Wanderung 34

2 May 2018 Wednesday: At Sea

I was pleased to find out during our morning stretching /exercise class that I could actually sit in the lotus position, even if only briefly. The Zuiderdam was swaying a bit due to medium sized ocean swells, so we did all of our exercises while sitting or lying on the mats for safety. But our instructor was very good about introducing a new set of stretch routines that could be done on the mats, so we still got our money's worth.

Immediately after we listened to a slide show on Captain Cook, the famous British exploratory sailing captain. He primarily explored the Pacific Ocean from the extreme South, where he tried to find Antarctica, to the extreme North, where he tried to find the Northwest Passage that was presumed to exist across the top of the North American continent. He was truly capable, and was one of the first explorers to use the newly-developed accurate chronometer to establish longitude far more accurately than had ever been done before.

Unfortunately, Cook was killed by the native Hawaiians on his last voyage when he tried to take a local King hostage to solve a dispute. Curiously both Vancouver and Bligh sailed with Cook on that final voyage, and both were rewarded for their service with ships to do further exploration. With Vancouver that worked out well as he discovered Vancouver Island and other good stuff, but when Bligh was put in command of the Bounty, things did not end so well! (For Hollywood's version, see the movie, "Mutiny On The Bounty".)

After two straight days of port calls in the Azores, we were ready for a day of relaxation on board our ship. We just noodled around in our cabin during the day except for lunch (mustn't miss a meal, of course!) and the afternoon presentation on Lord Horatio Nelson and his career in the British Navy.

The shore excursion guide Ian, who is British, gave a very good presentation emphasizing the role of Nelson in the decisive Battle of Trafalgar that gave Britain domination of the ocean for over a century. Although I knew much of that story, I had not realized that Nelson was initiating new tactics in naval engagements as well as deploying new weapons such as the 64-pounder carronade for close-quarters combat. But he also was clearly vainglorious and insisted on wearing his dress uniform and decorations on the quarterdeck, which made him a perfect target for the snipers who eventually killed him.

The really tragic aspect of Nelson's death, just touched upon by Ian, was the British government's complete disregard of his mistress Lady Hamilton (somewhat understandable in the Victorian era), and the utter neglect of providing for his young daughter Horatia (unforgivable in any era). To spend a fortune on a state funeral for Nelson but then allow his mistress and daughter to become beggars seems blindingly inconsistent to me, but also I am looking at those events with 20th-Century sensibilities. Oh well.

Our evening tradition after dinner has become attending the Billboard piano bar for the 7-7:45 performance, which gives us just enough time to nip into the theater in the bow of the Zuiderdam for the 8 o'clock main stage performance.

This evening the featured performer was Matt Cairns, a Scottish singer and guitar player who had just joined the ship in Ponta Delgado in the Azores. Mr. Cairns was quite skillful although he seemed nervous at first as he kept jumping about on the stage. I liked best the Scottish and Irish folk songs he did at the beginning, although he was also very competent on the Rock and Roll numbers that followed those.

Since the ship's band was playing with him, they had the whole shebang amplified so loud that we had to use our earplugs, which really should be unnecessary for true folk music. We were glad that we had brought our earplugs along, plus a spare set that Linda and Jerry ended up using. But the earplugs decrease the total impact of the sound by my estimate from around 110 decibels to about 80 decibels, which is still loud but not headache-producing. And so we all enjoyed the music before we two party-poopers turned in for the night and Linda and Jerry went on to other adventures.

3 May 2018 Thursday: At Sea

The "What On Earth!" Game show was cancelled due to technical problems with the stage, but was replaced by an audience-participation version of the same trivia questions centered around the natural world. We did fairly well at that, but we're not one of the top 3 teams, who all received bottles of champagne. However, they had brought enough tie pins as consolation prizes for all the other teams, so we finally got our official Holland America pins, plus some rather nice Holland America pens to take home with us.

The 11 o'clock seminar was on "Cycles of Diversification and Extinction and The Role of Natural Catastrophes", and the lecturer David W. Richerson, who had a lot of slides just chock full of information. Unfortunately, he had to speed up and skip slides at the end as he spent a lot of time on the diversification of dinosaurs and so forth. But I had not been aware of a natural phenomenon called a "flood volcano", which apparently releases a lot of climate-affecting gasses that had in turn caused at least a couple of the 6 great extinctions in the Earth's history.

I was surprised that there was still no plausible explanation of the Maunder Minimum when sunspots had disappeared and the overall luminosity of the sun had markedly decreased, causing a mini Ice Age. That is particularly vexing because if we have no idea what can cause that much of a change in the sun's output, forecasting a future such event is impossible, and a sudden cooling of the Earth is probably just as disruptive as a sudden warming. I read that, for example, the Vikings had to adapt to the Maunder Minimum by switching to more cold-tolerant cereal crops to feed themselves and their animals.

Also at 11 o'clock was a demonstration of the deployment of the inflatable life rafts that are positioned all around the Zuiderdam on the Promenade deck. I feel that passengers should have that instruction as you can never tell if you would catch a lifeboat or one of those life rafts if the ship went down, and getting into the rafts is a bit tricky. Fortunately Jerry attended that demonstration and told us about it later.

We tried Team Trivia at 1 o'clock, but the questions were hard and we guessed poorly, so we only ended up with 7 out of 17 possible points. We were glad that we already had our Holland America pins from the morning's trivia session because it surely does not look like we will ever be the top scoring team in the afternoon or evening sessions!

We followed that by a port lecture at 2 o'clock that featured Southampton, England, and Cherbourg, France, which are our next two ports of call. Both appear interesting ports and we are happy that we will be at the next-to-downtown berth in Southampton as well as at Cherbourg. Especially at Southampton, that berth makes it quite easy to walk up to the train station and take a train over to Portsmouth and see both the Mary Rose and the HMS Victory, Admiral Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar. Southampton also was the start of the Titanic's cruise, and so a picture of the Titanic was obligatory, of course.

At Cherbourg we will probably just walk around town although Linda and Jerry have arranged a private tour of the WWII battlefields on the Normandy beaches that lie along the coast to the East of Cherbourg. The talk, however, focused on the beaches.

After dinner with Janet and Bob, we once again enjoyed the two singer-pianists in the Billboard piano bar before attending the main show in the theater in the bow of the Zuiderdam. The main show this evening consisted of a repeat show of the juggler who performed our first night on the ship, plus the Scottish guitarist who sang popular tunes along with some Scottish and Irish ballads. It was a curious mix, but interesting even if he did take the ballads rather more quickly in a rock music style that I was used to. But it was a pleasant performance and we relaxed for a while in our cabin afterwards before turning in for the night.

Being on the portside while going northeast, we saw some beautiful sunsets in the aft quarter of our ship.

4 May 2018 Friday: At Sea

Today is our last "At Sea" day before we visit a string of ports on our way to Copenhagen, Denmark. We started with our morning stretching classes, as those definitely made Monika's hip feel better, and I think benefited Linda's knees a bit, too. The problem was I also wanted to attend the Captain's presentation about the Zuiderdam at 10 o'clock, and the exercise class usually lasted at least 45-50 minutes. What to do? In the end, Linda and Jerry went off to do some emailing and we opted to attend the Captain's presentation.

Captain Von Hoogdalem gave a very thorough slide presentation about the design and operation of the Zuiderdam . I was glad to hear that Holland America Lines anticipated a 25-year life span of their ships, because the Zuiderdam was built in 2002 and completely renovated in 2017, so it should be around to take cruises on until 2027 or so. I think that would have made my sister Phyllis and her husband Bill happy, as they had experienced two very nice cruises on the Zuiderdam when it was new, one with us to Alaska and one with my sister Lois through the Panama Canal.

On the whole I think my sister would be pleased with the renovation, because except for the elimination of the library we thought it was well done. The Zuiderdam still has a good ratio of public spaces to the 1800-1900 passengers it can carry, and we definitely enjoyed some of the new venues such as the Billboard piano bar.

I enjoyed the detailed pictures both of the three sideways bow thrusters and the two large diesel-eclectic, tractor-type Azipods in the rear of the ship that are the main propulsion unit. I had not realized that Azipod-equipped ships do away with the rudder completely, but they do and that in turn reduces total drag by 8%, I believe the Captain said. Carnival Corporation had just made a high-level decision that all future ships built for any of their subsidiary cruise lines would henceforth be Azipod-equipped ships, which I had presumed had already been done as I first became acquainted with Azipods propulsion on a cruise ship in the early 2000s.

The navigation center on the bridge is now all electronic maps, although Zuiderdam still carries the old-fashioned paper charts. I had NOT realized how many backup steering systems were available in case the main steering link from the ship's helm on the bridge down to the Azipods fails--there were at least 7 levels of redundant steering controls available to the Captain, including a final level of the engineers in the engine room using hydraulic pumps to manually change the angle of the Azipods.

We forewent the 11 o'clock presentation on the role of the potato in history, which I'm sure would have been interesting if somewhat starchy, in favor of working with Linda to try to track the location of her grandmother's birthplace in northwestern Ireland. Linda had actually found both the town that Wendy remembered as being the correct birthplace, AND a nearby settlement that had a family with the correct names in the 1911 Irish census. That cannot be coincidence, so we have reduced the search area from the entire counties of Sligo and Mayo in northwestern Ireland, which would have been VERY awkward to canvass in a week, to a rather small town in Mayo and its surrounding area, which feels much more doable.

We also used the day of Wifi that Linda had purchased to start searching the ship emigration records for her grandma, or any of her immediate family in the 1920-1930 range of years. We ran out of Wifi time for that, but I am optimistic that when we are in Ireland we can find some church baptism record or official birth or residence record at a county office that will nail down that part of Linda's family tree a bit.

I was unusually tired after lunch and actually missed a step and fell down the stairway while going down for afternoon trivia. Partly, I think, due to flexibility facilitated by the stretching exercises, I was not really hurt. One leg muscle was strained a bit, but no other harm done. Phew! The trivia contest was deucedly tricky, however, and despite our best efforts we did not crack double digits but rather ended up with only 9 correct. The winning team only had 14, though, so we didn't feel too badly.

Right after Trivia was the port lecture for Brugge in Belgium and Amsterdam in Holland, and they both looked like very pleasant ports-of-call. Linda had arranged a walking tour of Amsterdam, which we will certainly do, but I was also excited when I saw a shop offering e-bikes for rent right beside the cruise ship terminal in downtown Amsterdam. For me, taking an e-bike around Amsterdam and out into the surrounding countryside would be a crackerjack way to see the city! (I later checked the prices when we were in Amsterdam and the rental for ebikes is quite high, which makes me want to use our own!) Maybe we will do that next time, because with several art museums besides the state museum, plus many old districts and city markets to take in around the city center, it looked like we would have to come back and actually spend a few days in Amsterdam to see it well.

Brugge in Belgium looked a lot smaller than Amsterdam and much more amenable to seeing by walking around it on our own. So we will probably wander the port area of Seebrugge, and possibly take a shuttle bus to the nearby seaside resort town or take the short train ride into Brugge and do a walkabout.

I turned in for a nap because I clearly was at a "stumbling tired" stage, while Linda went to tea and Monika enjoyed Happy Hour with Jerry. So we each had fun in our own way before dinner and the evening dance show. The show was unusual both in that the singers had no role at all, and in the exclusive focus on interpretive dance routines ranging from classical ballet to pop rock. Each routine was supposed to represent one instrument or instrumental section in the orchestra , but even that loose structure broke down at the end when they did a dance routine to illustrate "vocals". Still, the routines were very well executed and choreographed and all quite enjoyable, although the one that had three bullfighters dressed in flamenco dresses had me rather puzzled as to exactly what the message was. Afterwards we went briefly out on the promenade deck to see the sunset colors reflected off of an oily calm sea surface, which looked very unusual, and then we retired for the night.