Floating Hotel

A couple of days ago I wrote about driving to southern California on our way to San Diego to board a cruise ship to Hawaii. And I said “More about that another time.” Well, that time has come.

My first concern was the size of our cabin. Hard to tell from those little diagrams. I had visions of having to dismantle the scooters, and stacking them against the wall. We had been on numerous cruises, with relatively small cabins, and we'd been on one in the Mediterranean where we we had to go outside to change our mind. I needn't have worried. Look at the size of this room!


And if that doesn't convince you, let me say that there was room enough for each of us to scooter into the room, and turn completely around.

I'm guessing that the sour look on my face is because I was sucking on lemon drops.

Of course safety is a major concern on ocean going liners, so the first day out we went through the life jacket-lifeboat instruction procedure. We were told that the old and lame would be the last to get off because if anything drastic were happening, we were not valuable enough to save. Okay, I made that up.

One shipboard problem I worried about beforehand was getting the scooters over the inevitable "bumps" that marked the dividing line between various sections of the ship. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the interior decks were quite smooth. There were elevators to get us from one deck to another, and there were quite a number of handicapped persons aboard. (No, not the crew!) A couple of other people had scooters, and there were many with canes and walkers. Near the end of the voyage we were told that there were some 80+ handicapped people aboard.

One of the funniest happenings was when we went to breakfast. As you look at this next photo, the windows mark the aft end of the ship. The photo was taken from the entrance to the dining room, and as we scootered up for our morning meal, we were inevitably shown to a table by the aft windows.
(Obviously those are not portholes.) We would scooter up to our table, get out and be seated. That was when the, um, "argument" would take place among the hired help to see who would get to park our scooters somewhere near the entrance. No, it was never violent, but we got a kick out of listening to the yammering as to whose turn it was. Then the winner would go zooming off (at 4-1/2 mph) and bring them back to us when we finished the meal. Great fun!

There are many more photos I could have posted, but I couldn't resist this one. One might say that I'm something of an ice cream-aholic, for on every cruise we've ever been on, I have to have my ice cream. And Amalie always got a shot of me scarfing it up.

That's it for now, but maybe one of these days I'll show you the islands we visited.

Fun time:

Little Johnny is always being teased by the other neighborhood boys for being stupid. Their favorite joke is to offer Johnny his choice between a nickel and a dime -- Little Johnny always takes the nickel.

One day, after Johnny takes the nickel, a neighbor man takes him aside and says, "Johnny, those boys are making fun of you. Don't you know that a dime is worth more than a nickel, even though the nickel's bigger?"

Johnny grins and says, "Well, if I took the dime, they'd stop doing it, and so far I've made $20!"