15 days at sea is a long time to be at sea!
We are a few days from docking in New Orleans. Progress is slow - about 19 knots or 20 MPH or so - covering a scant 500 miles a day, if that. Boredom sets in and certain food items have run out. A waitstaff person tells me I took the very last banana. Someone screwed up on the provisioning!
Carnival caters to a lower-class clientel than Holland America. Instead of movies on demand, we get a 24-hour channel of "paranormal investigators" and HGTV. "Carl is an assistant paper-clip sorter and his wife Ella is a homemaker. Their annual income is $15,000 a year and their housing budget is $1.5 million." Who are these people? And of course, Ella passes up a great house at a great price because one of the bedrooms is painted green. These channels tell me a lot about their target audience.
Juan fell ill in Barcelona, complaining about diarrhea and then later, leg pains. He was nauseous in the morning and Mark ribbed him that maybe he was pregnant. He got better in a few days, but then whatever it was hit me. I don't think it is sea sickness, as Juan had it on dry land. I am mostly over it now, although my stomach is gurgling loudly.
The abbreviated rocking of the boat (stabilizers almost male the ride worse - causing a choppy back and forth movement) does tend to induce a mild dizziness in the hardiest of seafarers. And this is during calm weather, too! Right now, we are in two-foot seas, no whitecaps - calm weather, following seas. On both crossings there were days when the bow of the boat plunged through 12-15 foot waves, throwing up an impressive spray. Oddly enough, that was a more pleasant ride as the weather overwhelmed the stabilizers, producing a gentle, rocking roll. But those stabilizer (fins) are probably the only thing keeping these top-heavy cruise ships from rolling over, like the SS Poseidon. Not sure I want to do a Shelly Winters.
The Carnival Valor's regular route is a 4-5 night cruises out of New Orleans to Cozumel or Caribbean island ports. This transatlantic crossing is a one-off for her, as the only purpose of it was to drydock in Cadiz, Spain for new carpet and paint (and a new sauna facility!) among other improvements. We stopped briefly in Cadiz after leaving Barcelona, to take on more workers to finish some minor repairs. I think they were flown home from Punta Delgada.
Unlike the Holland America Oosterdam, the Valor doesn't make an annual habit of crossing the Atlantic to move with the seasons - from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, much as Alaska cruise ship winter over in Hawaii, serving the island trade. So I guess it is not unexpected that the crew was unprepared for 15 days at sea - ten of them uninterrupted.
(I whine about 15 days at sea, when we met a"Cruiser" who just came off 71 days of cruising. The thought of it makes me ill - again).
We sailed right by Bermuda, whose lights could have been seen on the horizon, but for a cloud bank. We are poised to threat our way through the Bahamas and then pass by Key West on the way to New Orleans. I suspect they are not stopping at Key West due to the Jones Act, or perhaps because of the delay it would cause - and the port fees. No great loss. Key West is no longer the Key West we used to know and love, and cruise ship dockings - which dump thousands of people onto Duval Street for eight hours at a time, are part and parcel of the problem.
This may be the last cruise we go on. We were never big cruise ship fans and my previous postings on the subject verify this. Still, it was interesting and novel, to travel by ship, but not something I need to do again and again, as some "diamond guests" do - going on as many as 20-30 cruises during their lifetime.
Speaking of which! The big hubub on the ship was the announcement that the frequent cruiser program was being overhauled. I have written time and time again about these loyalty programs - designed to lock you into one brand and one company. You never get ahead in these games and even if you did, well, they simply change the rules of the game much as the airlines have done over the years, again and again, with "frequent flyer miles." Time was, you could fly the whole family to Hawaii on your flyer miles. Then, as overbooking became the norm, the best you could hope for was an upgrade. Today, even that is gone and the best thing you can hope for with frequent flyer miles is to be the last person bumped from the plane due to overbooking. Some treat!
The frequent cruisers are pissed-off. They spent thousands - tens of thousands - of dollars over the years, trying to build up their cruiser "status" and patiently wait until they climb the latter high enough to get venerated diamond status. Now, it is all being taken away, or at least they have been kicked down a few rungs. Anxious couples sit closely together in the quiet Eagle lounge, studying the new terms of the contract, looking for a new hope. "Well, you do get a free bottle of water!" one wife says to her husband, "that's something, anyway!"
The husband merely grunts in return. I feel his pain. I have four of these bottles of water on my desk in my stateroom. A cheerful note on a necktag attached to each bottle informs me that I should stay hydrated! At $4.95 a bottle! No thanks!
You can't win chasing these award points or miles or ten cents off a gallon of gas. Maybe, at best, if you end up shopping at a certain store or going on the same airline, you can use these points for a minor discount or upgrade. But don't kid yourself you are getting anything for "free" - even a $4.95 bottle of water. But if these programs alter your financial decision-making, well, then you are losing badly.
I recall a guy writing an article in the Post a few years back, about how he would book his business trips to take the longest flights possible - going from LA to NY by way of Portland, Chicago, Houston, and Boston - just to rack up more flyer miles. Spending ten hours on an airplane for points makes no sense to me. But people do this stuff all the time, distracted by the ancillary "deal" and neglecting the underlying transaction.
So yes, I indulged in a little schadenfreude over this cruise-line screw-job. The veteran cruisers were getting the shaft, and all the medallions listing their previous cruises - adorning their cabin door like medals on a North Korean General - now mean nothing.
Well, that's all I have for now. See you on shore!
