Our cruise itinerary was changed because of a hurricane in the Caribbean. What was to be our last stop ended up becoming our first stop. It was the place I was looking forward to the least. In the previous post I mentioned that Princess owns a private island in the Bahamas. It turns out that isn’t quite true. They own a small spit of land which is connected to a much larger island via a mangrove swamp. I suppose in a technical sense it might be an island, but it is really just a hunk of beach on the much larger island.
According to the sailing schedule, this was the day I was least interested in for the entire cruise. I’m just not a big beach guy. Especially crowded beaches which is what this was. None of the activities which were available really appealed to me: snorkeling, kayaking and banana boat riding. The snorkel area was a small roped off area and you had to wear a life jacket.
Brett also didn’t want to sit on the beach, so we left the area and headed inland. We probably walked for over and hour round trip and only saw a few houses, most of them abandoned. Most of the houses were painted in the aqua or pink colors you so often see in the Bahamas. We even found an abandoned church and what I presume is the new church a few minutes up the road. In the end, we didn’t find the village we were looking for. We very well might have taken a wrong turn. I later found out there was a bus trip to the village, but I didn’t know about it.
We walked back to the beach and parked ourselves at a bar and waited to find other people who were in our Twitter group. Mostly I drank which I felt was acceptable because it was after noon.
Getting back on the boat I mostly wandered around. I ran into an art auction (they have an art gallery on board the ship) with some pieces selling for over $200,000.
As I said before, the food on board has been above my expectations. We had dinner at the Italian restaurant which was one of the places on board you needed a reservation for. The meal took three hours for all the courses to come out. We started at 8pm and ended at 11pm. Given how long it took to eat, I didn’t feel full by the end of the meal.
We’ve also been moving through rough seas, so several people in the group ended up getting sea sick. Surprisingly, I was not one of them. Given my history of motion sickness, I was sure I’d be one of the first. The restaurant was also on the 16th floor in the starboard aft part of the ship, one of the worst places to be to experience motion.
Today looks to be better. We get a behind the scenes tour of the ship and I get to have dinner with the captain tonight.