Excellent Adventure 2012 - Day 3 ALL ABOARD!!!

July 31, 2012

Our last morning in Stockholm:

Andy went for an early run; he wanted to run all the way around the island that is the Old City and it turned out to be a bit longer than he anticipated. But it was pretty, which is what counts.

It’s really hard to tell how big the hotel is: it’s  actually perched above a department store (“Pub”, must be a Swedish chain?), taking up the top 4 floors of the building. Yes, the reception desk is on the 4^th floor. Three of the four elevators in the building are rigged to go straight to the 4^th floor with no stopping.

But it seemed like all 4 floors worth of hotel showed up for breakfast this morning – there was a considerable line already there and growing when we showed up. Everybody must be on the same schedule. Despite the chaos resulting from a big crowd jabbering in multiple languages – and nobody looking down to see if they might be stepping on people shorter than themselves (i.e., me), we were in and out of there more quickly than we might have thought.

There’s a taxi stand right in front of the hotel, making the “how do we get a taxi” issue a moot point. The cruise terminal where we were to board our ship was a lot further away than I thought it would be – we had seen several different ships at dock very close to the city itself.

Last year, embarkation was super easy – we had arranged for Holland America to pick us up at the airport and take us directly to the ship. They took our bags, we checked in and it was all done before noon.

Not this time – stood in one long line to get through security, then another long line to check in, then sat for a while in some purgatory area and waited for to be called to actually set foot on board the ship. Batch processing, as it were.

Finally! We are on board(after the first official obligatory squirt of sanitizing hand goo at the bottom of the gang plank) and it’s time for – LUNCH!! I mean it’s been maybe 4 hours since breakfast!

Except the stewards are shuffling us up to the Lido deck where the buffet is and we KNOW this is just wrong – we are frequent flyers on HAL, therefore we are entitled to our traditional sit down lunch! We don’t have our 2 stars for nothing!  So we ignored the stewards, dropped our carry on stuff in the cabin and headed up to our usual dining room.

Ah, love the food on HAL!

{Notice how quickly one can deteriorate to 3 year old status when on board a luxury cruise liner}

After lunch we went back to the cabin to find our luggage had shown up, so we were able to unpack. And watch the Olympics. What I really should have been doing is charging up my macbook and writing this blog. But we watched the Olympics.

At 3:00 was the travel guide talk – last few years, the travel guy has been pretty boring. This one shows some signs of life. He actually had some useful information and was entertaining at the same time.

Then 4:00 was our mandatory safety drill. We were wondering if they were going to be more stringent than in the past. And I think they were – this year they made sure to account for every cabin assigned to each muster station. I don’t remember this level of detail since our first cruise to Alaska.

After 5:00, the ship started to pull away from the dock. The first 45 minutes was narrated by Travel Guy. I went out onto the bow for a bit – but the wind was blowing something fierce, so I didn’t really last very long.

But I did catch this one shot - if you really want to be alone, buy yourself a random rock in the middle of the Swedish archipelago:

My favorite part? the little bitty light house - all the way on the left.

At dinner we sat with a retired couple from Arizona. Last year it seemed that the wait staff always sat us with people who had to be at least in their 80s.

After dinner was another opportunity to write the blog, but instead, we watched the Olympics until 9:30, when we went to see the "big entertainment". Then, of course, we had to go to the Piano Bar, as is our custom. The piano player is from South Africa - sure hope she warms up during the week. Previous years the piano players have known to cater to the (old fart) American crowd.

And obviously this is not getting posted tonight....

Tomorrow: Estonia!