Travel With Betsy

After another yummy breakfast at “The Broken Yolk”, the four travelers packed up and moved on to the cruise dock.  I’m happy to say that today there was no negotiation needed on whether to walk, bus or take a taxi.  Too much “stuff” demanded a taxi.  The four of us, along with our luggage, jumped into one cab and were like sardines in a can as we tooled across San Diego to the cruise dock.  We are becoming very familiar and it was quite cozy.

We are cruising on the Celebrity Century, a five staf ship, one of the smaller ones in the Clelbrity fleet weighing in at about 70,000 tons and holding about 1200 people.  This is our third sailing on this ship and it’s been redone since our last voyage…. very nicely, I might add.

Our last cruise was onboard Seabourn, which is a small line of six star ships which have been deemed the best luxury ships for several years running.  Celebrity is not of this quaity, but we have always found the accomodations to be satisfactory, the food good and the price right.  One of the trade offs when travleing on a lower rated ship is that there are always lines…lines to board, lines to eat, lines to get on the gym treadmill, etc.  So, we anticipated a long line as we waited to get on the ship, with lots of inexperienced cruisers asking the silly questions that we all asked on our first times out.  As it turns out, and much to our delight, it pays to be a repeat customer.  When the staff discovered that we had cruised with Celebrity multiple times, we were escorted to the “Captain’s Club” line for past cruisers.  We were on our way onto the ship and sipping our complimentary Champagne in minutes.  Sweet!

As we discussed in the last post, the deal is always the most important thing.  On this particular cruise, the deal was on the inside cabin.  Our room is about the size of a postage stamp and, as you might deduce, has no windows.  I happen to love this because you can sleep well into the morning or afternoon and never see the light of day.  After coming off of a busy Christmas season and a stressful and emotional exit from my job, I am looking forward to this.  I may just sleep for the fifteen days and never even peek out of the room.  This thought lasted until I got hungry and needed to seek out some sustenance.  Imaging that!

If you have ever cruised, you know that there are food options ’round the clock….pretty much everything you can think of to eat, you can get on the ship.  The food on Celebrity is, in our opinion, some of the better cruise ship food which is one of  the reasons we picked this line.  Dinner did not disappoint!  We had a beet and feta appetizer, a very nice cream of mushroom soup and a pork chop that was the size and shape of Texas.  All very good.  This, of course, was after we had checked out the “Lido” deck for lunch and then had some french fries and a cookie from the grill on deck.  Too much food.  Tomorrow we need to cut back.

One of the things I like best about cruising is that it’s like summer camp for adults.  There is a captive audience of people to talk to that makes it easy to connect with all different kinds of folks.  None of them have heard my stories and that makes it even better!  We have already made our first set of friends at the dinner table, two sisters and their husbands…all from Canada.  They have traveled quite a bit, as we have, and so we had lots to talk about.  Lots of fun.  We’ll see them again, as we are assigned to sit with them at every dinner meal. 

There are lots of things to do on the ship and the crew is tasked with keeping you busy every minute, especially on the sea days, which we are having today.  There are dance lessons, cooking lessons, movies, trivia contests, gampling, shopping, Bingo….and, of course lots of eating.   I’m worn out already!

Happy sea day and happy semi-retirement to me!

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