It’s true. There’s been something missing from our life—sailing the ocean blue.
It’s not enough to see the water from your living room. Sometimes, you have to be on it. And after some four years without an ocean voyage, it feels good to be on a ship again.
We chose this itinerary, with its many sea days and only two port stops between Seattle and Tokyo, precisely because we wanted to test whether our cruising romance still carries a spark. It does.
It’s amazing how easily we settle back into the groove again. Walking with our regained sea legs as the ship rocks to and fro . . . falling asleep with the rhythm of the waves . . . listening to a jazz trio as we sip our pre-dinner cocktails . . . attending lectures in the morning and watching live entertainment after dinner. Yes, it’s still all here and we still like it.
It remains a pleasure counting up the laps as we walk the promenade deck to get our miles in. And maybe Covid culled the herd of people who don’t want to follow suggested rules and common sense, but there’s seems a dearth of upstream-salmon-walking folk on this cruise. We’re all ambling counter-clockwise as generations of cruisers have been wont to do.
Luckily, we started the cruise in Seattle on a beautiful, warm and sunny afternoon. Our verandah cabin, on the eighth level at the aft of the ship, is about 20% larger than the normal verandah cabin on this ship, and its deck is also larger and better sheltered. It proved a perfect to place to enjoy the pre-departure sunshine.
(Although we soon discovered that we are right below the back pool deck. During the departure party, conversations from above floated down. I am sure no one above suspected that they were being listened to by ears below. We were so tempted at one point to rush up the stairs to inform one seemingly clueless Southern gentleman—who fretted about his shy, retiring, never married tenant—that his tenant and friend simply sounded gay and was probably quite happy!)
As has been our custom for the last decade or so, we have continued to catalogue all the ways Holland America eliminates once cherished features in its never-ending quest to squeeze out profits.
Gone are the fresh flowers on the dining room tables, the fruit bowl freshened each day in one’s cabin, the chocolates left after turndown service, and the complimentary nuts at the bar. There are no longer cooking classes and there is no more movie screening room with free popcorn. I guess we are supposed to prefer watching films in the privacy of the cabin rather participate in a public group—and maybe most people do.
On one hand, lectures and shows have become increasingly sophisticated and elaborate with film clips, multiple screens, and pre-recorded music. On the other hand, they have become less involving and interesting. Cold media versus warm media.
Food has remained tasty and service good in the restaurants. I do wish they didn’t sneak in so many ways to try to sell you more things like fresh-squeezed orange juice, espresso, or extra-cost menu items in the free restaurants. We routinely ignore all such come-ons. However, the moment we saw the multi-course menu with main wine pairings at a significant added cost, we signed on without a moment’s hesitation or word of reproach . . . thus proving it takes all kinds.
Curiously, the obsession with dousing one’s hands with cleaning gels before entering any restaurant that marked the norovirus days before Covid seems to have become an afterthought at most.
Finally, in a triumph for the written word and the pleasure of books, we were delighted to see that Holland America has brought back its shipboard library. The last time we were on board, they had been removing them from all their ships in order to create multi-media exploration lounges. Today, every one of the multi-media displays in the exploration lounge is turned off (and probably no longer works, like hands-on displays in so many museums). But there is a library again which in many ways is an improvement over the old version. The current library feels like a well-curated bookshop stocking only a hundred titles, but with tons of copies of each title, displayed face up and easy to peruse. And there’s not a check out process, just a request to turn them back in before you leave.
One hopes for Holland America and its new library that Covid has also weeded out those people who like to debark with things that they don’t own. With blue skies ahead, and a wake behind, we sail on.
Please check out all my novels in either paperback or Kindle format, including The Long Table Dinner, The Finnish Girl, The Devil’s Analyst, and Tales from the Loon Town Café. All titles are available to read for free to Amazon Prime subscribers.
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