Lots to choose from
Thursday 6th December and the birthday party’s over, we have another couple of days at sea, so it’s business as usual; eating, lectures, eating, reading eating and trying to socialise with our table companions, not very much success there, rather like the
Birthday cake, spoilt as usual x
weather, getting colder.
Friday 7th and it’s our last day at sea for this leg of the cruise, we dock in New York early tomorrow morning. Today all the lecturer’s wind up their various talks and also they have brought the late theatre show forward, no doubt to allow everyone to pack and place their luggage outside their doors ready for collection; not for us on this occasion though!!!
New York at night
Today we kicked into touch the idea of dining in the Britannia restaurant; we couldn’t bring ourselves to join our usual table this evening and sit down and go through the “platitudes” one does with dining companions at the end of a cruise, instead we went to lunch in Britannia and made this our main meal, and very nice it was. This also meant we could go to the theatre with the late sitting diners for a change. On several occasions as I have already said, we were not on a happy, party, social, funny table, and have talked many times about
New York
our Queen Victoria cruise table. Not only did our table of 6 gel, we had an excellent waiter and sommelier, who we kept very busy, which added to the fun, if only the others were here!!!!!
Tonight we also picked up our room key-card for our new cabin, 4 decks below so we also had to pack everything ready for the transfer.
Saturday and We passed the statute of liberty around 0530 this
Statue of Liberty
morning and fortunately “El Capitain” held off the microphone, no announcement to wake us. As we weren’t interested in getting off the ship and heading into New York, our instructions today were simple and clear, wait for the call for last passengers to leave then head off, armed with our old and new key-cards and passport and head for US immigration, ugh? We’re heading straight back to UK, why go to all that time wasting trouble I ask.
We joined the queue at immigration behind the passengers leaving ship and waited. Fortunately the queue moved fairly quickly and eventually we were through and then walked round into the booking in hall. Following the usual security checks we bypassed the queue of folk waiting to check in and sat in the waiting area along with about 500 other passengers who are staying on board who also had to go through the same “meaningless” procedure. We knew our new cabin was ready, after all we had checked our luggage had arrived safely before disembarking and presumably, the vast majority of the people waiting were still in their same cabin!!!!!!
After a wasted morning and back on board it was lunch time, again. Today was all about getting another couple of thousand passengers aboard so there was nothing happening so we caught up with our reading, wondering all the time if we had done the right thing, moving to a new table of eight.
As dinner time approached and we were dressing in “smart casual”, we were still wondering what our dinner companions would be like right up to 1800hrs when all would be revealed.