Cruising again

 What do you do when you are living out of 2 suitcases and you are effectively homeless?  Travel of course!  George and I found ourselves in the interesting position of having a free (It was really paid for pre-covid, but you know how that went.) cruise and we wanted to use it before we lost our money. 

We are now on an 18 day cruise-2 cruises really-that lands in Ft. Lauderdale after 7 days.  We are making the most out of it though. I mean, it's warm, we are at sea, and all is right with the world.  

Both houses are now packed up.  We have 3 empty suitcases in the museum closet and a few personal items in the big house.  There are no puzzles, no toys, no nothing.  Our plan?  When we finish this cruise we will have a pile of puzzles waiting at the house to play with and then they all get packed in those extra suitcases and brought down to our daughter's for storage until we head to Europe in April.  

When we return to Boca, I have a bit of dental work to do then we are hopping in the Tesla and spending the next 2 months traveling around the States visiting friends and family before we leave for good.  

So.  Back to travel blogging it is.  

We are now on the Holland American Rotterdam. It is a massive ship.

This one holds a maximum capacity of 4,173 passengers and crew.  That's a lot of people!  Many more than we are used to.  But at this point, we had no choice.  Not that it's a bad ship. In fact, it is brand new.  It went into service in 2020 and we were supposed to be on it then.  And then again in September of 2022, but life just got in the way.  We cancelled our TransAtlantic crossing to pay for the castle instead.  

Our room is quite large. There is a nice balcony, the bed is comfortable, and the shower is big enough for two.  

We had a blast trying to get onto the ship. It turns out the folks on the phone at corporate and those at the pier didn't get the same information about having stars on drivers licenses.  Our passports are at the Italian consulates awaiting our longterm visas.  When I called I was told we could get on with just our license and a copy of our passport.  As it turns out at the pier they wanted a copy of our birth certificates.  Fine.  George had his but I didn't.  Trouble! We lucked out!  I called our man Scott at home and he knew exactly where the file marked personal papers was in the crate.  He pulled it off the truck, opened it up, found the file, took photos of the birth certificate and we were in business!  Now I have added a copy of that to the travel folder as well.  That folder is sure getting bigger.

The artwork on the ship is very interesting.  I post some of it here.  More will come later I'm sure.

Our first stop was at a private island, Half Moon Cay, and as usual, it did nothing for us.

I bought a swim suit because of course ours are all in Italy.  We had the "Island BBQ" which was just a shoreside version of the Dive In Diner food.  Listened to a man give us a first person account of his life as Jesus and we went back to the ship.  It turns out that 1/5th of the ship this first 7 days is some Southern Gospel Singing group.  Just our luck.  We've been prayed for more times than I care to account on this trip. 

I brought along a set of nano blocks to complete on the ship.  This one is the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  It's fun.  Much harder than Lego's simply because they are just so small.  I had fun running around trying to get cups to sort the pieces in.  The Baristas thought I was up to no good.  

The next day was a sea day and I spent the greater part of it in bed.  Thankfully there was no real sickness this time, but there was quite a bit of nausea.  I took the pills and was good within about 3 hours.

Today we are in Jamaica.  We've been here before so we went ashore to get George some swim trunks-I think he's going to look like Bad Santa, but he assures me they will fit well. Either way, I promise not to post photos.  Nothing to report from here.  We stopped at Margaritaville for the free wifi, posted the blog and headed back to the ship.