Wanderung 26

Bob:

The Sea Princess was cruising at a leisurely rate of 18 knots (21 miles per hour) toward the South Island of New Zealand, and that gave us two relaxing days at sea. I, for one, was glad to have a day where I did not have to drive, did not have to scout around for meals, and did not have to worry about where we would sleep that evening. Having someone else doing the "driving" and navigating and cooking and cleaning and really everything else, left us free to do exactly nothing, of which I did a lot! I mean, about the height of my ambition that day was to gear up and use the shoe polish to make my and Monika's dress shoes more presentable. Of course my shoes, being a men's size 13, required five times as much shoe polish and five times as much time as Monika's petite ladies' size six and a half. Since I'm not a particularly neat shoe polisher, I had to take (another) shower and thoroughly wash off the residue of the black polish afterwards.

Despite our tendencies toward complete and utter indolence, Princess Cruise Line tried to entice us out from our cabin in various ways. One way, of course, is to offer excellent cuisine at the buffet service on the Lido deck and in the dining rooms, and I took full advantage of that! We had a very relaxed breakfast followed by a brisk two-mile walk around the promenade deck that required six laps on the Sea Princess. Although the Sea Princess was smaller than some of the enormous ships we have cruised on lately, it featured a very nice, unobstructed, and continuous 1/3 mile track around the promenade deck. The forward section of the walk was in an enclosed tunnel inside the bow housing the anchor chains, and the advantage of that arrangement was that we could walk in almost any wind and rain conditions. "Blind corner" mirrors like those used on some driveways were placed at the narrow corner sections so you could see if anyone was coming against you and avoid collisions. How practical!

But another way we were enticed from our cabins was by a port talk on Dunedin given by Ronelle Adams, which we attended because the ship was scheduled to dock in Port Chalmers. We needed to know how far it was from Port Chalmers to Dunedin as our plan was to walk or take public transportation over to Dunedin and walk around a bit for the day, which is our typical pattern when we visit a city for the first time.

Fortunately, Ronelle presented a lot of information useful for us "do-it-yourself" tourists. Some of the most important slides were maps of the area that helped me locate Port Chalmers and Dunedin on the map, as well as the more detailed city street map of Dunedin. Based on the information provided, we decided to take a shuttle bus from the ship to Dunedin for $10 and then walk around that old university town a bit. We had driven through Dunedin on our cruise around New Zealand during Wanderung 22, but that really was just a quick drive through the town after a trip to the nature preserve down the peninsula.

The street maps shown by Ronelle indicated that Dunedin, a Scottish-heritage town, was organized around a central octagonally-shaped business district. The major tourist attractions were scattered in and around the periphery of that central district, so I took notes and made a copy shot of the street map so we could plan our walking route in advance.

After that we went to the aft lounge for a raffle drawing where they were giving away spa treatments, special meals, and that sort of thing. We didn't win anything, so we left the Bingo people to have their fun and retired to our room for the afternoon. At 5:30 p.m. we joined our tablemates at table 46 in the Rigoletto Dining Room for a nice, relaxed dinner. Two other couples completed our table of 6, Roya and Alex from San Jose in southern California, and Judy and Ian from Perth in West Australia. As it turned out, we were quite a congenial group had pleasant mealtime conversations for the next few weeks.

The table for 6 made it SO much easier to converse than our previous experiences with tables for 10 or 12. There are fewer people to carry the conversation along, of course, but there also seemed to be far less of a tendency for the conversation to break into different conversations on different sides of the table. That was just ducky for me, because hearing two different conversations, each coming into a different ear, just gives me a splitting headache after a while. Afterwards, we retired to our cabin for the night, working crossword puzzles and playing or writing on the computer as the whimsy took us.