Rita rang last night and we arranged a rendezvous for this
morning in the Crows Nest. I had my
first Explorations coffee last night (well, first coffee of the day, really!)
and I’ve more or less done enough orienteering to know where everything is. The
Zaandam is really only a small ship – less than 1500 guests and that’s rather
nice. Shopping is somewhat limited: they don’t have as much available as far as
cheap cruise clothing goes, in fact the duty free is mainly jewellery; however,
there’ll be plenty to see in Hawaii, not that I plan on spending much anyway.
I went to the welcome concert at 9.30pm, which was okay, but
I’m not really into the showtime stuff. It’s just lovely being on board again:
the window, as I downloaded photos last night, was doing a distracting light
show from the lights of the towns along the coast that we’re passing (I’m on
port side, which is really good on this cruise because we hug the coast for
ages). I could just sit there for hours, but thought I’d better get to bed!
We were to set the clocks back; as my phone had autoset when
I hit LA, I assumed it would do so overnight; so I ended up in the Lido at
6.40am having breakfast, when I thought it was an hour later! Oh well, early to
bed tonight. We’re in quite a swell now; I barely noticed it in bed because I’m
on Deck 1 amidships, but up in the Lido, it was careful, drunken walking
everywhere! Well, true to form for Holland America, not only do we have a Mass
every day and an interdenominational service but also tonight the Jewish
community is celebrating Passover.
After breakfast I went to the service: the pastors are Walt
and his wife, Lydia, an elderly retired couple from Ontario CA. We had some
prayer and did a lovely Bible study on worship, based on a few Psalms and
scriptures; there were a little over a dozen of us there. So it wasn’t really a
service; however, it was certainly encouraging and nice to begin a connection
with these people. I’m finding that most people on board appear to be a little
or a lot older than me and there is only a small percentage of younger couples
– a little unusual, but perhaps most people prefer to fly to Hawaii these days.
I had coffee with Rita this morning; Bob was at a session in
the art studio. It was really lovely to catch up; Rita is going along well but
Bob has had lots of health issues. We’re going to have dinner in the Pinnacle
Grill tomorrow night together, as we both have a complimentary gift dinner from
our travel agents. Today I went to some information sessions on our Hawaiian
ports; first port will be Honolulu on Tuesday morning, for 2 days.
I heard you’ve had some more hot weather. It’s cold here at
sea, cloudy today and the wind is too cold to do more than a couple of laps of
the deck. Of course, as we said further south it will get warmer.
