The First Few Days

Before I get to that, I have to make another bithday announcement.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY BEST FRIEND LAURA! Not going to mention her age, but I'm not older than her for about 1.5 months :)

Yup, her and Greg are one day apart. Just to show how messed up our body clocks are, we had planned to go out for ribs last night to celebrate Greg's B-Day. We both fell aleep at 6pm and woke up at 1:30am ~ hungry. We ate "dinner" (frosted mini wheats for me and a sandwich for him) and then went back to bed at 3am. Got up at 6am and have been up ever since. So we're going out for his B-Day dinner tonight and are going early....like at 3pm so we don't fall asleep and miss it again. Not too many places serve BBQ ribs at 1:30am.

Okay, on with the first few days.

It started when Greg and I were sitting in our living room waiting for the airport shuttle to come pick us up. A Lincoln Town Car drove past the house and then made a U-turn and came back and pulled up in front of the house. I told him there was no way Cloud 9 Shuttle was picking us up in a town car. We watched out the front door for a minute and then a really big man got out and was dressed like a chuffer.

Hummm.

It was indeed our ride. I’m not sure how it is that happened, but I wasn’t unhappy about it! The driver was quite the talker…talked the whole way to the airport. He told us a story about a woman who found out he voted for Bush and had a cow and asked to be let out of the car and be picked up by a driver who was a non-Bush supporter. They were on the freeway, so letting her out of the car wasn’t an option….but she wanted out. He called his boss and told him the story. She would have had to pay for both shuttles and some kind of “pain in the ass” fee. He didn’t call it that, but that’s what I’m calling it. She decided she could endure the rest of the ride with him. I would have thought he’d learned his lesson about telling people who he voted for after that, but he told us and didn’t seem too worried about it. Maybe the fact that he is 6’ 7” and 300 pounds had something to do with him not being too worried. He could have easily been a line backer.

The flight to Atlanta was good. Nothing very interesting to report. Same with the flight to London. They were smooth and Greg and slept as much as possible. Oh, wait….on the flight from Atlanta to London there was an 18-year-old kid in front of us who stunk like BO! Oh Lordy….how can people get on a plane smelling like that? He wanted everything. A cup of water before we even took off. An extra pillow. The little sleeping blind fold thing, which they don’t provide anymore. That sent him into a little fit when the flight attendant told him that. He asked for a glass of wine. He looked his age, so he didn’t get it. Then he wanted to know when they were going to turn all the lights off so he could sleep. Well, they don’t turn off all the lights…another tiny fit. After he finished his soda, he tried to turn off the personal reading light above him. What do you know….it was broken and wouldn’t turn off. This was lucky for me because he asked to be moved to another seat.

We got to Gatwick and found the cruise ship people and headed to the ship. It was a two-hour ride. Lovely countryside along the way. I took a picture of the sign on the window because it cracked me up.

“Emergency exit. In emergency, break glass with hammer”

I didn’t see a hammer anywhere in the bus, so I guess the people in London walk around with hammers?

We got to the ship and wow…it was really big. We had priority check-in, so we were on the ship in all of 20 minutes. They greeted us with champagne and smiles….it was a nice welcome. Went up to the room (where our bags were waiting) and I was really happy with it. It wasn’t big, but it was very livable. In my tired state, I forgot to take a picture of it before we started unpacking. Oh well, you can just take my word for it that it was nice. It actually looks a lot like the one on the website, so check that one out if you are really curious.

We had to get up about an hour later for a mandatory safety drill. Everyone had to wear a life preserver. We looked so silly. After that was over we milled around the ship checking things out. Of course Greg found the arcade and the ships computer lounge. He actually didn’t stay very long in either of them and only went to the computer lounge a few times during the whole cruise to check his email.

As I said in my previous post, uploading pictures proved to be a problem. The wireless service on board works about 30 % of the time and even then it will drop you after as few as 5 or 10 minutes. I was blogging and I attempted to post and was dropped….so that was a waste of time.

We had a sea day the very first day of the cruise…I can’t really remember what we did. I think slept mostly. We were sooo tired. It was like we’d been given drugs to knock us out. We did go to the main dining room that night (we missed the first night since we were sound asleep) and were seated next to the captain’s table! You have the same table the entire cruise. We had originally been at a different table (assigned seating for dinner), but this was a better table and they “upgraded” us. Our waiter, Thomas, is from Poland. He’s young and very….hummm, how should I say….interesting, I guess. He made some odd comments, which neither Greg nor I were offended by, but I found it strange that he said them. Perhaps he could tell we were not the type of people to be offended? Who knows. I had shrimp and Greg had roast pork that first night. My shrimp was over-cooked but Greg’s pork roast was perfect. I did have a banana daiquiri that was out of this world. It was so good ☺ Then we went to a show. The singing and dancing Broadway kind. This isn’t usually my kind of thing, however, I really liked it. These people can really sing and dance! They did little segments from different Broadway shows. My favorite was one that was Yankee Doodoole Dandyish. All red, white and blue. It was cool. Then it was off to bed.

The next morning it was off to Oslo Norway. As we were pulling into port we passed some of the Norwegian countryside. Simply stunning. Pictures cannot do it justice. Greg said he was sure I could live there and he is right. However, it sounds like they have some very serious winters and that's not something I could do. So, I could live there in all but the winter months. Hardly seems worth it. We went to a glass factory where they made a bowl from start to finish in front of us. This was a new limited edition bowl and they were making only 50 of them to sell at Christmas. This was the first of the collection and they made it from a drawing from the designer. It was an interesting process. Everything is done by hand....the "old" way. No machines are used. I’m quite sure more than half of our group would have bid mucho $$ to buy the bowl they made, but they were not able to sell it. We stopped into a café for coffee and a danish. I didn’t have one because I was feeling carsick. I didn’t think to wrap one up and take it for later ☹ Greg said they were delicious. Our guide in Norway knew everything there was to know about Norwegian history. She knew dates and years of stuff right off the top of her head. I tell you, it was impressive. Our crazy Norwegian bus driver was taking the roads like he was driving a sports car. I got carsick. Sucked. Could not wait to get off that bus. But the views.....amazing. The buildings are all old style....nothing looks modern. We ended the day by going to Holmenkollen, a ski museum and jump. The Winter Olympic Games in 1952, when held there. The Norwegian royal family goes there in the winter for skiing. Norwegians are said to be born with skis on their feet.

The next day was a "sea day"...we were at sea the whole day. This was the day Greg got sick with strep throat. We think he got it on the plane and it's been festering in his system since we got to the boat. I was surprised because he isn’t one to get sick that much. After just one day of taking his medication he was feeling better, just as I suspected he would. When he does get sick, he recovers quickly. We went down to the pool and laid on lounge chairs facing the ocean. We took a nap ☺ That night we went to see Jamie Allen ~ a magician. I’ve seen better in Vegas, but he was entertaining enough. Then it was off to bed because we had an early day the next day.


See pictures here. Copy and paste the following directly into your browser:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=14i88s9b.182wjfnr&x=0&y=-9xhexw

More to come....