xpcdoojk

What documents need to be uploaded onto the app?

Correct. I can see my room in your photo! We are at the Hyatt Regency by Darling Harbor. We went shopping on George Street and then went to Sea Life Aquarium this afternoon. Had lunch at the Medusa Taverna (good too much food), not sure what we are doing for dinner, we are both still filled. Had wine on the roof top bar of the Sussex Hotel.

We are several miles from the Australian shoreline, north of Sydney. I was able to FlowRide yesterday and this morning early. This is a 2 day sailing and there is a bazillion kids on board, when I showed up for the mixed wave at 10AM, there was about 75 people in line. We should hit port tomorrow about 9AM, then Uber to the Hyatt using a free night.

So, the mixed wave went til a bit after 6PM, it was a mob scene with typically 20 or so in line. We did the IFly at 3:40 and I was the last ride after the IFly. Dinner was Jamie’s. We went to Star Water for the 4th time in the past month. This morning we had a nice advanced stand-up session for an hour at 8AM, there was about 10 of us. Then they had a break til 10. So, I ate breakfast, when I returned at 10AM the line completely encircled the wave. I don’t think I have ever seen a line that long. I came back to the room, and I am watching the Japanese F1 race now, as I am updating this. Boogie boarding from noon to 4 and then mixed at 4 for an hour. I doubt I bother seeing if it happens. Unless they add another advanced session. We get off tomorrow for one night before we join the Solstice. I have no luggage tags, hopefully they will be able to help us when we board in Sydney on Wednesday. JC

Pump started working yesterday at about 3PM… .of course no announcement so I missed it. Mixed wave starts in 55 minutes.

That was the first clue.

Checking in from Brisbane aboard the Quantum of the Seas. Two night cruise departing on a Friday. Could be a fascinating people watching experience. Not that anyone in the Celebrity forum cares, but the Quantum FlowRider is not functioning with both pumps for the 25th day we have been on this ship. I am not a happy camper. On the upside, we did the IFly today, and I am currently, drinking a glass of Cabernet that I bought 26 days ago during the Cyclone precruise when we were stuck in Brisbane. I think this is the first time I have posted in this forum since 2000 before our Millennium in the Med. I look forward to meeting everyone on the 9th. I have to survive another two night cruise, which should be extra odd, because other than the people doing what we are doing, nobody living in Brisbane is going to take a ship to Sydney for 2 days then figure out how to get home. I think this sailing will be wild the next maybe mild and we will be all alone!😂 Wishful thinking I am sure. jc

Guess, what we don’t have on the Quantum of the Seas today? I will wait for it. 🤣 IFly was good. So far the two day cruise is full of kids, that I am noticing. 6 kids with us in the IFly. I figure by show time I will notice the drunk adults. I bet there will be a lot of both.

Back in Brisbane, no sign of a crane and therefore not likely to have a FlowRider pump on board. At back to back lunch in Chic, there was an Australian couple who were talking about the FlowRider. So, there are at least two old people on the ship who are not happy!😂 I swear Australian Border Force is inexplicable. Last night we had to send our luggage off, then we went thru to collect our luggage and then walked out of the terminal to give it to the ground crew with only the number 61 tag leaving the ship. Then we gave them the yellow card to verify we weren’t carrying a pile of money, or food, etc. Then we waited for our hand luggage to be x rayed then we just walked on the ship. We didn’t ever go thru the ABF portal like we have on every other cruise. I am now thinking it is just a union thing to keep people employed lugging bags from the terminal to the ship. Or just to make me scratch my head at the insanity. We are waiting for the rooms to open at 1PM, and I took a moment to ask if Next Cruise could do Silversea @Ken at the beach and they said, soon, but they don’t have access to their computer yet. They can do X. I can only imagine RC’s IT people migrating the two different platforms. We have a 1:40PM IFly scheduled. The North Star is not operating today (when it would normally be free), I wonder if it is now broken. JC

The wife, thinks I am nuts. Then she has a ball. I am always calculating the risks, against not doing things. Life is short, none of us gets out alive. I am somewhat incapable of hanging out by a pool by on a lounger. In the summer time, we go out on our boat, and float in the lake, and eat and drink and have general fun. If I were to have a medical emergency, there are places with no cell service, and we might be 30 to 45 minutes from just getting to our dock. If a medical emergency happens, there is always a chance that it would be too late. Then there is our time we spend in our Airstream visiting the National parks, etc. Usually have no cell service and could literally be hours from any hope of rescue, even if we have service. Risks, are always there, and it is critical to be aware of them, but in the end not taking risks is not possible. Knock on wood, it has mostly worked so far!😂 Krystal’s toe seems better today, still purple but not as painful for walking. It is rainy here today, and windy. We are heading to Brisbane. We have to send luggage off, and claim it then go thru security etc. Stupid. You Aussies need to clean this up.🤪 Tomorrow is the first of the 2 two day cruises. I can only imagine how many drunks will be on the first one, and then I can’t really imagine who is on the second one, which goes from Brisbane to Sydney? Why would anyone take this cruise, if they don’t live in Brisbane and are planning on taking the trans pacific. That is the only group of people that this cruise makes sense to me. Of course, that is why we are taking it, needed to get to Sydney anyway in order to take the Solstice. JC

On our shopping walk around the CBD we found not a lot of things to buy. I am always hopeful when I am in a French port, I can find cool French stuff like on St. Martin in the Caribbean. I would give New Caledonia about a 3 on a 10 scale for shopping. Not horrible but not great. About 30 minutes after departure there were two alpha alpha calls one on deck 12 and another a few minutes later in the Chic dining room. An hour later we were in the Crown Lounge and the captain announced we were returning to Noumea for a medical emergency. Which meant we would be a little late getting to the next port. The next day we stopped in Vanuatu and tendered to Mystery Island. Mystery Island is normally not inhabited as there is no fresh water. The beaches were a mob scene with tons of tourists and locals offering massages, snorkel excursions, beach chairs, trinkets that look made in China, snacks and some restaurants. We wandered around until noon when our tour with Royal met up near the tender pier. It was hot so I bought an over priced bottle of water. Not going to dehydrate today! We met up with our tour guide who gave us snorkeling vests for life preservers and our group of 18 got into little fiberglass boats with a small outboard motor and headed across the bay to the mainland. Here we had a little talk with our tour guide. Who told us about Vanuatu and how they are part of the Malaysian group of Islanders like Fiji. Then he and his fire walkers showed us all of the things that they do and make from coconuts. Then we went up the hill to a place with about 10 feet of stones, where they built a fire from coconut fronds, etc while a native woman wove a purse from the fronds. Then after about a 20 minute burn they brushed off the remains, and did 3 fire walks. Then they took pictures of us greeting the “natives” and then us being attacked by the natives. Silly fun. Then we put back on our snorkel vests, took off our shoes to enter the boats. This is when the beautiful Krystal cursed out loud, and only after we got off the boat did I realize she had hurt her 2nd and 4th toe on the left foot. She said she stubbed her toes on a rock or coral under the sand getting in the boat. This morning the second is very black the fourth not quite as much. She is able to walk. On a note of insanity, I booked a zip line excursion for April 15 on Latoka, Fiji today.

We arrived in Noumea, New Caledonia on the 31st. We had the Canopy Adventure booked thru Royal. Ate breakfast in the Solarium, we each had an omelet and other things. The trip departed about 9AM and included a 30 minute ride in a large van for the 15 or so of us. Apparently, Haiti is not the only colony the French are struggling with. There was a ton of graffiti on buildings, and some of them appeared to be abandoned and burned. We then went past a giant Carrefour store (if you haven’t left the USA much Carrefour is a store as big as a Walmart Super Center). It was burned too. At this point, I am like that can’t be a bunch of random things. Unlike the other burned out buildings, this one appeared to be being reconstructed to some degree as there were construction equipment and other things all around the parking lot. When we left the city we started climbing up a single track road to the park where we would do the Canopy Adventure. We took another 15 to 20 minutes to get geared up with a harness and pulley, and weird magnetic devices that you clipped to and off pieces of metal cable with red tape on them. Only one of them could be in the open position at a time, they both could be in the closed position. IE when attached to the cable they could be closed. There was a button that could toggle either to the position if they were connected to the wire with the red tape. That was pretty much the training, we did a quick series of connecting and walking on a board and a 8 foot zip line so we knew how to operate the system. then the two people running the “park” told us to start on either trail 1 or 2 and then progress to the next as time allowed. By the time we were up in the treetops, it was about 10AM and it was getting warm, probably mid 80s. So, we dispatch course two pretty quickly. It consisted of several rope walking bridges, short ziplines, and other odd balance things. Then we started course three, and the temps were now pushing 90F and I was sweating pretty profusely. Course three had longer rope bridges and a lot more upper body challenges, an occasional zip line. It would have been nice if someone had been telling us how to effectively navigate these obstacles, but the “guides” were on the ground and the guests were scattered 80 feet up in the sky. Then I had an obstacle that required you to crawl through a “barrel” with boards that formed a circle of wobbly boards. This was when I realized I was physically about done, and the boards were an absolute killer on your knees if you navigated them in that manner. I think you probably could have scooted on your bottom, but I was not smart enough to do that. Next platform I looked over 3 cargo nets (like you would see in a WWII movie with soldiers climbing down from a troop carrier to a landing craft. The cargo nets were on opposite sides of the safety cable. At this point with instruction I would have probably put on the pulley and just treated it like a zip line if I was a lot smarter. So, out I go on the first cargo net worked my way across it where I had to turn my body 180 degrees and climb onto the second. O lord, my arms are dead, and I am simply soaking wet from sweat. As I finished the second cargo net, I realized I was too tired to even try to switch back to the other side. At this point the male “guide” noticed that I was in trouble, and asked if I could finish. I said, no I am completely shot. He said it is only another net, and I said, I barely finished this one. Then he said, do you want me to help you get down, I said yes, and at that point I let go of the net and was hanging in my harness like a bug a spider would eat later. That was when I realized that was a mistake. I am now hanging uselessly in the air, and my back is in agony, and I realized letting go was the worst possible decision I could have made. The guide gets an extension ladder and climbs up to the platform and then starts to hook up his equipment to come over to me. Then it was me dying in the air, while trying to help him save me. Not a good situation for me! He tried several different ways to try to hook me up, but with out my pulley on the cable it was useless as the safety magnetic lines would not slip along the cable with my body pulling down on them. So, eventually he hooked me up so that I could repel down. 20 minutes after my bad decision I was on very unstable ground (ie very sloped with no solid footing) trying to walk up the hill to get on the ground trail. The female “guide” was helping me. Finally, I reached a place to sit down. I wouldn’t have been wetter if they had turned a hose on me. She offered me my first drink of water since breakfast, at this point, I am worried about Krystal, as I have no idea where she is or how she is doing. As I am sitting with my mind reeling, I realized that I momentarily blacked out. I know this because the female “guide” is starring at me asking if I am alright. I said, yes, I am just completely exhausted. I drank more water from a bottle that was not full when it was given to me, so now I am thinking about whose bottle was it, etc.😂 Finally, after another 20 minutes Krystal comes to check on me after almost finishing the course before she got light headed and asked to be dropped down after a zip line, and before another exhausting upper body killer. So, at this point we are officially old! 😜 Now that everyone is down and we are getting ready to leave the heavens open up with a pounding rain. (It is a rainforest canopy tour after all.). We drive back to town, and see additional burned out commercial buildings, including one that is still smoldering. Back on the ship, we go to the room change clothes and shower and eat lunch in the WJ. Then off to catch the shuttle to town, a short drive from the pier. I needed a can of shaving cream because my can emptied most of its contents in my dry bag with other items on one of the cabin change days. The CBD of Noumea was not burned out, but lots of shops were closed with garage doors.

I will say the only good thing about the Quantum is that I rarely get charged for drinks. Typically, I show up in the Music Hall or Vintages for a Gran Marnier to take to the room as we fall asleep watching tv. Night before last I had 10 drinks (ie I was not charged for a single drink nor was the beautiful Krystal). I got a large pour and a few diet cokes. Last night I still had 7. I know for a fact we had 3 glasses of wine each, so I should have had 4. On the negative side the GM I got last night tasted like one of the copy cat versions of Gran Marnier. Lighter in color and not nearly as good, almost like triple sec or Cointreau. Will be going to Vintages tonight, that is not acceptable.

So, the weather in Brisbane was rainy, and has been rainy since we left. Tomorrow is Noumea. Ship has been rocking, but a bit better today. On important news. The stinking FlowRider still only has a single working pump. When I walked by this morning before the rain returned there were about 15 boogie boarders in line. I can only imagine how boring half a FR is even on a boogie board. We watched the NCAA basketball on my IPad. The NCAA has killed college sports, much like Royal is killing FlowRiding. Does anyone in their lifetime remember an elite 8 of only top seeds, NIL and the transfer portal is just legalizing buying a professional college team. I am all for college athletes earning money, but this is just stupid. Remember the good old days of Cinderellas? Now it is just like watching the NBA, which is basically unwatchable. JC

Yeah, I am right handed, kick a ball with my right leg, but when I was 7 or 8 and I learned to slalom waterski, I could do it better goofy, and have been that way ever since. I can barely qualify for a blue band regular. When I did the FlowRider for the first time, I tried regular wiped out 3 straight times, went to the goofy side and was able to stay up for about 45 seconds the first time. Weird, but then you all knew that!🤪

Double dang

Dang

That link works too well, you can see Bernhard and Victor too.

Hmm… didn’t work View my video at https://www.smugmug.com/gallery/n-xCvz2s/i-GxxfTCD

Oops here is a link to the video…. Remember I am the most boring surfer on any ship. https://www.smugmug.com/gallery/n-xCvz2s/i-GxxfTCD/A

Me surfing on the Anthem before my injury. There is a bunch of structural looking stuff on the deck by the FlowRider on the Quantum, so I am thinking it is for loading the new pump tomorrow. I am either going to be happy tomorrow at this time or asking for the CEOs email address!😂

Some pictures from Milford Sound IMG_7913.mov

Yeah, the flash mob was pure chaos. Glad, my only job was to video it. From deck 5. Always a weird thing, with people who never attended the practices joining in for their 15 seconds of “fame”.🤪 See you around 5:30 I would be packing now, but K is napping after her efforts!🤣. She is too type A to just show up, and puts way too much into preparation.

@kccrzr I hope you get over your cold, was nice seeing you and Allen last night. The Singapore Chicken Rice restaurant near Raffles we ate at is called Chin Chin Eating House. it is about 90 years old. This is the area where this style of chicken rice was originally created. It is not fancy!

So, next week we go to Noumea, New Caledonia, and Mystery Island Vanuatu. I believe the Celebrity cruise goes to Lifou, New Caledonia and repeats Mystery Island because Port Vila is still closed?