Tirana, Albania

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

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It is very warm here in Tirana. It is very much a Mediterranean city. I knew that but I guess it being formerly one of the countries behind the Iron Curtain, I had something else in mind. Those days are over. As an organized country, Albania has had one king (Zogu, say zog) and one Communist dictator and now as a supposed Socialist democracy. There are about 1 million people in Tirana representing about 1/3 of the country’s population. The average salary is about 250 Euros. Private individual automobile has only been legal since 1991. I am missing a lot but that is most of my take away from this morning’s city tour. We have signed up for the afternoon’s 2pm to evening, $71pp optional tour to Kruje. I believe the guide said, it is a UNESCO world heritage site. I believe she said it is a medieval city critical to withstanding the Ottoman Empire siege. It should entail a drive through the country side, a walking tour, a museum and dinner.

The hotel was very quiet overnight. It is very quiet in our room. We are overlooking the main boulevard or avenue of Tirana in the busy center of the city and it is very busy outside, but very quiet in here. It is excellent! We slept very well even with crappy flat pillows and a mattress as hard as a pallet. We were both just happy to finally lie down!

Clay woke up first and woke me early so I could take my time. We were down to the breakfast buffet by 7:30am. It was fine. Nothing extraordinary. The hotel is again quite nice and the restaurant was indoor/outdoor around a garden courtyard that also housed a pool with a tennis court in back.

We met the group in the lobby at 9am for the tour. We are 16 right now. In Dubrovnik, we will add 20 more people to that group. That will surely not be a happy day. We were not the last 2 to arrive. There was a man from Australia that came in minutes after us evidently. Anyway, that was the missing 3^rd person that was assumed to be a member of our party. The group will apparently have another welcome meeting in Dubrovnik for the 20 that will join us so Gabriella tells us we’ll have another chance. I expect to know everything I needed to know by then!

We drove around the main part of town, all within easy walking distance this morning and saw the important buildings and monuments and visited a mosque and a museum. We were turned loose right before noon. Clay and I walked across the street to check out the Communist checkpoint relics assembled on the corner and then down to the twin towers building. We had lunch there. We shared some kind of cornmeal pita and doner sandwich with fries and a Coke Zero. Then we walked to the next corner to an ice cream stand and got cones and walked back. It is very hot without a cloud in the sky and Clay had to change from shorts to pants this morning because of the mosque visit. So we are back at the hotel now where he changed and got rid of his socks.

Tirana is a very clean and pleasant city even though it is crowded and busy. We like it. Most of the signage is in English so that helps us. They seem willing to accept Euros, Dollars and Leks equally everywhere we’ve been. Too bad in a way that we leave in the morning.

We went to Kruje for the afternoon. We drove through Frushe Kruje on our way. George W. Bush is the only sitting American president to visit Albania and for reasons that are still not understood, his entourage made an unscheduled visit in this village between Tirana and Kruje. W’s watch was stolen there and recovered and returned about an hour later. He went into a Kafe Bar and bought a coffee. The Kafe Bar owner renamed his establishment George W. Bush. The town erected a statue of W across the street from there. I believe the guide said it was near where his watch was stolen. Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.

We went up a crazy switchback-filled road up a mountain with a lot of other big buses to find our way to an arch over stairs through the Panorama Bar Restaurant Hotel. We passed through and walked a most precarious and slippery uneven narrow rock passage through and old bazaar to get inside the fortifications. There is a big newly constructed museum there but this is not where we went. We visited what they called an ethnographic museum. In reality, it was what we would call an historic house museum. I think it was over 250 years old and generations of a single wealthy family had lived there until Communism. I don’t know who did it, or how everything was preserved from then to now. I believe the special guide we had said the last of the family stopped living there during the 1970’s. It was interesting. We had to walk back down the slippery uneven steep stones to get back down and had an hour to cross the bazaar to the restaurant for dinner. I recruited our guide for the day to find a small Albanian flag symbol patch for 1 Euro, only to misplace it! Oh well. Tomorrow we leave Albania for good, so that is a lost patch opportunity. The one that got away! Dinner was 5 course in a spectacular setting as the sun set. Cream of chicken soup, salad, cheese & spinach pie with something like queso fundido on the side, main course of veal steak and a cheese filled ground beef patty with potatoes and something like tzatziki, followed by a dessert of something like rice pudding and slices of apples, oranges and apricots. They served everyone a cold bottle of water and a big glass of red or white wine. They offered coffee, tea or cappuccino afterwards. It was a lot of food! It was mostly pretty tasty too. We liked the wine and Clay paid to also have a Korca beer. It was a good afternoon and we got to see a bit more of Albania on the drive.

Albania is inexpensive. Everyone we ran into from the cab driver at the airport to now spoke some English so that made it easy. Signage is in English almost everywhere. The Albanians seem to love Americans, so there is that. There is a lot more here to recommend Albania that I had thought and I’m sorry we are not spending more time here. Tomorrow I get to put a new pin in the country travel map, Montenegro. It will be a long day on the bus tomorrow and I hope it’s a good one.

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To Tirana, Albania

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Photo Slideshow.

It has been a long full day plus some. We left home around 4pm on Monday the 14^th and now we are in our first hotel room at the Rogner Hotel in Tirana, Albania. This was our fault. Somehow we erred in booking the flights and did not get the extra overnight layover in London. We still would have missed the welcome dinner with Celtic Tours/Kompass Tours tonight though. We did not learn about the welcome dinner until we got final documents and that was months after we had booked the flights. I honestly don’t know if we messed that up too or we really weren’t informed of the day’s events here until too late. In any event, we did not get our included airport transfer and that rankled more than a dinner we were too tired to eat. We did meet our tour director, Gabriella (I think, but that is not how it is spelled!). She was most concerned with where our 3^rd person was (huh?) and getting us something sent to the room in place of our missed included dinner. As I say, we were not on the same page. Tirana seems a bustling place on a Tuesday night. We’ll have our first tour in the morning. The hotel is quite nice so far. That’s it for me. I know short on details. I’m tired.

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Closure on Norway

Back in June when we were aboard Hurtigruten's Nordkapp, we had a problem. Our Kensington Tours invoice stated we had paid for breakfast, lunch and dinner while onboard, but the ship told us we were only entitled to breakfast. We went back and forth at lunch and dinner and in between meals for a couple of days. I notified our sales person at Kensington the first day and when she got back in touch it was to say that she did not think her Hurtigruten contact had booked us as full board. Kensington was willing to pay for our meals onboard but Hurtigruten would not take their money now because we were onboard with our own credit card on a shipboard account. She advised us to go to Reception and ask to pay for our own full board for the cruise and to mail her an invoice for reimbursement after we got home. We did. We paid $428USD for something like 5 days of 3 meals times 2 people. Today we finally got the reimbursement check.

I cannot fault Kensington Tours for their handling of our Norway tour. Things go wrong. They handled it in a satisfactory manner. I can still recommend Kensington Tours.

I still don't feel like I can recommend Hurtigruten. It was not a pleasant experience doing the Norwegian Coastal cruise. Hurtigruten sells and markets this as a "cruise". It is not. It is a ferry. It is a ferry with some very upscale-cruise-priced passengers onboard while it carries on its ferry business. I suppose if you bought the passage at ferry prices and had that expectation it would be a different story. Generally I tell people who ask to go ahead with less the optimal experience if the alternative is missing the experience entirely. In this case though, it was done badly enough that I would make an exception and advise not doing it at all if you have to use Hurtigruten to cruise the Norwegian coast. Save your money and wait until you can do it properly and actually have a chance to see it properly. Norway is spectacular. I might even advise skipping the coastal Norwegian cruise and just doing the 4-day version of Norway in a Nutshell between Oslo and Bergen. It would be a better use of your time and money than that ferry experience.

So, that closes the story of this spring's long trip. We leave in less than a week for a 2-week trip with Celtic Tours. Followed by a month of river cruising (we hope!) with Amras Cruises. I'd post a link to their website and the Complete Europe that we booked, but they've taken it down! I guess it is sold out for this year and either not offered again or not yet. I'm not sure. Check back! In any event, below is the brochure page I scanned from their catalog.

Back home from Chicago

Monday, August 10, 2015

We were awakened by the docking maneuvers a little before 3am. We were docked at the Iroquois Landing of the Illinois International Port. It was not meant for cruise ships! It was better than tendering though. So while we were disappointed to miss arriving at Navy Pier, this had to be better. It was at 95th Street so far southeast as to almost not be in Chicago. O'Hare is on the northwest side of Chicago. It made for an over an hour commute. Since our documents had a scheduled 2 hour drive, we felt lucky that it was only 70 - 75 minutes! At $45 pp, they did not even stop at each needed terminal but dropped us in front of the airport Hilton. Honestly, we had expected for the $90 we paid that we'd at least be getting door to door service. We saw Terminal 3 signs as the American one when we drove past and just walked back after getting our bags from under the bus. I have no idea what the elderly, disabled and heavy packers did from there.

It was actually kind of a calm disembarkation morning because you didn't have to be out of your cabins until you were called to disembark. That made all the difference. We enjoyed a last breakfast with Edgar. I had the chef's special vanilla French Toast since I had missed my special Sunday breakfast. I cannot recommend the French toast! They weren't prepared to put maple syrup on it either, Edgar had to put on a full on scavenger hunt to find one dispenser. They act like maple syrup is gold on Saint Laurent, just so you know. The other final misstep was one of those information sharing problems. They had delivered at least 2 and maybe 3 invoice summaries to our cabin. Now, we had all been required to provide a credit card that they scanned with their computers when we checked in and before we got our keycards. We were told then that unless we made other arrangements this is how we were paying for our onboard bill. We agreed and used a Discover Card which we had used to pay for the cruise. None of the invoices they provided had any notes that we needed to come to Reception or speak to the Purser or to provide payment. They said if we wanted to leave in place the payment methods we had previously provided to do nothing. So we did. At 6:30am we could start picking up our passports. We heard some rumbles while in the dining room about people not being able to get their passports because they hadn't paid their bills. They were mystified but were planning to return after breakfast when the line had gone down. We went up right after breakfast and got in a short line. More than half the people in front of us were having to pay bills and everyone argued they had already provided a credit card. Of course they did and to the same women we were facing now! When we got up we drew a different woman than the one we drew 10 days ago. She said we had provided a Discover but they only accepted MasterCard, Visa and Amex. Clay wanted to argue with her that we knew Haimark takes Discover because we'd been using it to make payments. I stopped him and pointed out that would be pointless, even though they said they accepted Discover 10 days ago when they took it, today they say they don't so they won't. Give her a different card and let's move on. Just a head's up for those who may follow. She charged the Visa and returned our passports. I don't know why when Ken was making all his jokes about people having to stay and work off their bills, he didn't just tell us all to go check with Reception about the status of our invoices. That would have avoided some unnecessary departure morning stress for everyone. Of course, the people doing the invoicing should have printed the same message on all those papers they were delivering.

We got in and got our boarding passes from a kiosk with no wait. We both had TSA pre-check so we only had about 5 people in front of us. Unfortunately, something was wrong with 3 of those people and they weren't following instructions and brought the whole operation to a complete standstill. Then when I walked through the metal detector I either set it off or else it beeped as I was a random selection for a body scan and pat down. It was all still over relatively quickly.

We saw bagels and bought our lunch for the airplane. Then we found our gate K3 and settled in for a wait. There was no plane there when we got there. It arrived at around 11 and we started boarding around 11:25am. We took off 8 minutes early. The flight only lasted about an hour and it was smooth. We ate our bagels with our complimentary Cokes. There was a time change and in about an hour we were on the ground in Raleigh. We caught a shuttle bus to the parking lot shortly after arriving. We found the car easily and it started right up and we had an easy drive home. It was only about 80F and very low humidity. The grass doesn't even need cutting, though the cars need a wash. All in all, it's like we never left!

Still it is good to be home. It will be good to be here for a few weeks and I expect it will be harder to pack up and head back for Europe the next time.

It was a good cruise with Haimark's Saint Laurent and we can recommend it.

Cruising Lake Michigan to Chicago, IL

Sunday, August 9, 2015

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We moved the clocks back an hour last night as we crossed time zones. That meant an extra hour of sleep this weekend and I think we could all use it. Clay was up first. When we got to the dining room, it was much more populated than it was yesterday morning even though people had nowhere to go today. I was hoping for a special Sunday breakfast this morning. Unfortunately for me the chef’s special was crepes filled with cottage cheese. I can’t abide cottage cheese! It was another ham and cheese omelet for me. It had orange and white cheese today so that was my Sunday special. Clay ate from the buffet and got a banana and a chocolate chip muffin so that was his Sunday special.

The first lecture by Fred Stonehouse was from 9:30 to 10:30am and was the Saint Lawrence: Saltwater to Seaway. It was about the history, present and future of the seaway and its craft and cargo. Next up is an hourlong disembarkation talk by Ken (scary!), lunch, afternoon lecture on the Great Lakes and college team trivia at 3:30 to 4pm. The Captain’s Farewell Reception is from 6 to 6:30pm. Dinner is 6:30pm.

We don’t have Internet today which is unfortunate since we’d like to do online checkin about now. I guess I’ll see if Clay can do it through his phone. We’ll have to wait to get boarding passes when we get to ORD anyway since there is no print center onboard.

Well, I guess Ken was being overly generous when he scheduled his disembarkation talk for one hour as it only lasted 20 minutes. In other news, we still have no Internet and Clay has no cell signal either. I guess we can check in when we get to ORD.

Good news is that we got checked in online at last and both got TSA pre-check. Now we just have to get our boarding passes at the airport since we can’t print onboard. We had hoped since we have only carry ons that we could go straight to security but now we’ll have to find a desk or kiosk to print boarding passes. Oh well. That reminds me that there seemed to be a high percentage of passengers onboard Saint Laurent that did not get their luggage in Montreal. They were coming from all over America and just didn’t get their checked bags. The really bad news is that they didn’t get their bags delivered to the Saint Laurent until Sault Ste. Marie.

Back from lunch. I had lemon pepper roasted free range chicken and it was a huge serving. Clay ate the leg. Clay had the tandoori chicken Caesar salad. We both had Sacher torte for dessert.

We went to Fred Stonehouse’s Great Lakes lecture. It was interesting. The Great Lakes contain 21% of all the earth’s fresh water! We left before trivia started. The grand prize for the winning team was going to be lanyards. Not enough to tempt us into it!

Oh, the sailing today! I have been conspicuously silent on the subject and that falls under no news is good news. When we woke up this morning, the water was so calm it was almost glassy. We could see land on the horizon to the port and to starboard. We walked out on to the outside deck between our cabin and the dining room on the way to breakfast in disbelief and amazement. It was just little splashy water noises. During the day it has gotten hazy as we have left all visible land behind and the water has just been rippled but still smooth. It would have been a perfect sailing day except for the fact that Saint Laurent is leaning, tilted to the starboard side about 8 degrees. Clay agrees with me for once and is not accusing me of exaggerating. He says it is clearly tilted and a ball would roll across the deck if you put one down on it. We sat for a while at the aft of the 5^th deck and you could turn your head and see the horizon on one side a foot from the top rail and on the other side even with the rail. I had pointed it out this morning in the dining room, but he didn’t recognize it ‘til then. He keeps saying that if he were the Captain, he’d be leveling the ship out. I have a theory. I’d level it out too if I could but I think something happened and he can’t. The day we were in Sault Ste. Marie, John’s Septic Service (I am not making this up!) ran trucks back and forth all afternoon and into evening pumping our sewage out. No problem. It is hard to believe we could wait that long! Yesterday in Mackinac, we had blue hoses running all day filling our potable water tanks. Somehow, I think the imbalance was created and they can’t sail us level now. Without the tilt, it would have been a fantastic sailing day. I’ll take the tilt over big waves anyday!

We went to the Captain’s Farewell reception this evening. We went early to make sure we’d get seats because we wanted to finally see our Captain. We’ve been on 9 days and now we’ve seen him and we still don’t know his name or where he’s from. People were so noisy that we didn’t hear his name when Ken announced him. He came up and said he’d like to see us all onboard again and sorry he was saying hello and farewell at the same time but that he’d spent more time on the bridge than in his bed during this cruise. Then he left. We didn’t hear enough of his speech to even guess where he might be from, but my guess is Italian from what little I heard. That was weird. We went down to dinner a couple of minutes early. There were already passengers seated in the dining room. I walked around the corner and found all the tables in our little corner had reserved signs on them. I stopped and told Clay and Brnka and Edgar heard me and both hastened over to find us another 2-top in Edgar’s area. It was a different shape and right at the back of the room against the window and it rattled and shook and it was quite a bit noisier which was surprising.  Clay was sitting facing downhill and had to brace himself to keep from falling face first onto the table. I had to lean forward. It was not a good final dinner. We both had the chef’s special of filet mignon and shrimp. Clay ate my shrimp. Clay had a salad to start and peach melba for dessert. I had tomato consommé to start and vanilla ice cream with honey for dessert.

Tomorrow we are expected to arrive in Chicago between 3 and 5am. We have to have luggage out by 6am. Pick up passports after 6:30am. Breakfast is at 6am. We have to disembark by 8am. We booked $45pp transfers to ORD since there will be no taxis at International Port (construction moved us from our scheduled dock at Navy Pier). We should be home by dinner time tomorrow. We’ll be home for about a month!

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Mackinac Island, MI

Saturday, August 8, 2015

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Clay was up first this morning. It was still dark but we were sailing very slowly alongside Mackinac Island. We saw the big Mackinac Bridge come into view just as the sun was rising. It was overcast with low dark clouds and not much of a sunrise plus it looked like an ominous sign for a bad weather day. I had a hard time getting going even though today’s visit to Mackinac was the big attraction in booking this trip for me.  We went to breakfast and I clearly wasn’t the only one feeling like a late start. We had a whole half of the dining room to ourselves. It being the weekend, I was hoping to treat myself to a special breakfast. Alas, the chef’s special was burrito omelet and I was not up to taking that risk! I had oatmeal and yogurt from the buffet. Clay had his usual fried eggs, meat, potatoes and bread and cheese. Edgar told us he hoped to go ashore finally today. He and Servy seemed like friends today and Servy even came over and offered to top off my coffee. I guess the good mood was contagious among the dining room staff. I really do hope that they finally got a chance to go ashore.

We were docked by 8am. We started debarking for our excursions at 9am. Clay and I got called closer to 9:30am. That is fine. All those earlier people were paying an extra $48 each for the buffet lunch at the Grand Hotel. So, we went out onto the Arnold Transit Dock and walked up to Main Street where they had 20-passenger horse drawn carriages for us. We rode around the town area of the island’s south end for about an hour. This ride eventually took us to Surrey Hill Carriage Museum. There were some old carriages in there, but mostly it was a comfort stop with shopping. We looked around and used the restrooms. I found and bought a patch and then we heard the loudspeaker announcement for Saint Laurent passengers to go to the 30+ passenger carts. The 20 passenger carts had 2 big draft horses. The larger carts had 3 big draft horses pulling. Each cart’s driver had a microphone and speakers in his cart so he could give a narrated tour. These consisted largely of awful jokes and puns with a smattering of historical information thrown in. It was good, but I might have been upset if I had actually paid for it. I mean, make no mistake, we paid for it. But, it was included in our fare and I didn’t make the decision to give them my money. They did give us each a souvenir pin as our ticket/pass ‘til 2:30pm so that was nice. Anyway, since the groups were getting scrambled by the carriage number change, it didn’t matter how early or late you left here unless you stayed too long that is!  The next stop was about a half hour ride through the State Park which was once the nation’s 2^nd national park behind Yellowstone. This ride took us past the cemeteries and for a photo stop at Arch Rock before dropping us at Fort Mackinac. It dates from 1780 and was instrumental in the War of 1812-1815. They’re celebrating their bicentennial. We were first told that we had an hour here and we could have used it, but then they said that we only had carts available to get us to the Grand Hotel until 11:45am. We left about 10 minutes early after the 11:30am cannon firing. We got to go into the Grand Hotel and tour the gardens and public spaces. We went in the shops and lobbies. We shared a sundae at Sadie’s Ice Cream Parlor and rocked in the big porch’s rockers. Then we caught another horse drawn taxi back to the dock where we returned to the cabin and changed into shorts and had lunch. The day had faired off and the sun was brilliantly bright in a cloudless sky. We think it got warmer than the 72F predicted. 

Clay got his salad at lunch. It was calamari Caesar salad with anchovies. He liked it. I had a deconstructed beef & Guinness pie. It had a pile of mashed potatoes, a pile of beef and gravy and a round of puff crust. I liked it. For dessert, Clay had carrot cake and I had little strawberry eclairs with white chocolate sauce. There were crazy crowds out on Main St. with people lined up outside restaurants to go a seat, so we made the right choice. 

I had been looking for a cotton long-sleeved shirt since we started this cruise and without finding one yet I had figured this was my best chance at it. But, I had no idea! We had made landfall in t-shirt heaven, or hell. We looked in every shop before I made my choice. It was a plain dark blue shirt with a small map of the Great Lakes and the words along with Unsalted. I like it. I will have to hem it as I have all the similar shirts and then roll up the sleeves. But, I didn’t really like any of the ladies’ shirts I saw that could have gone unmodified. Clay bought a t-shirt at Doud’s Market, the oldest grocery store in America. We went for the world’s largest and absolutely worst shaved ices after to celebrate and mostly just threw them away. They were a waste of sugar and ice. We used them as an opportunity to sit on benches in the sun on the dock for a while though. We went back to the ship. We had time to wash up and get a couple of Coke Zeros before the afternoon lecture. Today we had a guest lecturer. We had Bill Taggart, the Grand Hotel’s historian. He was good and entertaining. We sailed right on schedule at 5pm. I thought we were going to sail west under the Mackinac Bridge to get to Lake Michigan and I was right. So we went up to deck 4 and then aft on deck 5 to see the bridge as we sailed under. That was probably the end of scenic cruising until we approach Chicago. Of course, we’ll be doing that in the pre-dawn darkness so even if it were scenic we aren’t likely to see it. I think we are supposed to be docked about 6am on Monday in Chicago and off by 8am so we won’t see much. We knew that though and decided it would be okay since we’ve been before. I was born there! 

Dinner was good. Edgar told us he had seen us in a t-shirt shop! He said he got to go ashore for 30 minutes and he had gotten a souvenir magnet. He seemed happy enough with that. Clay had salad and swordfish and strawberry ice cream with chocolate sauce. I had hummus and fettucine primavera and the same dessert. 

Entertainment tonight is the onboard musical duo performing Karen Carpenter. We will definitely pass on that and unless we find something in the limited TV line up go to bed early. We sail all night, all day tomorrow and all night again to arrive in Chicago on Monday morning and fly home. Fingers crossed for smooth water on Lake Michigan for 2 days!

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Sault Ste. Marie, MI

Friday, August 7, 2015

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Thankfully last night by dinner time the stabilizers had been deployed and also the waves had calmed, so it wasn’t too bad in the dining room.  I still have no idea what happened in the lounge last night. Usually there is a live camera feed with sound from there on one of our TV channels. It is right alongside the most ridiculous bow cam feed ever. But, last night there was no broadcast on that channel. I am assuming that the duo SoulJourn that has been playing every night was playing last night. The only other thing of note was that we stayed dressed and up until after 9pm waiting for delivery of today’s program, when it didn’t arrive we went to shower and to bed with the privacy sign out. Clay was in the shower and I had put in my eye gel and gone to sleep when I was awoken by knocking. I finally answered it and they delivered the program, 4 red luggage tags and our disembarkation instructions. Our luggage needs to be outside by 6am with the red tags on it. (They are Saint Laurent red plastic disks, so souvenir luggage ID tags. Nice.) Breakfast is 6:30 to 8:30am. We have to leave on our bus to O’Hare at 8am. Estimated time of arrival at O’Hare is 8am. Our flight is at 11:55am, so we should be good.

This morning we were awakened at 5am by the side thrusters. After all Ken’s hedging about the Soo Locks and Lake Superior, we had arrived. I was slow stirring even though I peeked out and knew we were entering a lock in the dark. We rose 36 feet according to the water gauge I saw. (21 feet according to Ken at the port talk.) We sailed on into Lake Superior as far as Ile Parisienne. There alongside it, we made a big loop and turned around and headed back. Ken came on the intercom about 8am to announce that we are in Lake Superior next to Ile Parisienne and headed back to the St. Mary’s River and the Soo Locks. He said we would expect to lock back through about 10:45am to 11am to be docked alongside Sault Ste. Marie around 11:30am.

As to breakfast, it looks like we ran out of bananas just as Clay decided he wanted one today. I expect they won’t re-provision until Chicago so he should have thought of that earlier. Servy and Edgar seem to have made up. I don’t know what was going on and I don’t need to but they were chatting courteously this morning and Edgar seemed happier. So good news. Clay commented to Edgar that he had a rough night at dinner last night and he did. His section was filled and with demanding and even ridiculous people. Edgar rolled his eyes and said the worst was when one of the people asked him for lobster. He said he can’t just say no so he said he’d go ask chef. He came back to tell her that the chef said no lobster on this sailing. We missed all that and I am glad I wasn’t there to see the passenger’s reaction. I don’t care as I wouldn’t eat lobster anyway, but I have to agree with the passenger that at this price point it is expected at least once.

Our port talk for today’s stop in Sault Ste. Marie is at 9am. We will also learn about the US Customs clearance of the ship back to the US there. We will go ashore for our excursion here at 1pm. At 6 to 6:30pm, we have the Mackinac Island port talk. 6:30 is dinner. 7:30pm is sailing away. 8:30pm is the lounge showing of the movie “Somewhere in Time”. Clay claims he has never seen this film. It is a classic romance film so I don’t know how he has missed it. I suspect he’s actually seen it and just didn’t know the name. We’ll see and be looking for footage of Mackinac Island since it was filmed there.

Back from the morning port talk. Ken had us pick up AudioVoxes again. We’ll see if we actually use them today. Ken says we will be split into our normal color buses and will go to one of 3 places in a rotating order. At some point we will all visit the viewing platform of Soo Locks and hopefully watch a ship lock through, then to Museum Ship Valley Camp and a city tour. We won’t find out our tour order until we board our bus. Customs clearance will be by deck order sometime after we have docked and the personnel come aboard. It will happen in the lounge. We will be called by decks 4, 3, 2 and finally 1. They will hand us our passport when we enter the lounge and take it back when we have finished our interview and exit the lounge. Ken says he expects everyone to be through the process within 30 minutes of beginning.

There is a woman named Emmy on a Cruise Critic board thread about this ship and cruise line that lives in Sault Ste. Marie Ontario. She has posted that she will come to the lock to see us go through and has said she will wear a pink boa! This will be fun!

Back from lunch. They have just called deck 4 to go clear USCBP. We are about an hour behind schedule now and they say they will adjust the afternoon hours accordingly. We’ll see. Anyway, I did spot Emmy with her pink boa. I was harder to find for sure, but when I finally moved from the front to the front starboard side off by myself and waved, she responded so I count that as we connected. It was fun! I laughed out loud when she got her boa back out after I started waving from the side. Clay got some photos of Emmy in her pink boa I’m sure.

We had burgers for lunch since the chef’s special today was Great Lakes Fisherman’s Pie. Edgar said the chef had a backlog for burgers when we had to wait. We said we’d just wait! Clay had ice cream for dessert and I can’t remember what I had.

We were delayed going ashore as it took us over an hour to get docked at Alford Waterside Park and get the gangway in place and load the CBP agents to come aboard and clear the ship. Our lecturer, Fred Stonehouse, explained to someone the other day that it can be called a boat because all the ships on the Great Lakes can be called boats because ships are saltwater vessels. I’m not sure it works that way because Saint Laurent is doing Cuba cruises come winter so by his definition then it is a ship. I have been calling it both, I mean the same thing, a floating vessel. Our group, blue, was the last to be called. We drove directly to the Museum Ship Valley Camp. It would have been interesting but we had a young man guiding us for our 1 hour there and he was barely audible and then he was reading from index cards. It didn’t heighten interest. He did not get to complete his tour. I am not sure what happened there but I told him when he had 20 minutes left that our bus was on its way and it would leave in 20 minutes. He asked me what time it was and what time we were leaving so I am sure he understood me, but he didn’t alter his course. He just carried on until a loudspeaker announcement for us to exit the ship, then he turned and walked us out to the exit sign. Next we spent about an hour driving around Sault Ste. Marie, MI on a city tour. It was less interesting with no photo stops. Finally we arrived at the Soo Locks St. Marys Falls Park. The guide told us we had to be back on the bus here in 1 hour and there was pandemonium. Half the bus revolted and insisted on being returned to the ship within 30 minutes or immediately. I think he had planned to give us a guided tour here too, but he sent the bus back with about half the people. Those who wanted to stay got off the bus and he told us to go on in. We did but then he didn’t come. So, we headed for the Visitor’s Center and used the restrooms. Since we didn’t finish the museum ship and get to go out to the gift shop/restroom building it was our first chance. When we came out, he was looking for people but when we joined him he left. We went back in to the information desk and found that the next boat through the lock would be at 5:15pm and that was when we had to meet the bus again. So, we didn’t get to see a ship lock through. There was a theater in the visitor’s center and we thought there might be something there but the guide said no it was only for special events. So, we left and walked Water St. Clay got a t-shirt and we bought some caramel corn.

Ken was on our bus and told the guide and bus driver that the next cruise is all Japanese and the one after it is all French. He told us the day we boarded that the previous cruise was all French. As Clay said how come we don’t hear about this cruise line when they must be doing some heavy international marketing. Right? We got back in time to go to Ken’s port talk on Mackinac Island. It will be our last shore day as we will sail straight through to Chicago when we leave there. No cars are allowed on the island and we will be provided horse drawn transportation until 2:30pm. I guess after that we walk. The ship sails at 5pm. We will take horse drawn carts to visit the horse carriage museum, the Grand Hotel and the historic fort. We will start leaving the ship at 9am and I guess the last horse cart back to the ship is at 2:30pm. This is true whether you are just going for the included excursion described or you have reserved the optional extra Grand Hotel lunch buffet at $48 per person. We did not spring for that lunch. Anyway, I was desperate for some caffeine and was hot from the rainy day we’d just walked through and had big plans for a Coke Zero. I entered the room to hear Clay ordering a Corona and a white wine. I told him no, but he confirmed it and then I couldn’t get a Coke Zero. I barely stayed awake in that stifling room until the cacophony of question time. I guess no one else could stay awake either since then he repeated everything.

Dinner was OK. It is time for me to go home I think. Clay had Cobb salad and lamb shank. He raved about the salad and has big plans for his remaining lunches now. He had German chocolate cake for dessert. I had oxtail broth and a grilled chicken breast with French fries again. The chicken wasn’t quite cooked through and I couldn’t stay awake anyway. We got back to the room too early and the stewardess hadn’t filled the ice bucket. I really like to have cold water by the bed overnight so I went right before she came back to do it. Oh well. I told Clay I couldn’t stay awake until past 10pm in that stuffy lounge so he left and went for a walk ashore. I’ll stop now and try to get this published. No go. No Internet now for some reason. I’ll try again later or in the morning. Sigh.

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