Steve and Cathy's Blog

The first night aboard as we sailed south was an education.  Neither of us slept all that soundly, partly because of the excitement of starting our adventure, and, especially for Steve, because we had not yet adjusted to the rolling motion of the ship.  We are newbies to cruising, and, as cruise ships go, this is a small one.  It weighs less than a third of the hugantic Oasis-class ships of Royal Caribbean, so ocean action of any consequence has an effect on this ship- and that means any movement is way more noticeable to us that are not veteran cruisers.  But we will get used to it.

Cathy awakens around 4 am.  Steve awakens by alarm at 5:30, as he has his first personal trainer session with Sho.  Up to Deck 9 he goes for his 6:30 appointment.  It goes very well, but it becomes obvious that the two-day per week he has signed up for needs to be increased to three if the full benefit is to be felt.  Steve does just that.  Ka-ching for Oceania Cruises, but so be it.

When he returns at 7:00, Cathy declares near starvation has set in.  We hustle to the Grand Dining Room, only to find it closed until 8:00.  A quick perusal of the other options and we discover Waves, a small restaurant next to the pool that opens every day at 6:30 and serves a light breakfast buffet at that time.  So back up to Deck 9.  Waves is a delightful and informal  spot with about fifteen tables, many looking over the water.  The place is near empty, and we are rescued with coffee, tea, and a buffet of rolls, cereal and fruit.  Not enough for Cathy for an entire breakfast, but it held off starvation admirably.

It’s still 7:30 when we finish, and so we go down to Deck 5 to reconnoiter the ship for a few minutes.  Then it’s in to the Grand Dining Room for a full breakfast.  We peruse Currents, the daily ship publication that has news from the US as well as a lot of useful information about the ship.  It also contains a full schedule of activities for the day, which Cathy saw included an “Enrichment Lecture by Peter Coyle” on the political history of the Caribbean at 3:15 PM.  We made a note to attend.

We ate breakfast and headed back to the room.  The unpacking process commenced.  Now to give you a good idea of the complexity of this project, let us begin by noting that the cruise line paid for the two of us to ship 200 pounds of stuff in four suitcases free.  We ended up shipping three that weighed probably 150 pounds.  As mentioned, we hauled another suitcase and three carryons with us, so you can imagine that our room looked like an airport lost and found.

The other factor to note is that our stateroom is all of 216 square feet, and that includes a desk, a kingsize bed, a bathroom and a closet.  While it is well appointed, and very well designed, it is a small space, so the task of transferring all that stuff to the available storage space appeared daunting if not impossible.  But we set to it, and, lo and behold, within an hour, we had all four suitcases and three carryons unpacked and the stuff stowed away.  We were very proud of our logistics prowess.  What seemed an impossibility at 8:45 was completed by 9:45.

We decided that we would just vegetate for a while.  Steve is still held captive by a really bad cold, so we just hung around the stateroom for an hour or so.

The mention of this cold reminds me to deviate for a paragraph for an observation from the previous day.  I didn’t mention it, but part of the embarkation process was to fill out a Public Health form that had three questions on it, the purpose of which was never disclosed. One question asked if you were more than 34 weeks pregnant,  A second question asked if you had a runny nose or cold symptoms.  The third asked if you had been nauseous or had vomited in the past 24 hours. Now I ask you: if you are about to start a cruise vacation that you have anticipated for months and months, who in their right mind is going to answer Yes to any of these questions and risk being told that they could not board the ship?  Of course, everyone there that day answered No, and that included Steve Knight, who, while not a plague-ridden danger to his fellow passengers, had a faucet-like runny nose.  Sorry, Department of Health, I feel just fine.

Okay, back to the ship and our stateroom. Eventually we got antsy and Steve was having trouble logging on to the free WiFi for which he had, he thought, carefully set up an account.  The library and the Oceania@Sea computer room were side by side near the bow, so off we went to seek out both.  No one was in the computer lounge to help Steve, but we both toured the very nice library.  Of course Cathy wound up taking a couple of books.  We returned to the room to dump the laptop and books and went to lunch.

After lunch we went back to the stateroom.  You would think that by now we would have had the energy to join in some kind of shipboard activity, but that was not the case.  This was only our first full day, so, unlike someone on a one or two week cruise, we felt no urgency to do so. We did decide to attend the Enrichment Experience lecture at 3:15 concerning the political history of the Caribbean.  That wasn’t for two hours, so we laid around reading and Steve fell asleep.

At 3:00pm, Cathy left for the lecture.  Steve decided he needed sleep more than enrichment. In an hour or so, Cathy returned from the lecture having enjoyed it a great deal and looked forward to many more, as the lecturer was to be on board for most of the entire ATW voyage and giving many lectures acquainting us with the destinations we would visit.

During Cathy’s absence, Steve had awakened and trotted up to Oceani@Sea and the manager had fixed the login problem caused by Steve’s misspelling his email address.

It was time to me to start blogging.  After two hours of that, with Cathy becoming faint from hunger, we headed for the main dining room right at 6:00pm.  The joint was jumpin’, as Cathy might say.  Another fantastic meal (see Cathy’s blogging contribution for details).  The photo of one of the entrees begins this post, and it, no doubt, is one of many we will take.  After dinner, it was back to the room for the two party animals from Wallingford.  Snoring commenced at approximately 9:00pm.