The patriarch of the Ilene’s clan, her brother Mike,
less than a
month older than me, was celebrating his 73rd birthday, his 50th wedding
anniversary to Linda, plus the High School graduations of his grandson, Griffin
(by his son Kerry and Kerry's wife Alex) and grandson Trevor (by his daughter,
Barbi, and her husband Patrick). Four good reasons for a family reunion at sea, to
which his three other grandkids, Lexi, Lala and Andrew, his brother, Ken, and Ken's son, Mendy (who has sailed with us often) and Ilene and I were also invited.
A group of fifteen, for a week aboard the Carnival "Breeze", out of Galveston TX.
Our flight from Newark to Houston was uneventful but the ship had
a problem caused by a power failure in the boarding building from which folks
from the last cruise debouch and we embark and are given our plastic ID cards
which serve as room keys, boarding passes and credit cards while aboard. 4700
folks had to get off with their luggage and then another 4700 had to get on
with theirs, in very few hours. 4700 is a lot more than the 2000 I had been
accustomed to and I'm still not sure how they manage a city which, with crew,
has 6000 souls. A three hour delay, with most of our group, having driven to
Galveston from Austin in cars, had to wait out in the sun. Ilene had arranged
for the ridiculously expensive bus ride offered by Carnival from the airport,
which included "priority access" one of the ways that the cruise
industry gouges money out of folks by appealing to their desire to be
considered special. This time, however, the upshot was that we got on a
different faster line and had no wait at the terminal.
The Breeze was guarded by a large Coast Guard RIB with a machine
gunner standing forward. A pilot boat accompanied us out, after the bow and
stern thrusters pushed us sideways about 100 feet from the pier. I was rather
surprised at how long the marked channel was from the port to the Gulf through
reef infested waters. I have to check the charts for Galveston.
We were assigned to two adjacent tables for seven and for eight
(or nine and six) at the 8:15 seating in "Blush" the main dining room
at the aft end of the third and fourth decks. The other restaurant, somewhat
more forward, is "Sapphire". Lunch is always on the Lido, at the aft
end of the tenth deck, which is open continually and serves copious amounts of
an extremely varied cuisine. They have food bars for burritos, pizza, burgers,
salads, hot food, Mongolian, barbecue, Indian plus several desert bars, and
others for frozen yoghurt in addition to bars for non-alcoholic beverages.
They also try to sell food, drinks delivered on trays poolside,
fancy coffees and the cuisine of specialty restaurants for an extra special
dinner that is finer dining than the regular fine dining restaurants, or for
Italian or sushi. And about ten bars for adult beverages. If you want to there are endless
opportunities to spend money, and most of the announcements and daily
"entertainments" are in also adverts, trying to sell. Cruising on a
liner is like being in a continuous infomercial.
Our cabin, is on the Eighth Deck, port side, about three quarters
of the way aft. The boat is four blocks long!
Lots of exercise, between the eating places and the comedy club aft and
the theater and gym forward. They have a wind protected Serenity Deck, forward
on the 13th deck, with cabanas and no kids allowed. For the kids and adventurous adults with good
backs (I tried them) there are two large
closed water sliding tubes topside as well as several pools.
The Coast Guard has apparently relaxed the requirement for an
abandon ship drill: we were told to leave our life preservers in our staterooms
and muster in the dining room rather than at our lifeboat.
The great mass of the boat (128,500 gross tonnage, 1003 feet long
with a beam of 122 and draft of 27 feet) is what caused me surprise because she
shakes noticeably underway and we did not experience large seas or great speeds.
We left Galveston at about 6:30 pm Sunday and arrived in Montego Bay early in
the morning on Wednesday after two days at sea. During these days we rounded
the western end of Cuba, but much too far off shore to sight that nation, even
from the vantage of the great height of our upper decks. Somewhere near that point I noticed later on
the in-room TV monitor that draws the boat's track, that we made a course
change of about fifteen degrees to starboard, and after perhaps ten or 20 miles,
came back to the original heading. I had meant to ask the captain or officer of
the deck about why this occurred during the tour or the working spaces of the
ship. Customer services said this would be on the last sea-day, but did not
tell me that I had to register for this. I was disappointed on that day when
the tour was not among to 40 to 50 events that day listed on the daily
blurb. When I went to ask when it was
they said that there was no more room on the tour, which was never announced in
any way. Unlike the captain of the boat we took from Amsterdam to St.Petersberg and back two years ago, Captain never appeared, in person by
a deputy at a session to answer questions, except, unannounced, at a session
advertised as being about baggage handling during disembarkation procedures, which I did not
attend. Customer Services does not have
the answers to my questions or know how to connect me to any ship's officer. My
only chance, which I took, was accosting a white uniformed person who strolled
into public view. It's like after 9/11 they don't want us up there. But the officer said that the veer was to get a better angle on the wind
The TV also has a screen showing the ship's heading, speed,
weather and wind direction and speed. I figured out that wind speed was
apparent when it said 30 knots and there were no big waves. The 30 was the sum
of our 18 plus 12 on our bow. Direction is stated in degrees, with a big yellow
arrow lying across a picture of the ship, from near the bow. So 30 degrees with
the head of the arrow off the port quarter (but not 30 degrees off that
quarter) may mean that apparent wind is 30 degrees off the starboard bow, I
think. I would make it easier for folks who want to know to figure out what
this data means. It won’t cost Carnival much.
I had "The Fatal Shore", by Robert Hughes, a history of the brutal colonization of Australia with convicts transported there
by the British, starting at the time of our revolutionary war, when the U.S.
Colonies no longer accepted British criminals. I hadn't known of our American
contribution to Australia. Antidote to potential boredom. The best part was the
description of the passage. The Crown chartered the ships from private owners
at a price per ton per month and the author knew the number of prisoners
transported and calculated the ton per passenger rate, less than three tons if
ship per person. The Breeze, with 128,500 gross tons for 6000 persons, afforded
us a luxurious 21.4 tons of boat per person. And made of metal, it weighed less
than a heavy water logged oaken boat
The gym is huge, though inadequate for the horde of would-be
exercisers, e.g., only three benches for pressing weights. Unlike our prior Carnival Cruise, from NY to
Nova Scotia, during the Katrina disaster, the sauna and steam room are not
included in the services except for an additional charge. Similarly, the free
one page newspaper is apparently a thing of the past. We are so-called "frequent cruisers"
due to our Nova Scotia cruise and derive the benefits of such a status: a free
one liter bottle of water. Am I supposed to be duly impressed? But they also
recognized my birthday, which had occurred a few days before the trip started,
with a card granting $25 off the price of a bottle of wine, which was
pleasant and $50 off any spa treatment,
which induced Lene to buy a $125 treatment, their cheapest, for
"only" $75. Such a bargain --except Lene is quite beautiful enough in
my eyes, without such treatments. Shakespeare has Ophelia's father, Polonius, say that beautification "a
vile phrase;" and they are no longer called beauticians but, by gilding
and hyping the lily, "estheticians"!!!
The largest number of passengers present on this voyage, a clear
majority, are Texans. It makes sense with Galveston the port of embarkation and
debarkation. Oklahoma is the second largest source. There is a hot tub on the
port side of the fifth deck, three decks below our balcony.
The family members
enjoyed this tub and later, enjoyed a recitation of a monologue by aunt Lene from one of the dramas that she has studied. She is upper right, the center of all attention. These shots from our balcony.
I
was there a different day and made friends with four Indian-American couples,
from Texas, Missouri and New Jersey. All professionals lawfully working here,
and representing the vigor brought to
our nation by immigrants as far back as Alexander Hamilton. I had the pleasure
of recommending the books of Jhumpa Lahiri to them. She writes from her own
experience and imagination about the lives of
immigrants to this nation from India and their children. Actually there
were folks from every race and nationality on this boat, among the passengers
and the crew as well.
Another non-scientific and statistically unsound observation: the
percentage of morbidly obese people -- and those apparently not very far from
that status -- among the passengers on this ship seems much higher than in the
U.S. population at large. It occurred to me that the morbidly obese may be
attracted by the seven-day-long continuous
"all-you-can-eat" food binge, but that is sheer speculation.
Our waiter, Victor, from Hungary, was great. Here between Kerry and Alex.
He has other tables
in addition to our two, and another full set of folks for the early seating,
yet he knows everyone's first name and food preferences. He provides elegant
professional service, and is low key toward the table-top dancing that some of
the more extroverted waiters revel at. He met a Hungarian born young lady who
works in a different part of the boat and they have been permitted to share a
crew cabin.
In Montego Bay, Mike arranged a bus to take 13 of us to a place
where a small boat took us to "the reef" and provided equipment for
snorkeling. Not much of a reef, nor enough wind to create waves on it, but lots
of small fish and varied small corals with black spiny sea urchins living in
their vales. Then a bus to Doctors Cove Beach, and after a few hours of
swimming, partly in the rain, a ride back to the ship, well before the 5:30
deadline. The beach was a rather poor one compared to the beautiful largely
vacant ones we have been elsewhere and they charged admission and for chairs
and umbrellas. An expensive day for 13 folks, about $60 per head, but a lot
less than what Carnival would have charged. There was a beach volleyball court
at the far eastern end of the small beach and two of the young men in our party
took their ball there and got up a game, which sadly had to be stopped when our
driver came back early and rescued the rest of us from standing in the rain.
We arrived at the bight at the western end of Grand Cayman Island
at 7 am and departed at 4 pm for Cozumel.
This was the only one of the ports where they had to use lighters to
take us ashore. The two tiny dots you can see at the waterline on the Breeze's
port side are lighters.
Here is one of them up close near the dock.
My mission
here, as usual, was to find a postcard for my granddaughter and a post office in which to
buy a stamp and mail it. Others had gone on for another day of beaching. It is
rather a scandal to visit the Caymans without snorkeling or diving but I'm
guilty. Mendy and I discovered a museum right near the waterfront. Regrettably,
because there is no money to be made by pimping attendance at this museum, it
is not mentioned by Carnival as an attraction. It is one of the oldest
buildings in town, previously used as a town hall, meeting house, school,
lighthouse, courthouse and jail. It describes the natural, political and
communal history of all three of the Cayman Islands. They split from Jamaica in
1959, three years before that nation became independent of England, in order to
maintain loyalty to the Commonwealth rather be independent. The sea was
always the heart of the Caymans economy until recently when tourism, and off-shore
money-hiding finance have taken over. Turtle fishing was the big industry
followed by rope making, until nylon wrecked that line. This museum, like the
one on the French side of Saint Martin, is a treasure and well worth your hour
and a half.
Our last port of call before a day at sea and return to Galveston was
Cozumel, an island off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico -- the
easternmost point of Mexico. We had no plan, and some stayed aboard but eight
of us wandered about and met a man who turned us over to a van driver who
charged only $30 per capita for what turned out to be about 3.5 hours. First a
visit to a Tequilla store. They don't make or bottle it here but sell in here,
in variations from inexpensive to very expensive. They gave out samples of
each, perhaps five samples, in tiny plastic cups, aggregating half a shot per
person. They explained the process of the making, which comes from the root not
the leaves, but has similarities to the distilling of rum. We also visited San
Gervasio,
in the interior, near the wells, a site of Mayan ruins, though small
compared to those on the mainland, which I have never visited. Barbi and Lene are in the picture. Then on to Punta
Morena, on the eastern or ocean side of the island for a swim on its somewhat rocky beach for
some and trinket shopping for others, before returning to the ship.
The last few nights we attended the late night R-rated comedy
club performances,(one better the other worse) got Happy Anniversary cakes, and I partook of the huge water
slides that rise several stories above the 13th deck.
Family gatherings are great great, but these big boat cruises pale in comparison to cruising
aboard I
LENE. Linda and Mike sailed with us for a few days in the Chesapeake, in 2006, before we started this blog.
