Stay Home!
My wife Linda and I love to cruise. We started cruising about 30 years ago, and we only stopped when the pandemic showed up and blocked all cruising for 2 whole years. You can imagine how happy we were when cruising finally came back.
We had a great 8-day cruise from Baltimore to the Bahamas scheduled for the beginning of November. We were supposed to go to always luscious Nassau and then to a private island called Coco Cay, full of great beaches and swimming ponds and free restaurants and all that stuff. But we didn’t go.
On the third day of the cruise, as we were leaving Port Canaveral, FL, for Nassau, Hurricane Nicole showed up just south of the Bahamas.
The Captain announced that because of the threat caused by Nicole we had to return to Baltimore. So we turned around and started back to our home port. We not only sailed away from two beautiful ports, we sailed into bad weather.
The bright sun suddenly disappeared, the temperature dropped from 80 degrees to 50, the wind picked up to 30 miles an hour, and the sea started rolling and rocking. The ship’s stewards placed vomit bags on all the staircases because the Captain knew what a rolling sea can do to a person’s stomach.
We were stuck inside the ship. We couldn’t walk around on the decks, couldn’t sit and drink a beer at the pool bar, couldn’t go swimming in any of the 3 pools.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Usually, the ships pick up food at each of the ports. Since we weren’t docking at two of them, we were missing the food we would have been picking up. So the chefs had to abandon the super menus they had planned and fell back on food they could make. Tacos! Risotto! Mashed potatoes and Mac and Cheese! Forget about dessert!
And it got worse! The ship started running out of wine! First, they ran out of our favorite cruise wine, Andrew Peace cabernet! Then they ran out of Robert Mondavi’s cabernet! Then Kendall Jackson’s cab was gone.
And then it got even worse. They ran out of entertainment! The featured entertainers usually get on at one port and off at the next, so they can entertain on a number of ships. Because we were not stopping at fresh ports, we were not picking up fresh entertainers. The last good entertainer got off at Port Canaveral and his replacement was stuck in Nassau.
Instead of great shows featuring headliners, the ship had to fall back on the guys and gals from the chorus singing and dancing their hearts out. They tried, but it wasn’t enough! So the cruise director started showing movies in place of live entertainment. The movies were good films, a new Thor movie and a new Jurassic Park movie. The problem was that they showed these films repeatedly on the pool deck where it was cold and raining and the wind was howling!
And if we turned on the TV? We’d only get bad news about the elections because the midpoint of the cruise was Election Day, November 8.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Then I got COVID.
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My latest article for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America!
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