Thursday, November 2 – Nothing Doing

As noted yesterday, today was another sea day.  We had no place to go and nothing we had to do.  It’s a good life.  We spent the day wrestling with the NYT crossword, reading and relaxing.

While we ate lunch on the Lido yesterday, we watched a whole flotilla of sailboats float by.  There were more than two dozen of them, most with brightly colored sails, others with plain white.  We wondered how folks could just take off in the middle of the day to sail when MA remembered that November 1 is a national holiday in predominantly Catholic Portugal.  Hallowe’en/All Hallow’s Eve is not celebrated but All Saints’ Day is.  Tomorrow is All Souls’ Day but we will be at sea so it doesn’t matter.

Tonight is the third of a proposed 10 formal nights.  Shrimp cocktails and surf-and-turf for the traditionalists, but will probably opt for the fish entrée. We have stopped getting the tempura vegetables as an appetizer the last few nights because there have been viable choices on the menu; we don’t want to become bored with them.  Our waiter Eka has been sick for a few days so even he doesn’t want them yet; once he feels better, he will order them whether we want them or not just so he can have them.  The assistant, Heri, does not like them.

We are approaching the point where we will have port stops almost every day.  In many, we will not even leave the ship except, perhaps, to use the WiFi in the terminal.  Since we have been to most of them before, we feel no compulsion to take a shore excursion just to do something.  A cruise ship in port is lovely when everyone else has gotten off.

Speaking of WiFi, the service on the Veendam has been inconsistent.  Our tablets connect and download quickly allowing us to get on and off in just a few minutes.  The laptop, which is needed to post the blog and do some other chores, often just spins its wheels forever.  At one point yesterday, after working to post something for 15 minutes, D was faced with the announcement that the connection had been lost.  We bought 1000 minutes of internet time and have used a little over 400 so far.  That’s 40% of the minutes in less than 35% of the cruise.  We will have to budget our time better – and complain to the staff in hopes that they will restore some minutes.


TOMORROW – Malaga, Spain

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