Carinval Glory - NYC to New England... A Memoir

[hockeyluver]

what thats it??? I still have half my first coffee left.... guess i will have to go back to the main board page and read some boring stuff...:rolleyes:

 

I will definitly have a coffee for you, my 2 daughters, husband and puppy are all out of the house this morning :D

 

love the shower story been there done that!! :p

 

i also love the warm weather and soak it up when I can!! I drive special needs school bus and let me tell you when it is blizzarding out and I have to keep opening up the big door to put the ramp down for a wheelchair.. i call upon my summer and vacation storage of heat to warm me. AC doesnt come on in our house untill it is at least 85, and I never use it in the car.

Edited July 23, 2011 by hockeyluver

[JPH814]

It was 102 degrees here yesterday, and I was sitting in the backyard in the sun reading a book. We visit Arizona/Vegas in August. There is no such thing as "too hot.":D

 

It was 110 on our deck yesterday- IN THE SHADE!!!. I think you anf DH are both nuts:

:cool:

[Delta Hotel]

what thats it??? I still have half my first coffee left.... guess i will have to go back to the main board page and read some boring stuff

 

sorry... I'll try better next time.

Edited July 23, 2011 by Delta Hotel

[hockeyluver]

sorry... I'll try better next time.

 

lol your forgiven this time.... hopefully I will have some reading material for my sunday morning coffee......... :p :p

[pe4all]

It was 110 on our deck yesterday- IN THE SHADE!!!. I think you anf DH are both nuts:

:cool:

At least I am in good company!:D

[bragstarr]

Hey, Delta/Anita/Whoever the heck you are....

 

I WAS going to go to bed an hour ago when it occurred to me I had not checked anything on CC except my roll call for a while, and I found your little gem (not to be confused with NCL Gem which was my last cruise). Now that I am wide awake instead of falling asleep on my feet, where is the rest of it? What is this work thing you IT people profess to work at? (note: DS is a project manager in IT for a major company). Going on this itinerary September 5 with two friends. I've done Halifax twice before and St John once (the purpose of this cruise to hang with friends, eat, be entertained and not have to make beds or clean) but the last time in St. John was with DH and we did the obligatory Reversing Falls schtick. I'm anxiously awaiting the report on what you did in St. John, because I need ideas for what a person with mild fibromyalgia (me) and her pal with a gimpy knee can do. (We're renting a car in Halifax to drive to Peggy's Cove and the Titanic Cemetery). More, please. With expected sarcastic detail and entertaining sidebars!

 

PS Shaky, I think you should be awarded credit for putting up with this sock deal of his. I'd shoot my husband. Seriously, his entire sock wardrobe is 1/4 length white socks and Gold Toe black socks.

[Irishvisions]

I'm thoroughly enjoying your memoir. I told my cruise buddies about it and now they're hooked too. We're all from Southern Maryland and are looking forward to our Sept cruise to New England. You've given us many good pointers, that's for sure. Can't wait to order some Indian food. Had no idea that was an option for us. Thank you so much for doing this for us all!

[australian_girl]

I will be sad when this memoir comes to a conclusion.

[Pee-ah]

Just me #7.. checking :)

[hockeyluver]

Good thing i decided to spend my morning coffee time with my husband ;) no new additions :(

[Irishvisions]

Good thing i decided to spend my morning coffee time with my husband ;) no new additions :(

 

Exactly. Please, Delta Hotel, don't keep us waiting! :(

[pe4all]

C'mon Delta a Mrs. Shaky Beef! Not even my dh works on a Sunday!:D

[Delta Hotel]

C'mon Delta a Mrs. Shaky Beef! Not even my dh works on a Sunday!:D

 

<SIGH> Just got home... I'm working on my next installment now =) Hopefully I'll have it ready in about thurdy day.

[Delta Hotel]

Daughter #1 sees the big chess set up on the platform directly across from the movie screen, and excitedly asks if they can go play with it. Daughter #2 immediately starts jumping around to indicate that she’d like to “second that motion”. Wifey and I both look across the Lido movie deck at the chess set from our table by the bar and see that despite the wind and cold, there are a bunch of people and kids already playing with the chess set.

 

I don’t want to stand around on deck waiting for our turn to play chess, so I tell them, “It’s too cold and windy, and people are already playing with it. We can check back later and see if it’s available.” I pause while noticing their silent disappointment, and Wifey says, “Would you girls like some hot tea? Come on, it’ll help warm you up after running around in all that wind.” Notice that Wifey doesn’t use the word “cold”. The girls perk up at this idea and Daughter #2 asks, “May I dip the tea bag?”

 

We all head into the buffet using the closest glass doors. We go in, and find the place almost empty. There are a few groups of people sprinkled throughout the area, but it’s as empty as the buffet ever is. I’ve seen more people in the buffet at 3AM on a port night. Mostly just a few teenagers here and there talking and joking.

 

We peruse the buffet for something interesting but we’re not terribly interested in eating. We’re all still full from dinner; it’s only 8:40PM. I see something on the buffet which has scallops, squid, egg noodles, and tomatoes. This stuff looks so appealing to me, that I can’t pass it up. I grab a small plate and help myself as Wifey and the girls go over to the drink station for their tea. While I’m getting some of the seafood noodle stuff, I also notice that they have some sushi rolls available that don’t look too dry, so I grab one and plop some wasabi-flavored gravy on it.

 

 

When Daughter #1 sees that Wifey is filling three mugs with hot water, she quickly makes the [correct] assumption that each of them was getting their own mug of tea, and says, “We get our own hot tea?” When Wifey responds with an affirmative answer of some kind, both girls cheer.

 

Both daughters really like to make hot tea and drink it, so we let them steep and drink non-caffeinated tea from time to time. They also enjoy the hot tea at Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese restaurants (and anywhere else that it’s served), but they don’t like it when the tea leaves sit in the bottom of their cup. They drink around it, but they still don’t like seeing it there.

 

Since the buffet is so empty and quiet, we allow the girls to sit at a nearby table by themselves. They’re really excited by this idea, and giggle and whisper the entire time. They dunk their tea bags continuously as they wait for the tea to get cool enough to drink. We sit here for a short while and I ask Wifey what’s going on this evening that might be interesting for us and the kids. She looks over the Fun Times for the day, and we don’t find anything that we’re particularly interested in seeing with the girls and we decide to just go back to the room and relax. It’s just after 9PM by now. We saw the “Justin Illusion” show on the list, and we had been interested earlier, but heard from other guests (parents and non-parents) that the costumes in the show were questionable and possibly too risqué for small children. There was also a warning in the Fun Times about this show that read “This show is PG rated due to costuming”. Since we had already seen some other shows on Carnival ships that we considered inappropriate for our children (which had no warning), Wifey thought that we should take this warning seriously.

 

 

 

Tonight was a “port night” anyway and we wanted to get a good night’s sleep before going to Saint John in the morning.

 

Hold onto your coffee or beer; we’re going to take a quick journey back in time. About 5 hours, to be more specific.

 

The “Past Guest Party” was scheduled for 4PM today. We’ve been to one or two of these parties before, and I would recommend that if you’ve never been to one, that you attend at least one… that’s assuming that you are in fact, a past guest. If you are, you should get an invitation in your room some time before the scheduled party. These parties are by invitation only, and are not listed in the Fun Times for the day. I suppose that’s in order to prevent random people from showing up, and the crew having to turn them away.

 

The past guest party normally consists of a Carnival-produced movie featuring the CEO of Carnival, a bunch of people sitting around, wondering what’s going to happen next, and cheering for Carnival ships that you’ve sailed on before. I think most people come because it include free cocktails. However, the cocktails are extremely weak, and there’s never enough waiters for the event, so it’s hard to get a drink, and when you finally get one, it’s pretty weak.

 

Like I said, I would suggest that if you’re invited to one, you attend at least one. Each one after that, you can decide if you want to do it again. I attended the very first past-guest party that we were invited to years ago, and have skipped each one after that.

 

We had received our invitations last night, and decided that we didn’t want to go. It took place during that “black out” period that I mentioned earlier when we came back to our cabin after walking all day.

 

Wifey was mildly excited about our youngest daughter, the 5-year-old, receiving her first past-guest invitation. She’s actually been on three cruises (including this one) but she was in utero for her first cruise, so Carnival says that it “doesn’t count”. Big meanies.

 

Here’s Daughter #2’s official past-guest party invitation:

 

 

 

We still have our invitations because we didn’t go. If you go to the Past Guest Party, they’ll collect your invitations at the door.

 

<Now we journey back to our normal storyline>

 

So, after we have our tea, beer, food, and fun on the Lido Deck, we leisurely make our way back home. We all get ready for bed, and the girls go back to playing in their bed area, and I take a shower.

 

I was going to start this sentence out with, “I’ve often wanted…”, but that’s not nearly strong enough of a feeling. Every time I take a shower on a cruise ship, I think to myself (out loud on occasion) that I really want one of these shower systems. To me, the cruise ship’s cabin shower fixture system is exactly what I want at home.

 

The shower in this Ocean View cabin is a stand-up shower, so it doesn’t have a faucet on the bottom; it only has a shower head, but that’s not such a big deal. I know that they have this exact same shower system with a faucet/spigot system at the bottom from the whirlpool tub that we had on Carnival Pride earlier this year. At home, my biggest complaint about the conventional shower system is the 30-60 second wait time until I get the water temperature to level out. It might take other people less time depending on how picky they are, I suppose.

 

The cruise ship shower system is a height-adjustable shower head which slides up and down on a stainless steel bar which mounts vertically to the wall. The showerhead is connected to the fixture by a flexible hose that attaches to the bottom of the fixture. Where you would normally have the “Hot” and “Cold” knobs, handles, or some other kind of turny-thing, there’s a horizontal bar with two knobs – one on either end.

 

I didn’t take a picture of the shower from Glory. The picture below is of the shower and whirlpool tub from the Carnival Pride. This shower system looks a little different, but the shower fixture arrangement is very similar… except our shower on Glory didn’t have the tub at the bottom, just the normal square fiber-glass basin. Also, the stand-up shower version doesn’t have the lower spigot protruding from the horizontal bar.

 

 

 

The two important parts of this shower system that I really want at home are the horizontal bar, and the adjustable height showerhead. Now, I know that some of you reading this might be thinking, “Both of those options are commercially available for residential installations, you dork…” However, you might have worded it slightly differently in your head. I’m aware that I could just go buy this shower system, install it in my house, and stop wishing that I had one. The two major problems with this idea are:

 

Problem #1 - Replacing my shower fixtures takes money, which would mean that it takes that much longer before we have enough saved up for our next cruise. Why install a cruise shower in my house when I could just go on a cruise to take a shower?

 

Problem #2 – Since I am capable of replacing the shower system myself, I have a hard time paying someone else do it. However, I rarely find the time to do any home-improvement projects unless it moves so far up the list that it involves animals in the attic eating through our walls, water running through the house in places that should be dry (I hate wearing wet socks), or perhaps something that might cause us to lose money – money that could otherwise be put toward our next cruise. It’s a real trap that I’ve set for myself.

 

Now onto the most important part of this whole shower fixture thing. The horizontal bar has two knobs on it. These two knobs would normally be “Hot” and “Cold”. You would turn them according to the mixture you want, and they’d mix to make the temperature that you want. The problem here is that when you turn it off, you lose your settings for the temperature that you worked so hard to get.

 

The two knobs on this shower fixture are for “Temperature” and “On/Off”. On the right knob, you set your target temperature using lines and numbers that correspond to the water temperature. The target temperature of 38 degrees Celsius is marked in red, and happens to be the exact temperature of water that I like. This system allows you to set your temperature and simply turn on the shower using the other knob. This helps reduce the amount of time you spend getting your water temperature “just right”.

 

This is a great system, and I plan to either get one installed in my house, or I plan to live on a cruise ship at some point… and not just for a week! By the way, for anyone that’s interested, the manufacturer of these shower systems is Grohe, and they have many models like this available. Also, 38 degrees Celsius translates to approximately 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

The combination of this shower system and the green, squeaky Bienvenue soap make showers one of the more enjoyable parts of cruising for me. Sometimes at home, after I’ve taken a shower with my cruise ship soap, I’ll come out of the bathroom and Wifey will smile and say, “You smell like a cruise ship.”

 

After my shower I put on my sleep socks and flop into bed, carefully tucking my feet (up to the knees) under the turned-down corner of the bed spread. I pull out my laptop and camera, and back up the pictures that I’ve taken that day. Once I’m done with my backups, I begin to go through the pictures from that day with Wifey beside me. While I’m going through pictures, Wifey is going through the Fun Times for the next day to see if there’s anything we’d like to see or do.

 

Then we hear “the neighbors” in their room again.

 

The neighbors, once again, are attempting to tear the cabin apart without tools. In addition to tearing the room apart, it sounds as if they’re trying to recover something valuable from their child’s lower intestine by way of beating the kid’s bottom until it shakes out of his butt. The kid is screaming, the parents are yelling, and the older brother is trying to break through our wall like “The Hulk”. In case the parents ever come across this, I’ll be polite and not mention anyone in their family by name. However, I will tell you that the screaming, younger brother’s name started with a “T”… and ended with an “yler”. We know this little factoid only because of how many times it was screamed at him by his parents. Most of the little boy’s responses were loud yet indistinguishable.

 

With the excessive noise, and the child screaming (presumably because he’s being beaten profusely by his mother), we decide to call Guest Services, again. We report the incident and wait. Ten to fifteen minutes later, the noise calms down.

 

After I finish looking at pictures, I put my laptop and camera away, we continue to watch “Tangled” [again] and I lose consciousness at some point until morning.

[gigi1313]

If you’re going on this cruise anytime soon, and use natural sugar, you may want to be prepared for the unusually-difficult-to-get-out-of-the-brown-packet sugar. If you ARE going on this cruise soon, but you DON’T use natural sugar, open one or two of them for me and tell me if they’re still rock-hard. I’m just saying… if you remember to.

 

 

just got off the Glory on Thursday... dh used the "sugar in the raw" packets every night at dinner... they were not rock hard at all but rather quite granular as they should be :)

[Delta Hotel]

just got off the Glory on Thursday... dh used the "sugar in the raw" packets every night at dinner... they were not rock hard at all but rather quite granular as they should be :)

 

Thank you Gigi, when I wrote this, I really wanted to know if it would get any better, but honestly didn't think anyone would take the time to tell me. That makes me feel better about all of the little brown sugar packets on the boat. Now I can sleep soundly.

 

Thanks again!

 

DH

[hockeyluver]

....... and then ???

[Delta Hotel]

....... and then ???

 

and then.... I have to go to work =(

 

Everyone, I know that I haven't been good about responding to many of your posts, but that doesnt mean that I'm ignoring you. I appreciate all of the very positive and flattering comments. I'm still very unsure as to why any of you would want to read my brain vomit, but I'm glad that you are. I probably shouldn't even say this, because I'll have to find some kind of virtual wood to knock on, but I'm a little shocked that there haven't been any negative comments posted here yet! There was that one guy that edited his post and only left the words "Never mind", but I'm going to assume that he just didn't want to take all of the time necessary to write all of the positive feelings that he had inside of him.

 

Anyway, thank you all. I'll try to keep this memoir going as quickly as I can... not for your sake, but mine. I'm doing almost all of this writing from memory, and I can already feel the days, events, and details fading from my memory.

 

DH

[pe4all]

Ahhh - brain vomit! My favorite summer reading!:p:D

[meatloafsfan]

I read through your memoirs this afternoon. You're a very engaging writer and your love for your family and the time you spend together really shines through. This is a wonderful history of events and I can't wait to hear the rest.

[gigi1313]

The smell of this street is interesting. There’s a coffee shop on the end of the block, so there’s a very noticeable, but not overpowering, smell of coffee. The other smell that I really noticed was, at first, odd and unidentifiable. I smelled it again and again, thinking to myself, “I know that smell, what is that?”

 

IT is possible that what you were smelling is the brewery beyond the del sol and coffee shops... it was pleasant (in a seaweedy hoppy sort of way) from the outside but gaggingly awful once inside! (i know this because i left gagging!)

 

oh, and if others pointed this out already, mea culpa, because i am only on page 7 and have plenty more to read... enjoying every syllable! :)

[australian_girl]

 

The neighbors, once again, are attempting to tear the cabin apart without tools.

 

This cracked me up. :)

 

But I am sorry you had to deal with crappy neighbors.

[Delta Hotel]

Day 4 – Saint John, New Brunswick

 

 

 

 

RISE AND SHINE, MAGGOTS!!!

 

 

This morning, we wake up on our own! No early morning wake up call for us. I haven’t mentioned this before, but EVERY day on this cruise, Wifey asked Dad to not call us before 9:30AM for any reason. We tend to stay up later at night, and therefore have a later sleeping schedule. Dad, however, has settled into his retirement and now only requires about 3 hours of sleep each night.

 

He routinely stays up until 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning on his computer and watching the History Channel or SpeedVision. This alone wouldn’t mean anything – it’s the combination of this and the fact that he wakes up early enough to go outside and throw rocks at the birds in the trees to remind them to start singing. By the time the sun is starting to show its face in the sky, Dad’s already had two cups of coffee and re-learned everything he forgot about the Civil War and the Alaska Pipeline.

 

This morning is different though. He doesn’t call us. Do you know why he doesn’t call us? Because we woke up early on our own! We woke up as the ship was still moving, and getting ready to dock in Saint John. We look out of our window and see the cruise port coming up ahead of us.

 

It’s between 8 and 9 in the morning. The ship is due to arrive at the port at 9AM. See? Going to bed early last night apparently helped. We get out of bed, get dressed, and get out of the room in record time. We move so quickly to get out of the room that my first picture of the day isn’t until we are standing in the elevator on the way to breakfast! That in itself is an amazing statement – that I don’t have a single photo in the cabin before breakfast… not even a poorly framed, under-exposed, blurry picture of me stumbling to the bathroom.

 

We head up to the Lido Deck for breakfast. Again with the breakfast <sigh>… kids, food, hot tea, trying to find a table, bacon police… etc. As we sit by the window and eat our breakfast, we look out over Saint John. Actually, it’s more like – “as we sit by the window and try to get the girls to eat the breakfast that they picked and the grown-ups wait for them, having long finished their food, we look out over Saint John.” The city looks like it was “tipped up” so that we could see more of it. Saint John (or at least this part of it) is built on the side of a large, steep hill, so it gives the effect of the buildings and streets being arranged in a “stadium seating” kind of arrangement.

 

About a third of the way up the hill on the right side, I notice a building that looks strangely similar to an elementary school that I went to in Connecticut. I attended Lincoln Elementary School in Derby, Connecticut for a little less than one school year. I was there long enough to make one real friend, develop a crush on a little brown-haired girl, get bitten by the local stray dogs two or three times, learn how to grow a potato plant, and move away to another school… but the good news is that I didn’t move away until I had been rejected by that little brown-haired girl.

 

<Begin misty flashback>

 

Lincoln Elementary School was a three-story brick and iron monster of an elementary school. Located near the top of the hill in Derby, it used to be a high school that was later turned into an elementary school when the local census discovered that there was a very high rate of babies being born, but very few people in Derby ever made it past middle school. They didn’t really need a high school that big.

 

A year or two ago, I had to drive to Manhattan, pick up some things, and deliver them to Vermont (for work). On this trip, I took Wifey with me as company for all of those driving hours. She actually made the pick-up in Manhattan much easier, since I didn’t have to find a place to park on 5th Avenue.

 

On the drive back from Vermont, we were passing through Connecticut and I saw a road sign that said “Derby”. I had an overwhelming urge to go visit the town where I had lived more than 20 years ago. The drive home was on my own time, so I wasn’t in any rush. I decided to take a detour and try to find the house I lived in, the school I went to, the park where I used to play, and the seafood market on the corner where I was often sent to pick up fish, squid, and shrimp for dinner.

 

I followed the signs toward Derby, but quickly got lost as I got close. Once I got close to Derby, the signs pointing to Derby stopped. I guess the sign-maker people figured that if they got you close enough, you should be able to figure out the rest. I stopped in a grocery store parking lot, searched online for directions, and popped the directions into my GPS.

 

One of the problems I faced here was the fact that I was only 8 years old when I lived here – so other than the name of my school and the name of the town, I didn’t remember anything else useful. Unfortunately for me, my GPS and Google don’t know exactly where “the corner seafood place” or “the crappy house that I lived in 20 years ago” are. I searched the internet for Lincoln Elementary School, and there were lots of them all over the country. If I looked in Derby, there wasn’t one… not a single “Lincoln Elementary” anywhere near my part of Connecticut.

 

I was starting to become discouraged. I felt so close to one of my childhood homes, yet so far. The things I remembered from my childhood were so clear, yet none of them were useful in actually finding my house or school. Wifey strengthened my determination, and encouraged me to continue searching. I mean, we were 5-6 hours from our current home and probably only 10 minutes from my childhood home. We should be able to find it. We start driving around the town; it’s not a big town. After 30 minutes of driving around a “15 minute” town, I hadn’t seen anything that looked remotely familiar.

 

As we’re driving, Wifey notices that there’s a school up on a hill on the outside of town. She looks at it and reads the sign. I glance at the school and evenly say, “That’s definitely not my school.” My disappointment was apparently getting the better of my brain. Wifey suggests that we go into this school, and ask them how to get to my school. It was a great idea. Surely someone at this school knew how to get to another nearby elementary school. Most likely, this would be a woman who’s worked at this school for 50 years, and knows all of the schools, the years they were built, and who’s son became principal there.

 

We drive up the hill, park in the visitor parking area, enter the school, and go to the main office. The ladies in the office weren’t very helpful to start with, since none of them had heard of a Lincoln Elementary in the area. This wasn’t promising. One of the women then dug deep into her memory, and had remembered a school by that name, a long time ago. She hops on her computer, does some searching, and then has an “AH HA!” moment… but more of a public library version of the “AH HA!” moment. It sounded more like an, “Ah Ha.” moment.

 

She found something on the internet which helped revive her own dusty memory. Lincoln Elementary School was closed only a couple of years after I had left there. The article didn’t state this, but if you read between the lines, it says something like “after a specific 3rd grade student had suddenly left during Christmas vacation, the school was closed because it failed to meet the district’s new affirmative action rules for school children. Since the school was now 100% white kids, it was no longer allowed to operate.”

 

The school lady tells me that the school was closed, the building and property were bought by a private company, and it was condemned and closed for 15 years. Only a few years ago, it was taken over by a new company, renovated, and turned into a retirement home. My childhood school had become a retirement home.

 

Armed with my new information, I plugged the name of the retirement home into Google, got the address, then let my GPS guide me to a little chunk of my traumatic childhood. As we approached the retirement home, I began to recognize the area. Through a child’s eyes, I had remembered “my neighborhood” as being the whole town of Derby. Instead, it was just a few square blocks inside of a much larger city.

 

Wifey and I park in front of my old school, and walk up to the front. It’s almost the way I remember it, except cleaner. The front door is locked, so we walk around back where the basketball court used to be and meet a few ladies that now live there and watch the traffic from their lawn chairs. Most of them are grumpy, but one of them takes interest in my story. I tell her that I used to attend school here, and she takes us inside to look around. I didn’t get to see much, since the building had been converted into private housing, but it was neat to see it again.

 

After visiting the school/retirement home, we walked the 4 blocks to my old house, passing the now-closed seafood market on the way. I stood in front of the little split-level home where I once lived, and play back the memories of the mid-night shootings, the crack-head stealing my marigolds from my garden, learning to grow potatoes, and running from the neighborhood strays… and their dogs.

 

<End misty-with-gun-smoke flashback>

 

Back to Saint John. The school on the hill looks like my school, so I take a picture of it. I actually take the picture because there are words engraved above the front doors, and Wifey wants to know what it says. It says “SAINT JOHN HIGH SCHOOL”. It’s probably a retirement home now.

 

Edited July 26, 2011 by Delta Hotel

[SnowWhiteNYC]

This was my favorite installment!

[Delta Hotel]

This was my favorite installment!

 

I know what you mean SnowWhite, as I wrote this section I was thoroughly this!