A Week With 14 Members of Lene's Family on a 4700 Passenger Liner

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 ILENE. Linda and Mike sailed with us for a few days in the Chesapeake, in 2006, before we started this blog.