Part VII - Installment Travelogue: Cruising With the Mothers, Maasdam - I Meet HAL

This is part 7 of the story. See also:

Part 1 - A Crazy Idea

Part 2 - One Down

Part 3 - Come On, Ma

Part 4 - Two to Go

Part 5 - Formalities

Part 6 - A Grand Plan

I love doing things online. Computers are so logical and efficient, and with the advent of cable modems, there’s not a telephone in the process anywhere. I work with computers every day, and I know how to make them sing…

 

I sat at my computer and made my way to HAL’s website. I was struck by the irony. Presumably, most people are familiar with the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey, and remember well the villainous computer central to the story – HAL.

 

I chuckled at the name association, clicked the shore excursion link and plunged straight into a computer nightmare that even Stanley Kubrick couldn’t have envisioned…

Part 7 (57) - I Meet HAL

It all started innocently enough. The computer wanted to know our names and booking number, and I willingly complied.

I typed in the requested information, pressed the return key and waited.

I went back to the login page and tried again. HAL would not talk to me at all. Sometimes computers just need a little time to rest and reflect, so I went about my other business. Hours later, I returned to HAL and tried again.

This was going better - so far - but I decided not to get pushy.

I tried using the back button to see the original list of ports. HAL went off into outer space. I went to the kitchen, made a stiff drink and went to bed. I was sure that the programmers would be working through the night to fix the server.

I worked on my book editing project for most of the next morning before finding the motivation to try signing up for excursions again.

This was bad news. I figured that I’d be one of the first to book excursions. All those first-timers would be caught off guard, but our little party would prevail.

I filled in the form, paid the tab and immediately returned to the login page. This time I logged in using the mother’s information.

I filled in the form.

I received an email moments later confirming my mother on the mine tour in Sydney. Time to call Kris with the bad news.

“Hello,” said an unfamiliar woman’s voice.

“Hi – can I speak to Kris please?”

“She’s water skiing right now. Can I take a message?”

She’s water skiing, and I’m drowning. “Yes. Please use these exact words – ‘Phone home.’” For some reason, an outer space theme was running through my head.

“OK. Will do.”

“I wonder who that was,” I thought. You never really know who’s going to show up at the camp, especially on a holiday. Sometimes it’s a real zoo.

I logged back onto HAL - as myself this time – only to find that the Confederation Bridge tour was not being offered in Charlottetown. We’d never been to PEI, but more than one person had told me that the beaches there were beautiful, and that the water was remarkably warm. Although one does not normally associate New England/Canada cruises with beaches, it seemed to me that beaches and cruises were meant to go together.

I scanned the offerings, and found a tour called Dalvay by the Sea – a lobster lunch at the historic Victorian estate of a pre-income tax American magnate. Although the description didn’t specifically mention a beach, I figured that if the place was by the sea, a beach couldn’t be far away. Admittedly - for all I knew - it was at the bottom of a hundred-foot cliff.

I triumphantly completed the booking, logged back in as the mothers, and convinced HAL to sell them a spot on the bus to the Green Gables house. A pair of email messages arrived confirming the unqualified success of my efforts. I printed them as evidence, just in case.

Around dinnertime, the phone interrupted my editing progress. I’d spent the whole afternoon researching punctuation and the proper way to write the time of day. From that experience, I concluded that English grammar is just plain nutty.

“Hello,” I said.

“It’s me,” said Kris. I let it go this time. She’ll never learn…

“How’s things? Who’s up there? A stranger answered the phone.”

“Well, let’s see. My cousin from Maine is here with her husband and their two daughters - and they each brought friends – and Ann’s sister’s friend is here with her new baby, my brothers are here and…” I kept count until the number of souls reached twenty. “And then my cousin Eric and his family are renting the cabin next door, so that means the Smiths are visiting…”

“Where are you sleeping?” I asked. With that crowd, I knew Kris wouldn’t have the luxury of hogging the double bed in “our” room. Too inefficient.

“On the couch,” she said. “If you were here, we could claim our room.”

“Sorry,” I said. I was sorry about the sleeping situation, but not too sorry that I wasn’t there to cook for the masses. It is my job to man the grill at the camp, and when the body count is that high, it becomes quite a chore. Twenty-seven cheeseburgers, five hamburgers and a dozen hot dogs, coming right up. I’m kind of glad that it’s not safe to eat rare burgers anymore, because I can cook everything for the same amount of time – well done…

“We’re having lobster tonight,” said Kris. “Eric brought a huge outdoor cooker, and he and my mother are out there making the steamers right now.”

“It figures,” I said. I think I started drooling…

So what’s up?” Kris asked.

“I’m having a bit of trouble with the excursions. The Puffins are sold out. Same for the lake tour. They’re not offering the lunch tour in Bar Harbor or the bridge tour in Charlottetown. But I got the mothers on the Green Gables tour.”

“No Puffins?”

“Afraid not.”

“That was Sydney, right? Same place as the lake tour?” Kris asked. I grunted an affirmative. “My mother would like to go to the Alexander Graham Bell museum, then. I’ll go with her.”

“I could go for that, too,” I said. “What about Bar Harbor?”

“You pick. Find something nice that we’ll all like.”

“I’ve gotta tell ya, the computer system they use for the excursion booking is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“Why don’t you just call them?” Kris asked.

I responded with silence.

“Do you want me to do it?”

I repeated my last line…

I wasn’t about to give up just like that. “No, I’ll take care of it,” I said. “Kiss a lobster for me…”

That was it. No more Mr. Niceguy. No computer was going to make a fool out of me…

Anxious to hear what happened to you as you continue through the trials and tribulations of booking on line at HAL --I really feel your pain-- since the "new system" went in several months ago, I have been totally unable to book on line -- I am less stubborn than our poster, and have just used the phone. That always works.

What I do not understand is why HAL has not found a way to fix the web site issues yet after so long.

Guess where I lack for luck in upgrades, I make up for with the shore excursions booking. It's funny, but I've never had the slightest bit of trouble. Just booked eight excursions online the other night. Took me all of ten minutes to book them. Took me close to ten hours to decide on them, though. :)

Blue skies ...

--rita

Keep them coming Chester! I feel your pain, it took me about 8 trys to book a $9.00 Clamshell for HMC. I know I'm limited in the computer department but the shore excursion thing is a trip. I also did the online immigration form for 8 people and I swear HAL changed some of the info once it got into the system! Anyway, thanks for the continuing saga and looking forward to the next installment.

When you pack for the trip, be sure to take all the credit card statements proving that HAL actually charged your card. If the statement hasn't come yet, establish an online account to get the most recent charges.

On our Prinsendam cruise last summer, HAL didn't give us tickets for $700 worth of excursions that we had booked online, and for which our card had been charged. We were just not on the list sent from HAL to the ship. It took ten days to straighten things out during which I bought the excursions agin on the ship, used precious internet time to establish an online statement account with the credit card company, and print the statements proving that we had been charged.

Note that they want actual credit card statements, not the "confirmations" from HAL that you get by email; they will claim that your credit card never was *really* charged!

Hmmm.....I use a mac and my preferred browser is safari ......is that a piece of the web site use puzzle? How about the rest of you --both those successful and those unsuccessful?

Hmmm.....I use a mac and my preferred browser is safari ......is that a piece of the web site use puzzle? How about the rest of you --both those successful and those unsuccessful?

Maybe that might be the problem? I use Microsoft Explorer on a regular PC. Never had a bit of trouble with HAL's shore excursions site. Now, I will say I just had a bit of fun ... not too much trouble, but some ... trying to do the online boarding pass for my Celebrity cruise leaving a week from Monday. Maybe it was me ... but I seemed to have trouble during one portion of the process ... until I figured out that they've got this "glitch" built in that if you don't scroll completely down the entire passenger contract, it won't let you accept it and move on to the next page. Once I figured that out, though, I was pretty much good to go.

Maybe HAL just takes some practice. I've booked shore excursions online with them before ... so maybe I got the "kinks" worked out?

And thanks also to the poster who provided the tip about bringing along the credit card statement to prove shore excursions were booked and paid for. I would have never thought to do that ... would have just brought the email from HAL. Of course, my statement is online, so I don't know if it's gonna do any good ... but one can try. :)

Blue skies ...

--rita

Actually, I booked the shore excursions for the Prinsendam cruise in three batches; the first two batches (about $1500 total) were done on Netscape 7.0 and these were fine; the tickets for them were waiting in our cabin when we arrived. By the time I did the last batch (St. Petersburg and Denmark), the HAL site would no longer work with Netscape 7.0 and so I had to use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 (both on Windows XP). This last batch of $700 worth of excursions were the ones for which the tickets didn't show up because they weren't on the list sent by HAL to the ship.

For the record...I used both Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox on a Windows XP system while trying to book excursions - with similar results. There were definitely problems with the server, as it simply stopped responding (more often than indicated here). The feature to book excursions for multiple parties never worked at all. In any case, I ultimately prevailed - and the whole episode is a fading memory now. Next time, I'll let Kris book the excursions over the phone...

chesterh