Food on board

Cruise ships I have discovered have a whole range of food that I for one had never tried and in many cases had never heard of! We had a table booked on one of the large restaurants and once you had been shown to the table that was yours for the cruise. The table was for eight, although only six of us were there for the meals. The waiters come around with a menu each and then pour a glass of cold water for all to help the meal go down.

Silver service of course, and the napkin is carefully placed on your lap as you sit. Of course as well the chair is pulled out and in as you site down. All very civilized of course. (Nearly all the staff on the ship are from Asia and I do wonder what they think serving, what to them must be rich people)

The menu has at least four and sometimes five starters and mains and dessert choices. Many of the choices on the menu I had not heard of, and for the most part left alone. But to be fair the greatest part of the meals that I tasted were very good indeed. The desserts especially were wonderful.

I did send a few back though and as they just do not want you ever to be disappointed, you are offered another choice straight away. The most memorable one I think was the lobster. This was a menu by Marco Pier White and was supposed to be spectacular. I had never tried lobster, and as it was on the menu, well of course I had to have it. It was quite frankly disgusting. I have to say that I have not got the palette that others have for this fancy food, and I will never try it again.

Another was Sea Bass. Ah! I thought I am on a winner. I like sea bass and have had it several times. But this came in some sort of orange coloured sauce and far to much of it. Horrible and back it went.

And three of us one day tried 'homemade faggots'. A specialty of Wales if you are down this way. Sold in many South Wales cafes, so what could go wrong. Well quite frankly everything. They were more liver than anything and not cooked enough. Three ordered and three sent back.

I do not want to give the impression here that I sent most of the fine grub back because I did not. The greatest part was wonderful, but perhaps a bit to wonderful for my simple taste.

There was also a 'buffet' type dinning room on the 14th floor open to all. You just turned up grabbed a plate and chose what you wanted out of a huge choice. And very nice it was as well, even if it did get a bit crowded. But as it was at the front end of the ship you had a nice view as we were sailing along.

To get from our cabin which was based at the stern of the ship to the buffet dining which we used occasionally, we had to walk up the corridor to the other end. I have put in a photo of the corridor to show how long it was.

And then deck 14 outside.

On board costs

For this page I am going to concentrate on the costs on board the cruise ship. One of the biggest scams are the photos. Of course most of us will take some sort of camera, maybe your mobile phone, or a small pocket camera, or like me, a large SLR type.

But we all want that special memory, and one taken by a professional of you and your partner, is just a bit nicer. And you are offered various ways to have them with different sizes. So far so good. There are about five or six pros on board and they will come around at ships evenings such as a 'black tie' evening, or will take photos as you disembark to go on tours.

What I have issues with is the prices. We bought for ourselves a photo memory book. Just three photos of 8"x10" and a couple of standard stock photos. The quality was pretty good, but that cost was just under £45. Quite pricey for what we got.

A standard 7x5 photo was around £6 and a 8x10 was just under £12. You of course are paying extra because of the ones that do not buy them. Have they not thought that by reducing the price by half about three times more passengers would buy them?

One of the biggest stings I noticed was on a canvas print offer. A 16" x 20" canvas print was on a 'special offer' of 5p short of £70! You can get this anywhere at £40. Below is a copy of the professional photo taken on board. It is only a 'photo of a photo' so not quite as good as the real thing.

Enough about the photos. Also on offer was a 'behind the scenes tour of the ship. Down to the engine room and up the bridge, that sort of thing. Don't forget this costs the ship nothing, just an officer to walk around and point out the places etc. I was interested so asked about it. Yes I could go but the cost was £75 each! No thanks was the quick answer!

The tours were also quite pricey, although I cannot give the prices here as I had organized my own with another company.

And of course there was the Wi-fi. That was a little gem. As you are on the high sea the internet is the ships own and not what you could expect back home. But it was OK for the odd email etc or surfing Facebook.  They wanted £62.50 for 250 minutes! That works out to around £15 an hour. Needless to say I did not bother. I stayed out of touch for a couple of days until I could get to port and find a free Wi-Fi spot.

So that is today's moan about the cost. Of course you did not have to pay it, and I did not for most of it. But it just seems they want to get that little bit more out of the customer, even though you have already paid a great deal to be there in the first place.

What I did like however was the cashless on board payment system. When you board you are asked to present a credit or debit card. They will take the details and then give you a card used to open the cabin door. This is also used to pay for all items on board from a large item to a packet of sweets. This does mean that you do not have to carry around cash or credit cards etc. At the end of the trip your on board spend is calculated and taken from your card. You can ask for a print out at anytime of the spend so you can keep an eye on it.

And then just to finish this off nicely, a photo that I took with my own camera, just of a flower we noticed while on a trip.

Back from our cruise

So here I am a couple of weeks later back from a cruise around the Canary Islands. All in all a wonderful holiday and one I am glad that I took. Both of us enjoyed it immensely on the whole.

The ship was the Oceana, 77,000 plus tonnage, capable of taking 2016 passengers with 850 staff.

we were delayed in boarding for about four hours due to the late arrival of the ship[ from the Caribbean. There had been some sort of technical problem, but that was resolved before we left, and each passenger was given £20 in credit for on board spend.

The cabin, although not huge, was quite big enough, and had the balcony we had requested. That certainly helped the feel of space in it. The dining room was very smart and the food on the whole excellent. As on all these ships the food seems to be endless and of very good quality.;

The service was first class from the waiters all who came from Asian countries. And the entertainment was excellent. I had the idea that ship entertainment was from those at the end of their carrear, but this certainly was not the case. All were first class and the venues were comfortable.

The prices of the drinks were roughly pub prices so were not to bad. We are both not big drinkers, so that part did not bother us anyway. Some of the prices were very high in my opinion and I will post another day on this.

we went to Madeira, La Palma, Tenerife, Gran Canaries, Lanzarote, and Lisbon finally. As I had only been to Tenerife in that part of the world before, I enjoyed the tours we had booked in all of them.

I have posted albums on Facebook for those who want to look at the photos, and I will upload them to Flickr soon and post the details.

So you might ask when are we taking our next cruise and where to? Well not all actually. we both felt the same way, that it was not just for us. For all the luxury and good living, it was all so slow. I like to get where I am going and get on with the holiday. I do know that for many, this relaxing way is part of the holiday. But I am going to Orlando later this year, and just want to get there by plane, and grab the car and start the holiday.

More about the cruise in further blogs.  Meanwhile check out the huge ship overlooking smaller yaughts.

Off on holiday

I will be leaving this for a couple of weeks as yippee! We are off on a cruise to the Canary islands. This is the first time I have been on one of these and myself and my partner are really looking forward to it.

We are going on the P&O Oceana from Southampton. We drive up tomorrow afternoon and the board on Monday. I have always wanted to try a cruise, but either never had the money, or other things intervened.

This time I have bought myself a dinner suit for the evening times, and the shirt and bow tie to go with it. Denise has several lovely dresses, and we are looking forward to the shows etc.

We have stops and excursions booked in Madeira, Lisbon, Gran Canaria, Tenerife and Lanzarote.

I will not be posting until I get back in a couple of weeks. As no-one reads this much anyway, I don't suppose it will be missed. But I although I have a tablet, the Wi-Fi is not that good, and I will not be buying the package on the ship. That is stupid money.

I will take plenty of photos, and sort it out when I get back.

Waiting for glasses

Last November, I ordered a pair of spectacles from Perfect glasses. I had never been that happy with them, but in February I had an eye test for a renewal of my bus driving license. It seems that I could see better in one eye without my specs!

So I took the glasses to my local optician for a check. It was found that they were near to a prescription given to me two years before! I went home and checked to find that I had in fact sent the wrong prescription off. So it was my fault. But my optician told me, they were still not right even with that prescription.

So I contacted them, and sent them back with the correct script. I had to pay a little more, but as it was partly my own fault I accepted that I would have to. That was on the 19th February, and I was assured that the matter would be dealt with quickly.

I phoned last week as I am away soon for a holiday and need my glasses. I was told that they were in the lab and would be sent off to arrive early this week. Today is Thursday, and I phoned again. I was then told they were in for quality check and would be sent off in a couple of days. That means I will not be getting them before I go away, and will have to use my old ones.

There is an lesson to be learned here and it means I will always go to my local optician for glasses in the future. Yes the glasses in online shops are cheaper, but you get what you pay for, and at least in your local place, any problems are dealt with quickly and efficiently.

Work for the retired

I have not been working last week or this week. By that I mean in a paid job. I am at the moment officially retired. So I have all this free time and some work needed to do in the house. Nothing drastic, just some cleaning and ironing and a small painting job. It could be done in less than half a day.

So of course I get on with it don't I. No, now I have the time, I don't have the urgency that I once had to get on with it. When I was working, I knew that jobs had to be done on my time off, because that was the only time they could get done. I used to work twelve hour shifts, so was out of the house up to fourteen hours a day. Things HAD to get done when I had the time off.

Now of course I have plenty of time off. So what to I do? I go on Facebook, or blog on here, browse the internet, anything but the jobs I want to do!

My beautiful partner Denise has been laid low all last week and this so far with a really bad dose of flu. I have been lucky enough not to get it. I think my immune system must be good, but because she is a diabetic, hers is not. She is getting better, and as we are going on a cruise a week today, hopefully by then will be on her feet.

Well I really need to get on with things, so I will sign off. If anyone reads this nonsense why not get in touch and say hello.

Update overdue

It seems it is over seven months since I last updated this. Wow, that time has gone quickly. I will really have to concentrate on updating my blog. Not that I guess I get a lot of visitors, but if I don't update, then I guess I cannot get any.

So what has been happening in the last few months? Quite a lot actually. My mother passed away in June as I wrote in the last post, and since then things have changed. I had a holiday with Denise in September in Santa Suzanna in Spain going by coach with a local company. We thought that having a break in France both ways would break the journey. Never again! These trips are endless, and the traffic both ways meant that we had a fifteen hour journey twice getting there and back. Next time I will book a plane. It is just not worth it.

The holiday was nice when we got there with typical warm Spanish weather. It was nice until half way through the week when my wallet got stolen! A quick shove from someone getting on a train and that was it. It was lucky that Denise had her own money or we would have been in real trouble. As it was phoning the banks etc was a pain. I got all my money back from the bank, but it did learn me to be more careful in future.

I then decided to retire from full time work when we came back, and paid of all the house etc. The first time I had been debt free for many years.

I have been upgrading the house, redecorating and getting windows re-glazed and a new PVC porch etc. It is nearly finished now thank goodness. I did start a part time job a couple of months ago, but that did not work out, and now I will have to think of something else to do.

We are going on a cruise to the Canary isles in just under two weeks. Neither of us have been on  a cruise ship before and we are really looking forward to that.

And I have booked a holiday in Florida for November. More of that toward the date.

I will try and post more now as the weeks go on,