Random Thoughts

Random Thoughts

It's Valentine's Day; third sea day in a row. Tomorrow we dock in Sydney and a number of passengers will be disembarking. We will have our first Ensemble Experience excursion too. It's an all-day one including lunch in the tower. We were up early this morning to deliver the Valentines to all our passengers then we settled back for our usual morning routine of sipping coffee and reading... lazy, lazy, lazy.

I thought this would be a good time to include some of our random thoughts about the cruise.

• I'd say that a good 75% of the passengers are 4-star (200 days at sea) Mariners or above which gives you free laundry service, discounts in the shops, discounted Pinnacle Grill, discounted wine packages and a bunch of other stuff. Few of them seem to be big drinkers either so you have to wonder where Holland America makes any money on this cruise. The fare, if you look at a per diem, is considerably less than for 7 or 14 day cruises too.

• Our stewards Gusti and Komang are great; they have kept our cabin in perfect shape and figured out our odd schedule and hit it perfectly almost every day. They have a huge number of cabins to take care of and yet they are always happy and cheerful to the passengers.

• I've heard from other passengers that there has been a lot of theft on this cruise – not from the cabins but in the public areas. It seems that iPads and iPods are disappearing when people turn their backs for a few minutes. Sad – if you can afford to take one of these cruises why would you need to steal stuff. I've also heard that the salt & pepper grinders in the lido are hot items to take... I'll keep a closer eye on anything I take out in the public areas... but that's not much as I do most of my computer stuff in the cabin and we do most of our reading here too.

• The speakers have been pretty good, but I'm surprised that there is so much topic duplication. I enjoyed the speakers that talked on the earth's tectonic plates and earthquakes, etc and the one that talked about WWII in the Pacific, but now we have new speakers onboard that are talking on the same subjects... I didn't like the topics well enough to hear them again.

• Where are the flying fish? We usually see them all over the world except in the very coldest waters. This trip we've seen very few anywhere – maybe there will be more now that we are heading north again.

• While the food is good, but I think the overall quality is down a little from past cruises – we are hearing the same from other people.

• Cookies... the first two days on board there were some oatmeal cookies to die for! That cookie baker must have left the ship in FLL because none of the cookies since then have been anywhere close to that good. We like to bring a couple cookies back to the cabin for emergency munching and I'd kill to get some of those good ones again!

• MS Amsterdam is a flagship for Holland America and you can tell the difference – it's slight, but the décor is slightly better than the other ships. The cruiselines spend just a bit more on their flagships and you can tell the difference.