Christmas Cruise

 Currently at Kangaroo Island so I thought I’d post a catch-up while we have proper internet access.

We left home on Monday 18th, with an overnight stay planned in Melbourne before the cruise left on the 19th.

Nothing much to say about the trip to Melbourne, the traffic was okay, we checked in with no trouble, and the flight was on time.

While planning the trip I was quite concerned about the heat - it can be very hot in both Melbourne and Adelaide, and you can also be unlucky with poor cooling in cruise ship cabins too.  So, I brought along by little USB desktop fan that I usually use at work, and also a separate hand held fan that I use at the baseball (to carry on shore excursions).

First concern was that we could spend ages waiting in the heat for a taxi and then have one of those drivers who won’t use their air- conditioning.  Reality was that there were about 10 taxis waiting, and ours was as cool and quiet as you could want.

Got to the hotel way too early - Qantas rescheduled us to an earlier flight some time ago - but it’s alway worth going to the hotel because they’ll nearly always agree to hold your suitcases and sometimes will check you in early.  We got an early check-in, and a free upgrade - were meant to be in a studio apartment and ended up in a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment which I swear was almost as big as our house.  Very nice.  And, got a free bottle of wine because it was my birthday next day.

We had paid for a late checkout on the 19th as our time for checking into the cruise was from 2pm to 2:30.  Got to the port really quickly and made a rookie mistake - should have asked the driver to drop us off and let us walk onto the pier, but he drove us on.  It took more than half an hour to get from the end of the pier to the taxi drop-off point!

P&O checkin process was very quick, although security had a fail - in his backpack Paul had a bottle of water they gave him on the plane; he forgot about it and they didn’t notice.  Oops.

Cabin is nice but very small, even for a cruise ship cabin.

The seas haven’t been too bad, although I did knock myself out with sea-sickness tablets on the first night, as per usual.

We’re now just waiting to go ashore on Kangaroo Island, but my concerns about the heat have been set aside by concerns that we’re likely to be too cold - top temperature here today is going to be about 19 degrees,