A quiet evening in... so the music is loud, the backlog of photos is being addressed & here is the review of the last month or so...
My PC got sick in early March & kept blue-screen dying, so off it went to a PC-friendly friend, who diagnosed blocked air vents, overheating & Windows 10. He cleared the vents, checked the fans & couldn't do much about Windows 10
(Who can... really?!?!), other than offer to replace it with Windows 7, which he says is more reliable. I must have skipped 7, as I ran on XP for years & years without much trouble, so never upgraded until this new PC
Add to that, my phone decided to die as well. Working one minute, refusing to power up the next. Unfortunately, I hadn't backed up for a while, so I lost some nice photos, all my SMS activity, a whole bunch of phone contacts
(If you're reading this & haven't heard from me in a while, it's nothing personal... probably. Give me a call & find out!!) & my preferred versions of Solitaire & Sudoku
While I was out of contact, it was time for L-SP & I to embark on our South Pacific cruise. We'd booked it a while ago & the departure date had been approaching like Halley's Comet - at one point it DID feel like it was 76 years away... until all of a sudden it was in 5 days time & we had to scramble to pack, prepare, board the cats, organise transport & remember where the 2nd suitcase was...
See you in a week, Sydney...
We were on the Royal Caribbean line's
'Explorer of the Seas' & it was like one of those modern shopping centres with the apartments built on top of it... with a couple of large propellers on the back. The sheer size of the thing was impressive from the outside, but once you hit the main central area
inside the ship, the scale is nothing less than impressive... & probably a few words beyond that! We spent the first 2 hours finding our cabin, then exploring the
'Explorer'. We found the pool deck - with a few hundred of our fellow travellers already occupying the spas, lounges & poolside bars, showing little or no inclination to move from there. All fine by us, we weren't on board for the swimming - We also found the forward lounge, the shopping centre, the theatre, library, the 2 main dining areas, the 3 other restaurants, the Chapel, the lifeboats & the ice-skating rink
(!!??). We didn't find the mini golf range until the 2nd last day, but no problem - a lot of other people had... There were also enough bars scattered over the decks to guarantee a mild case of cirrhosis before you could drink in all of them once. Again, no real problem - the additional cost of an alcoholic drinks package worked out at $75 per day & I doubted I could drink that much
every day, so we decided to just pay as we went. I think I ended up only buying 3 drinks in 7 days... in between complimentary drinks, a wine-tasting & a beer bought for me by a friendly Karaoke-ist. Speaking of which, the reggae band playing Bob Marley's greatest hits found me as I was walking past on the first day & thrust a microphone at me during the chorus of
'Could You Be Loved'. I think the singer was impressed... or maybe just grateful I wasn't another half-drunk, tone-deaf white guy. Get used to them, fella
In short... 2 days at sea, a day in Noumea, New Caledonia, a day in Lifou, Loyalty Islands, then 2 days at sea & back to Sydney. A lot of trivia contests, a couple of art auctions, karaoke every night
(including one night with a live band!), some group jigsaw solving, lots of great food, quite varied in origin, terrible coffee & the constant battle to remember that everything was priced in US dollars, so add around 40% before thinking something's a bargain!!
And, of course, the tropical clichés of crystal clear waters, white sands...
... & coconuts floating in the water. What more can you ask?!
The day on Lifou was my favourite... friendly natives, colonial architecture, a glass-bottom boat trip around the lagoon & reef
(Coral! Turtles!! Home-made alcohol!!!). We returned to Sydney in the early hours of the morning in a torrential downpour, which made disembarking & finding our Über driver an adventure in itself. Home to our own bed, pillows & decent coffee - not necessarily in that order...
More to come in Part 2... despite popular demand...
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