was perfect for us. We excitedly made our cruise deposit and began planning even before our cruise was over. We disembarked in Ft Lauderdale full of enthusiasm, thrilled that our return to cruising had reaffirmed our memories of our past cruises. We began planning about visiting friends in California as we incorporated the upcoming Panama Canal cruise into an extended adventure. We were back! Cruising was great again.

Unfortunately, after months of planning and anticipation of our “bucket-list” cruise, Celebrity Cruise line abruptly informed us of a major change in plans and within days, the highly anticipated cruise faded into the mist of disillusionment. We were offered a similar cruise on a different ship, and at a different time, but no option for a refund. The new schedule was impossible for us to accommodate, so we had to settle for “ship’s credit” for some future cruise. Ship’s credit has become the new refund in the industry, and we grudgingly accepted that resolution, feeling as if we would really be surprised to ever recover our down payment. And then life got in the way, or more specifically, Hurricane Ian, and we began to wonder if we would ever get back to sea.

We did. After a two year hiatus – mainly spent spending three months cleaning up after Hurricane Ian and then pulling up our Florida roots and moving to Athens, Georgia – we decided to try again, and this time we pulled yet another rabbit out of the hat – the Love Boat.

After settling in our new home in Athens, Georgia, and facing the prospect of our first “cold” winter, we decided to find a cruise that included a full transit of the iconic Panama Canal. We needed a respite from our moving and resettling chores and the foreboding winter weather as well. Princess Cruises, which we have sailed with twice before, offered the Island Princess with 2200 passengers and a crew of 900, a perfect size cruise ship for us. It was scheduled to depart from Ft. Lauderdale just after New Years and arrive in Los Angeles fifteen days later. We booked the cruise and started packing. We resumed our plans for an extended vacation in California as well.

We were thrilled to book a cruise on the ship, which we were told, is the namesake of one of the two ships used in the television series of long ago. Technically, it is the “other” Love Boat, the Island Princess, not the Pacific Princess, and it’s not the original ship used in the series either, but rather it’s namesake, a specifically designed Panamax for Panama Canal passage, launched in 2003. The original Love Boat has already met its ignominious end on the beaches at Alang, India, as did the marvelous SS Norway, both cut up for scrap after setting the standards for cruising that evolved past them. We were fortunate to sail on the SS Norway years ago, and this was a unique opportunity to sail yet on another iconic ship. We would soon find out the Island Princess, as pristine as it is, like the Millennium of our last cruise, is also approaching the end of its service life in mainstream cruising.

Step 1 - Get to the port! 

For the first time in our cruising experience, we can not simply drive to the port of embarkation. Not trusting airline delays, we book a flight a day early so as to minimize the possibility of missing the boat. That’s not an idiom, we really didn’t want to miss the boat. We fly from busy Atlanta, the busiest in the world, to Ft Lauderdale – a modest, under two hour flight – and stay in one of the several well-known chain hotels not far from Port Everglades. The cruise port, less than three miles from the International airport, has become a thriving, modern passenger cruise terminal, complete with parking garage for those who drive to the port. It now rivals its nearby neighbor, Dodge Island, the Port of Miami less than thirty miles away. Arriving a day early also gave us the opportunity to have dinner that evening with great friends, Bob and Patricia, who drove up from Miami. We enjoyed a great Cuban dinner, something we dearly miss up in Georgia, and reminisced about old times. The dinner set the tone for the entire cruise.

Port Everglades

The hotel, while spotlessly clean, showed it’s primary business is the constant flow of one night guests departing the next day on cruise ships and appears to have no interest in investing in maintenance or upkeep as that would be apparently an unnecessary expense. They had shuttle bus service to the cruise port, for an additional fee of course, that ran multiple trips beginning fairly early the next morning and each was filled with excited, shuffling passengers, all with various carry-ons strapped over shoulders and every possible color and size of four wheeled luggage made on planet earth.

Step 2 - Boarding - A short wait

One feature of Princess cruising I really like is their medallion. It was mailed to us at home a week or so before the cruise and even though I now know how my dog feels when the vet scans him for an implanted chip, I really found it to be a time saver. The medallion is a small disc with an RF chip containing your pertinent information. Lost your wife? Just ask the closest staff member to locate her. Piece of cake. After presenting our passports and scanning our medallions, we were soon on board and since we didn’t have to wait on checked in luggage, dropped our backpacks and carry-ons in our stateroom and headed for the food on the upper deck. 

We made the mandatory stop by our assigned lifeboat station, scanned our medallions yet again, and reminisced about the pushing and shoving of the old days. It isn’t really nostalgia because I don’t miss the old Parade of New Shoes, also formerly known as the mandatory life boat drill. It now takes a few seconds to complete the safety requirements and you are free to do whatever you want.

The open buffet is extensive and well replenished, and while we were sitting, looking over the other ships and boats around the port, my wife got a cellphone call from our overnight hotel. The maid found a tablet under her pillow when she made the bed. Normally, my wife, who always reads at night, would have put it on the top shelf of the headboard as the sandman slipped in, but not having a headboard, she had simply slipped her Kindle electronic reader beneath her pillow. Out of sight, out of mind, and we simply forgot it was there.

The next four hours, right up to casting off, were intense, with phone calls to the hotel, the shuttle company staff, drivers, and of course, on board customer service. I used my phone to deactivate her Kindle in case it couldn’t be recovered, and when we finally got a photo from the driver who delivered the forgotten tablet to the port showing who he had handed it to - it was of the back of an unidentifiable woman, dressed in a blue suit, taken as she walked away.

We shoved off almost immediately after, and once again pleaded our case to the sympathetic staff at customer service, but alas, there was no word or information about the lost Kindle. They checked again with the boarding crew, to no avail, and said simply they would do their best to find it. While they were helping us, they copied my DD214 to prove my military service. Most cruise lines offer a small discount to veterans, but I hadn’t submitted the required form ahead of time so I brought a copy with me. A few keystrokes and the document was on its way to corporate headquarters. My approval was received early the next day.

Leaving Port Everglades

The first night dinner is always informal as many suitcases have yet to be delivered to the staterooms and cabins, but we passed on the dining room and ended up in the Horizon Court, a great open food service area forward on deck 14 offering something for everyone. 

It was a gray, overcast sky by the time Ft Lauderdale was but a bright spot on the distant evening horizon. When we finally retired to the cabin, tired but excited, Ilse began to realize how much she missed her Kindle.

An old fashioned Kindle. 

Next:  Cartagena - https://piddlepaddler.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-panama-canal-cruise-part-2-cartegena.html

Video:  A 26 minute video of this blog, including Cartagena, is at  https://youtu.be/MeKFr8bPaFs

Sedentary

We moved to Athens, Georgia, a year ago and we are still ambivalent about the wisdom of ripping up our roots and moving out of state at our age. I was eighty when we made the decision to get out of Hurricane Alley and seek refuge in a safer haven, but the move has taken well over a year and our transition is far from complete. We are perturbed with our inability to feel at home in our newly adopted state.

My wife and I spent the last forty-five years or so participating in the annual Florida six-month long Hurricane watch party, the weather alerts that start at the beginning of the hurricane season, just about the time school ends and wraps up just after Thanksgiving. The intense peak is always around Labor Day Weekend when everyone sits in front of the television watching the Weather Channel worrying where the current storm is going to make landfall. Hurricane David planted the first serious fear in us during Labor Day weekend in 1979. After doing what meager preparations we could to our townhouse, we went to bed expecting to be hit directly sometime during the night. The dangerous storm capriciously spared us and we woke up to singing birds and gentle breezes. There were multiple scares before Hurricane Andrew hit Miami in 1992 and our two-car, hurricane reinforced garage door blew in and wrapped around the car parked inside. Our daughter fared far worse: her condominium only fifteen miles away was destroyed completely. Not just damaged, but red-tag destroyed. She relocated to Georgia, not too far from Atlanta, to finish her final year of college. Her move gave us an excuse to travel up north to visit every chance we got.

We thought we would be just spectators to the annual ritual after moving to Port Charlotte on Florida’s west coast after I retired, but we were wrong. We helplessly watched Hurricane Charley barrel toward us in 2003 before it too decided to follow a slightly different path at the last possible minute. While we missed a devastating direct hit by the storm’s eye-wall by about ten miles, we were clobbered directly by Ian in 2022. The big, heavy twenty five foot tall palmetto laying exactly twenty-eight inches from our bedroom in the aftermath was the very big straw that broke the camel’s back. Time to leave the watch party. So, where to go? Out of harm’s way, of course, but someplace where the weather is mild, if not warm in the winter. No snow or ice storms, no life threatening environmental issues. The best part of the move would be living closer to our daughter and her family. While Georgia seemed to check all the boxes, we had a foreboding about the massive disruption to our lives. We wondered why Florida friends Ingrid and Richard moved from Port Charlotte to Asheville, North Carolina, only to move back to Florida after only two years. Another friend, Clyde, a muscular, urbane friend who moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, a few years ago, only made it a year before he also moved back to Florida. Why didn’t they make it “up north”?

There are many active retirement communities being developed across the state of Georgia, and we visited many of them in the twenty years we’ve been looking for a desirable alternative to Florida. From Hochston to Gainesville, from Peachtree to Greensboro, from Hiawasee to Tifton, we have pretty much covered Georgia. Many of these purposely designed communities are from companies such as Del Webb, Cresswind, and Lennar, specializing in “55+ Active Adult Communities.” They aren’t the only ones of course, but they are some of the predominate or most prolific developers. We were interested in the possibilities offered by most of these communities, and for many people they are the perfect answer. But we found they are not for us.

The unimaginative sideboard houses, all uniformly painted in a bland color palette, aligned precisely to maximize the profit of the smallest footprint possible, resemble a dreary and unappealing Army base. They are jammed together as selling the precious, squeezed, footprint of land is of foremost importance. The only thing missing are the big, white building numbers painted on the street side corner of each one. We found few one story or “ranch” style homes that were small enough for us that had any quality. It was not uncommon to find rows of visible nails that completely missed their support beams and studs, living room rugs our young granddaughter could pull up with her fingers, and gaps in the finish I could put my thumbs into. Small, more often than not, translates to cheap rather than affordable, garish rather than tasteful, and worst of all, crowded and exploited.

We read plans and covenants, by-laws and home owner association rules at every community and found the inescapable and often inexplicable petty rules and regulations seemed to be at the whim of an insulated higher power. Appearance and community standards are not only expected, but desired as well, but so is common sense. While most developments tend to specialize in club house activities closer aligned to our old style of Florida living, once you drive out the gates – which I would do on a regular basis – you would be back in reality. Florida, especially around the coastal areas, tends to be modern and accessible. We find much of America is simply stuck in the past of reluctance and denial, or at best, the fanciful anticipation of a distant future that has eluded the complacent.

Even in the highly successful Villages, a huge – it encompasses six zip codes – preplanned adult community in Florida, appropriately not far from Disney World, diversity reigns. Not in the residents, they are all predominately white from up north, but in the overall concept of the community. From styles and colors, neighborhood layouts and building design and construction, landscaping that would make even Frederick Law Olmsted envious, to blending what prospective residents assume is native Florida with civilization, they have succeeded in presenting a retirement image that has simply escaped the developers up north. Unfortunately, here again, once you drive out of the Villages, you meet apparent destitution and the mishmash that contrasts sharply with the meticulous, carefully developed residential island the newcomers live in. Very few of the newcomers to the area live outside the boundaries of the Villages.

We were fortunate to find a relatively inexpensive home in a rather unique area near Athens, Georgia. Our new home is a one-story, twenty-five year old brick townhouse with a two car garage with the privacy of woods facing the back of our house. Each home, although they all follow the same architectural guidelines, is distinctly different. The streets all end in a cul-de-sac so there is no through traffic, and yet we are only minutes from shopping and restaurants. There are restrictions against political signs, or any kind of yard signs, and an inexpensive home owners association that even offers a pool. We were fortunate to find the house just as it came on the market. We know we will be hard pressed to find a more desirable area or location, and we would not be able to replace our home for anywhere near what we paid for it.

Our biggest single disappointment with our new home is something we have to learn to master on our own: Winter. The sporadic sessions of summer terror have been replaced with the numbing dullness of perpetual inactivity in the winter. We do not like being enclosed inside for five months of the year. We do not like being cold. We do not like brown, lifeless landscape that is made worse by the depressing overcast and dreariness of the weather. We do not like being uncomfortable as a way of life.

Therein lies our dilemma. Stay or move back? What do we want out of our lives? Can we seriously face the prospect of enduring, or even surviving another Hurricane? We know the cost of homeowners insurance in Florida is fast becoming unobtainable. To top it off, our lifestyle and our bodies are no longer as flexible as in our youth. We know should our daughter and her family relocate somewhere else due to work or school, our attachment here will diminish greatly. Florida? Who knows, being snow birds certainly has its appeal. While summer in Florida is nerve wracking and often terrifying, winter here is boring and sedentary. The answer might be a balance between the two, living six months here and six months there. The best of both worlds, but then again, can I handle moving every six months?

Huatulco, Mexico

Maybe we just need to go on a world cruise for a year. If we’re going to be sedentary, then let’s do it in style!

George