It’s 5AM and we are off the coast of Cuba following it south by Southeast. I have been battling a cold for the last three days so my posting may come off as grumpy. I might as well get the complaints out early. #1 complaint: HAL as forsaken CNN for …. Wait for it… you guessed it… FOX NOISE! It is their default News Channel. CNN is still available but you have to go look for it. We do have several sports channels and they run fairly current films on the TV. We are scoping out the best lounge to watch the Stanford game on Saturday. The Statendam was in Port Everglades with the Noordam, which took us all over the Mediterranean in 2009. The size difference was obvious. Inside it is also evident. The stateroom is identical but the public facilities are all scaled down. We had a very nice dinner last night with a couple of retired mail carriers from San Diego and a retired art teacher [from Iowa] and his wife. Everywhere are the usual overpriced and deceptive “luxury” promotions of “art,” jewelry, cosmetics, liquor, etc. I am afraid that much of the sales promotions we are bombarded with are as crass and unsophisticated as what you would encounter in the old time-share promotions at any Mexican resort in the 1970s. This is especially evident with Park West, the on-board “art” dealer. I ranted about this in the past and nothing has changed.
I am enjoying my Kindle, still working on David McCullough’s The Greater Journey.
We have advanced another hour on the ship but my computer does not read it. I wonder if it is a maritime thing. Sitting on the deck I can see the coastal islands of Cuba as we near the southern end of the island. We will then cruise along the northern coast of Haiti and The Dominican Republic before heading south to Aruba. We will pass between The DR and PR. We will see no land until we reach Aruba. There is nothing much worth photographing so I’ll post with something from the ship’s interior.