Yet again posting yesterday's story today, but it's not my fault this time - the ship's internet access was incredibly bad last night and in the end, I gave up. Anyway, here the story of 6 Feb 2013:
Really bumpy ride overnight - it was supposed to be calm seas down this side of the coast but it was far from calm - strong winds and lots of crashing into waves etc.
After we woke up we realised that one of the loud bangs wasn't a wave - a piece of metal from a balcony above had fallen off and landed on the lifeboat beside our balcony.It doesn't look all that big does it:
until you realise that it's one of these vertical privacy screens - it could have made a real mess if it had fallen onto someone on the promenade below:
We caught a shuttle into Napier this morning. Napier is called the "Art Deco" capital of New Zealand - 98% of the city was destroyed in an earthquake and subsequent fires in 1931, and a lot of the rebuilding was done in the Art Deco style.
The weather today was quite cool but not rainy. We've got two three more ports of call yet - Wellington, Akaroa (where they stop for Christchurch these days as the port in Christchurch hasn't adequately recovered from the earthquake yet) and Dunedin - as well as a day cruising the Fiords, and we're hearing that the weather for this later part of the trip will be warmer and dryer which is good for us.
This afternoon we did a load of washing. Now we have a lot of clean clothes, but we're going to have to stand in the queue at Guest Services tomorrow and ask them to remove all the incorrect multiple charges off our account. Two loads of washing but we got charged for about 6, and one lot of drying charged about 8 times!
Tonight we went to the Carnival Spirit's 'speciality restaurant' - the Nouveau Steakhouse - to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. It was quite a good meal but the ambience wasn't as good as P&O's 'Salt' restaurant. The problem is the location on the ship - for two reasons. First, there's real shudder at the back of the ship, so our seats - and us - were shaking the whole time. Second, there's an atrium that rises from deck 3 right up to deck 10 - and the restaurant is around the top of the atrium on Deck 10. The thing is that noises from deck 3 echo right up to the restaurant - in this case an live band with a lot of people cheering and shouting. I don't want to make it sound like it was terrible, just that it you go to a restaurant like that for a special occasion and you generally don't want those sorts of sound effects. However the food was delicious, which is the most important thing!
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