Tuesday, March 24, 2020

December 8, 2019 – Ft. Lauderdale, FL – Mostly Cloudy – 78F

We arrived early in Ft. Lauderdale, completing a very nice Eastern Caribbean Cruise.


I got up a little later today than I wanted to (around 6:50 AM) and had breakfast in the Oceanview Café.  It was a zoo – I grabbed the first table for two I could find and plopped my cap down to hold it.  The full breakfast was available but today I opted for a banana pancake with cottage cheese, sour cream, and preservatives (sound familiar?).  The scrambled eggs had returned to their usual glory this morning after yesterday’s anomaly.  I was afraid of either losing the table or losing my breakfast so I didn’t get my own coffee – the coffee server (who told me she was from Indonesia) did bring me coffee but it is never as hot as the ones that I get (don’t know why).

I brought Ellen some lox, cream cheese, and cucumbers plus a brioche.  I also brought her some fruit, a bake apple, some French toast, and hot mint tea.

At 9:15 AM we went to the Fine Cut Steakhouse on Deck 5 to participate in the turnaround process for in-transit passengers.  We exited the ship and our keys were taken and followed our leader to a room in the terminal.  A few minutes later, an immigration officers checked all our passports individually.  Once completed, we went back to the ship, now with new Sea Pass Cards.  We had new photos taken and we were set. 

We are in the same room (after some negotiating on the part of Sarah) and our keys work.  I went to Guest Services and confirmed that our credit card had rolled over to this cruise and then I set up restaurant reservations for the whole week with the Dining folks next to the Guest Services desk.  We are going to do the restaurants in order again but will check menus to confirm the items for the evening.

We are now on the port side of the Solarium facing the Allure of the Seas 


and watching the planes take off from FLL.  The open window is reducing the chlorine load.

Another mambo ship, the Regal Princess is also here today and probably set to sail later.


And of course, we took the standard pictures of Port Everglades.




We attended the lifeboat drill and once again watched the adventures of Agent Blair – 000 – as she took care of bad guys and reminded us of safety on board.  It looks like that film is tailored to each ship by cutting in pictures of the ship with the common footage.  The best part of the drill was the funny quips by Captain Kate McCue – the first female captain we have sailed with in our sailing careers and the first American woman to rise to a Cruise Ship Captain (1n 2015).

This second cruise is a themed cruise –“Moveable Feast” – has two famous chefs (I have never heard of them) on board – Gail Simmons and Marcus Samuelsson.  There will be a lot of events related to the theme during the cruise.

We went to the room to watch the early sail away at 3:30 PM.  We got nice shots of the departure through our relatively clean windows.  As is usually the case here, we had a USCG Gunship escort us out to the open sea.




Dinner tonight is in the French themed Normandie Restaurant.  We got a nice quiet table in the corner meant for four but, tonight, just for us.  I had the Beets and Feta appetizer, the Arugula Endive salad (just for the pecans), the wonderful mushroom Soup and the Spinach and Ricotta Ravioli (good).  Ellen had her favorite potato/cheese fancy knish, her baked Brie, mushroom Soup, and a pasta from the veggie menu that contained pasta plus tomatoes, mushrooms, carrots, and green beans (I liked it but she didn’t and it was a little oily).  We passed on desert, which we had later in the Oceanview Café.

We went to the Entertainment Office to see Sarah and straighten out a scheduling issue – is talk 1 the Titanic Child or the Romanovs?  The app says the latter but Sarah’s letter had the Titanic Child.  Eddy said he would talk to Sarah about it – I’ll follow up tomorrow.

We passed on Ashlie Amber Harris tonight and instead went to The Club at 8:15 PM for the “True or False” Game Show.  It’s a very interesting trivia elimination show where the attendees all gather on the dance floor and decide whether a statement is true of false.  The two groups separate and the losers sit down.  This goes so until a winner is named.  It was fun.

We stayed in The Club for the “Live Band Karaoke” – The Nauticals were there again to provide the music and several contestants tried their best to hold notes and stay on key.  This was not the cream of the karaoke crop.  The Nauticals lead singer tried her best to keep people on the beat to no avail – it was all freeform and noise but that’s karaoke sometimes.

To the room for the rest of the evening.  

The Captain promised smooth seas.

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