The alarm went off at 5.38am on Karen’s phone. My phone now also said 5.38am but we didn’t know if it meant it was 5.38am ship time. It wasn’t. I eventually had the brainwave of checking the ship TV channel which confirmed it was 6.38am.
I never started this trip thinking that I would be considered the fittest one by the end, but it seems it will finish that way. Karen is now in constant pain which is ironic as though my foot is still sore and tender, I am walking much better. In fact, when walking it is my knee that is causing me the most stress. Karen is now struggling to walk at all nor find any position to sit of lay which does not cause distress. She is gulping pain killers at every opportunity. She is very grumpy with it all.
Today was our day in one of the worlds tropical paradises – Half Moon Cay (pronounced Cay or Key) depending where you are from. This is an island owned by the cruise line since 1996. They have since spent $11 million developing it as a stopover for their passengers. Certainly, as we pulled alongside it, the white sandy two-mile-long half-moon shaped beach looked stunning as did the incredibly clear blue water.
We had spent real cash on a Tram tour of the island which started at 8.45am. As we knew we had to catch a tender to get to the island itself we were in breakfast on ship not long after 7am to make sure we were in good time. I was queuing for breakfast with one of the ships officers and mentioned our confusion over the time. He confirmed ship time was staying 1 hour ahead today of real time and then suggested I had made a mistake by not turning off the auto change on our phones. At that point I had lots of questions about why that was necessary but he wandered off to eat his eggs.
Disembarking was supposed to start from 8am. We joined an enormous queue at 8.10am. But due to problems in getting staff to the island, we did not get onto the first tender until 8.50am and that was after initially being told to join the wrong queue.
Currently queueing and standing still is the worst thing for both of us. I tried to find a member of staff to cancel our tram tour so we could instead get onto the island later at our leisure, but they were singularly unhelpful and said we needed to have cancelled 48 hours previously. I responded that then they should have told us 48 earlier that we would be stuck in a long queue not being able to get off. By the time I got back to Karen the queue had started to move.
The problem was the weather or rather the 30mph winds, which meant for a choppy short tender ride in. The place may have been tropical but the weather wasn’t. It was cloudy and grey and a relatively chilly 22c. We were not seeing the island at its best.
We joined our tram guide and the 8.45am start turned into a 9.30am start. Again, it involved lining up like school children which pleased me enormously. Yvette the guide was engaging and interesting. The tour was short and most definitely not worth the money. If it had been 75% less then I would have given it a value for money thumbs up.
Anyhow we saw the tame stingrays you can feed and where the horses for the riding in the sea are kept, but that was about it. We did learn about the 700 islands that make up the Bahamas and what the black triangle on the flag represents (the people).
After the all too short tour we found ourselves a comfortable sun bed which amazingly was free and sat for a while. We were just about close enough to the ship to be able to pick up the Wifi from the ship intermittently where I discovered I had missed a goal fest at Carrow Road.
The bottom line for the cruise companies in buying these islands (Disney have got their own as well) is more profit for them. There are no mooring fees and they get 100% of the revenue from all money spent on tours and in shops. Despite being their outlets our ‘drinks’ packages do not apply on the island, even though the drinks were being restocked onshore from the ship.
We had a look in a couple of trinket shops but didn’t buy anything and then headed to the Island free BBQ that had been set up. Karen was not enamoured by the food or her impression of hygiene standards nor the fact that her burger was undercooked in her eyes – it wasn’t. She was very unimpressed and so we headed back to get the next tender back to the ship. Where we dumped our bags in the cabin before heading to the Dutch café so Karen could get a properly cooked toasted sandwich.
After having a couple of hot drinks we headed up to the Crow’s Nest which was full of people playing all sorts of board games. I couldn’t find anything that Karen would have enjoyed so instead we made do with having 3 glasses of bubbles each.
It was then time to head back to pack up bags which had to put outside our room by midnight so that they would be taken off for us in the morning. I tried to persuade Karen to let her very large and heavy hand luggage be taken off for us to make it easier but to no avail. I do believe she has more clothes in there than I have in my main bag.
For our last dinner in The Dining Room, I had the Jerked Lamb Shank whilst Karen had the Chicken, they were both very acceptable. I followed this with the no sugar banana pudding which was a bit bland.
As we were leaving the Dining Room all the waiters and cooks who were at the end of their current contract paraded singing a farewell song. They were dancing and singing and the joy of it was all quite infectious.
We walked slowly to the other end of the ship to the theatre to see another show by Mike Robinson. It wasn’t quite as good as his first one but still had been laughing loudly at parts.
Our final drink was a Baileys listening to the piano players. The choice of songs was not great and one of them sounded flat tonight. Karen was now really suffering and so we made our way back to the cabin for the last time – a right pair of old crocs.
So, our day in paradise had not lived up to expectations. As I mentioned in an earlier blog from this trip, we must start having lower expectations. Perhaps though if the weather had been glorious and we had gone into the sea etc then we might have felt differently.
Back in the cabin, Karen was now sobbing with the pain but there was nothing I could do to help. We just hoped that a good night’s sleep would perhaps alleviate some of the pain otherwise getting off the boat could be challenging.
