Tuesday 13 December - to Lifou, and of course Jo's birthday

As usual on this cruise I woke up at 5:45am,same as I do on any workday.  However, on a workday, when I sit up in bed I see the wardrobe on the other side of the room.  Here, I see a big glass window and door opening out onto a balcony and then the sun shining on an apparently endless ocean.  Beautiful!!

Here are a couple of shots coming into Lifou:

Went up to the Cafe del Sol - aka the buffet - for breakfast at about 6:45 and for the second time this week, found that Adam had gotten there first.  I don't know what has happened to him - something about being on board has turned him into an early morning person. Don't see it lasting once we return to Canberra though!

We're now just waiting to leave the ship - we have no huge plans but we are going to go ashore to see the markets and then Adam and I at least will have a swim at the beach.  Paul hasn't decided yet whether he'll stay for a swim or not.

The most unusual sight - Adam in swimming togs!

We definitely have to leave our cabin this morning though, because the drama over the bathroom still isn't finished - there is still water under the tiles and it is still leaking out.  We've told them that we're going to leave at about 10am this morning, and they're going to come and replace the grouting.  I'm not convinced that grouting up the tiles and leaving the water underneath is really the best way to deal with this problem though, in fact I'm pretty much convinced that the dodgy state of the grouting and the odd stains on the tiles are likely to be a direct result of grouting over previous nasty leaks of the same sort.  They really do need to rip out all the tiles and fix the toilet properly.

Lifou is a tender port - the ship's boats take you to the jetty:

This is a ship's photo of the three of us at the jetty at Lifou:

Later: Adam and I ended up having a short swim - the water was beautiful and I could have stayed in it a lot longer but the sunburn would have been a sad thing to see.

Paul didn't go in swimming, but he did stay on shore a little longer than Adam and I - he had a beer before he came back onboard.  We had a look around the markets onshore and bought a couple of little things.

Pacific Dawn off the beach at Lifou

Quiet afternoon with not much happening, although Paul did do a load of washing - he needed a couple of things washed and since the machines are so big he did a few things for each of us.  I'm still sticking to my plan of not operating a washing machine on this cruise, although I've had to rinse out a few things  :-(

We left Lifou on time, although again a couple of people only just caught the final tender off the island!  This is a picture taken from our balcony as we were leaving:

Dinner tonight was at the Salt Grill.  I cannot speak highly enough of this restaurant - the food and service were just excellent. If anything could get me back onto a P&O cruise, the Salt Grill would be it.  Heaps of choices, proper sized serves - ie not monster American sizes but not 'thimble in the middle of the plate' either - all cooked exactly right.  And, I discovered a new type of red wine which I've cleverly forgotten the name of - fortunately I'm sure my dinner companions will be able to remind me :-)
Later:  it was a moscato, a sort of wine I hadn't come across before but that I really liked.

After dinner we lost some money on the pokies.  I had a plan of going to the Pirates show, but I was so tired I just crashed.  Tonight, the towel animal was a penguin:

Monday 12 December - at sea and then in Noumea

Decided to get up early today, have a shower and then go down to the wifi deck and see if the internet access is any better when most people are still asleep.  We're still sailing towards Noumea, we don't arrive until some time after lunch.

However, before we could do this, disaster struck - the toilet started leaking all over - or more correctly, up from under - the bathroom floor.  Called reception who said they'd get someone up here asap - and they did.  But, he had to go away and get another guy and a machine to suck it all away, and then the plumber had to come to actually fix it, so even though they all came really quickly, our plan of an early attack on the internet came a little unstuck.  Paul was quite rightly concerned about this given his precarious health - we still don't know what caused him to be so violently ill on Friday, and having the toilet leak everywhere doesn't result in good thoughts about one's health.  However, although the water was dirty and smelly at least it wasn't full of chunks - so to speak - and they've sanitised everything so we should be ok.  We might spend some time in here today with the balcony door open though, just letting it air out properly.

Update:  it wasn't ok, the dirty water had gotten in under the loose tiles in the bathroom and leaked out onto the carpet.  They've come back and shampooed it, and now there's a blower trying to dry it out, but the water is still coming out from under the tiles, so the drama mightn't be over yet.

Anyway, we arrived in Noumea on time and there was a nice welcoming ceremony at the docks.

We weren't the only cruise ship in port the Holland America Line's Zaandam was in port as well

Sailing into Noumea

Welcoming ceremony

Later again: Paul and I went on a coach tour around Noumea, just a short one.  First we went to the aquarium, which they had opened specially for P&O tours since this was a Monday and most of the shops are normally shut on Monday.  Then we went to a couple of different places to see the view over the city, and of course the tour guide gave us a bit of a talk about the culture and society, and various places that we were seeing, as we went along.  To be honest, not one of the best shore tours I've been on - the guide was friendly and helpful but the coach was built for school-children (if the legroom is anything to go by) and we didn't really see all that much for the two hours we spent on it.

Gun installed by the Australian Army during WWII

Glow in the dark coral at the Aquarium

Adam didn't go for organised shore tours - he walked around for a while and then caught a hop-on-hop-off bus to have a look around.  He probably overall got a better look at Noumea than we did, for less money and in more comfort. Although, he did discover one small issue about being in a cabin on deck 4 - the security arrangements around getting on and off the ship surround his cabin, so he spends a lot of time asking for permission to go to his own room  :-)

After dinner we watched a show called Transformation by a group called Pacific Cirque - the show is based on a circus act, but it's done in the main atrium of the ship.  I was seriously impressed - an astonishing combination of strength, grace, balance, showmanship and bravery!

Sailaway was delayed for 10 minutes as three passengers hadn't come back on board.  They were only about 10 minutes late in the end but even watching from our balcony high above we could see that the P&O man who met them at the dock was not in the least impressed.

Pacific Dawn in port

 

The red arrow shows where our cabin is

Our first 'towel animal' - something the stewards do on lots of cruise lines

 

Sunday 11 December - at sea, on the way to Noumea

The internet access is a complete pain - we managed to sign up for it without much trouble yesterday at the internet cafe, but wireless connections via our laptops are simply impossible.   So, I'm sitting here typing up the notes for today's blog entry but yesterday's still hasn't been posted.  We'll have another go later today.

Anyway, the doctor didn't come last night, so Paul got breakfast via 'Sandy Room Service'.  As soon as the medical centre opened up I went down there to ask about this, and they apologised for not visiting and said that since he was still feeling ok he could be set free from detention.  So, I don't have to be room service any more :-)    I'm glad we booked a mini-suite because by the time he was let loose Paul was pacing the room, and that wouldn't have been a pretty site in a normal cabin - the carpet would have been completely worn down!

Today I went to a talk about shore tours that are coming up over the next few days.  We've already booked ours of course, but we did get a lot of info about the practical stuff about where the ship will dock, how far it is into town if you just want to go there yourself, money, and lots of other bits and pieces. Since then basically all we've done is to have lunch, play the pokies in the casino, and have another go at getting the laptop to connect to the internet - a complete failure, so all the blog notes for this trip will have to wait until we get back unless we can find a WiFi connection on shore in Noumea or Vila.

We all managed to get together for dinner tonight for formal night - or more correctly 'cocktail night' as P&O calls it, but Adam only just made it.  He had been asleep, was woken up by our attempt to call him so of course arrived late, and he spent most of the meal trying to stay awake - he even knocked back dessert! My meal was pretty good - a really nice chicken broth and wonton soup, then some beef spare-ribs, then a lovely creme brulee for dessert.

10 December 2011 - leaving Brisbane

We all woke up this morning quite early and feeing fine.  It was raining, but who cares, we're going on a cruise.
Paul and Adam ducked out to Coles for a bit of last minute shopping, then we had about an hour to spare before the shuttle came.  Then, all of a sudden, disaster - Paul became violently ill - the sort of ill I've usually only seen after a night on the rum - but there was certainly no alcohol involved here!
We got onto the shuttle and started off to the port, but Paul had to get off the shuttle he was so sick. Adam and I continued on with the luggage, and spend the rest of the ride to the cruise port working out what we needed to do if Adam was to go on the cruise without us.
When we got there, Adam went and checked in, and I waited.  Paul in the meantime managed to find a chemist who gave him the best wonder drugs a chemist can hand out, and eventually he made his way to the port - looking a lot better but still nowhere near well.
They're quite paranoid about illnesses on ship, particularly that sort of illness - they're not really set up do deal with hundreds of sick passengers.  So, we knew there was a chance that they still wouldn't let him board.  The nurse gave him the third degree but decided that it was ok for him to come on board.  However, it was only on condition that he stays in the cabin at least until the doctor sees him, which won't be until later tonight.  They were quite serious about him not mingling with the other passengers - we got a personal escort to the front of the security and Customs checks and right up to our room.
Paul has mostly been sleeping this afternoon, and we now just have to wait and see what the doctor says.
As far as the cruise itself goes - so far so good!  Adam's cabin is small but quite nice, all of our luggage has arrived, I've had some food (which was good) and a welcome glass of champagne (which I stupidly drank - combined with the seasickness tablets it knocked me around a bit - but it's all good).  Now, it's off to the internet cafe to sign up for internet access and post this, and some photos.  Most other cruise ships we have been on have been upgraded to have ship-wide WiFi, but on this one it's only available on decks 5 6 and 7 apparently, and we're on deck 11.  (Later note - this didn't actually get posted until we got to Vanuatu, as the ship's internet is the worst I've ever come across - more on this later!)
The minisuite is very nice - basically a bigger room than usual so there's a two-seater lounge chair plus two other comfy chairs and an extra coffee table.  And, the bathroom actually has a bath - I have to enjoy this as it's certainly the only mini-suite we'll ever have!
Went to dinner with Adam at the main restaurant - all very nice and of course the price is right since the food there is all paid for as part of the fare   :-)
We ate during a monstrous thunderstorm though - the captain actually warned us about it before we ran into it warning everyone to stay inside and not go out onto the decks.  Most people took notice of it, except some smokers braved the storm of course!

View of Brisbane from our balcony

Because it's a minisuite, we have a lounge and coffee table

and a lot more desk space than usual - plenty of room for all our stuff

And a bath!  I could get used to this!!!

Leaving Portside

Under the Gateway Bridges

Brisbane 9 December 2011

Up nice and early this morning for the flight to Brisbane - all went well.
We hired a car for the day in Brisbane - since we needed a fairly large car for us and the luggage, I'd booked a 'Commodore Sportswagon or similar'.  I was hoping to actually get a Sportswagon as they're on my list of cars I'd like to buy and I thought it would be good to have a test drive.  We did get one, and it's still on my list of cars I'd like to buy!  And astonishingly, Paul didn't completely hate it either - usually a car that's good for me to drive is not at all what he likes. All I have to do now is win the Lotto and buy one!
Driving out of Brisbane I got monstered by some bloke who wanted me to go faster - even though I was in the middle lane of a three lane highway, we were doing the speed limit, and I'd have had to run over someone else to go any faster.  He got bored with bullying me after a while and passed me on the left then chopped right across to the right hand lane, and sped off.  A couple of minutes down the road a police car with sirens and lights blazing went past us, then a couple of minutes later that same car is pulled over being booked.  I'm ashamed to say that I cheered out loud - you don't often see idiots get into such immediate trouble for their bad driving!
We went to visit Al and Ingrid - I hadn't been to their house before. I could have sat on the back deck for days just chatting and watching the trees and wallabies - such a lovely place!
After that we went to Joanne's place and visited for a while, then dropped off the hire car in the city and went to our hotel.  Nice apartment at the Oaks on Felix - we've stayed here before and it's always quite acceptable. Today's apartment has a view of the Story Bridge - I'll see if I can post a picture or two.
Adam decided he wanted to go to the Mana Bar - it's a video game arcade and bar combined.   He had a good time although he didn't stay all that long.  I walked to the Valley with him, and then back, so at least I've had a bit of exercise today.
And, tomorrow we sail away!

Holiday progress report!

Almost all the major bookings are made now.



I had to book a few hotel stays in between tours and cruises - I've booked places to stay in Manchester, Cambridge, New York and Fort Lauderdale.   I wrote before about how expensive the hotels in London and Copenhagen are - well, Cambridge gives them a good run for their money, specially if you decide to stay close to the centre of the city to avoid hiring a car.  In the end I've gone with the Crowne Plaza - close to the city, easy to access public transport including to the war museum even though it's a fair way out of town.  And, it's in the same street as three of the places on my 'things to see in Cambridge' list - Sedgewick Museum of Earth Sciences,  University Museum of Zoology, University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  And, by the time we get there,  hopefully I can forget the fact that we've paid more than $600 to stay for three nights.  eeek.

Another step along the way - I've booked our flights to England - two very long flights for old people like us.  We're going with Emirates - even my Qantas Club membership and the thought of a stack of Frequent Flyer points couldn't bring me to pay the huge extra amount Qantas wanted to charge us for the flight.  We leave Sydney late on 21 August, almost 15 hours flying time to Dubai, then a two hour transit, then another almost 8 hours to England.  However, both flights are on an Airbus A380, and our experience with the A380 to Los Angeles last year was that it was enormously more comfortable than our previous long flights on 747s.  So, we'll see.


We're not going to London first; instead we're leaving a couple of days earlier than we originally planned, and we've picked a flight that goes direct to Manchester.  Once we've recovered from the jetlag, we're going to visit some little country towns where some of Paul's ancestors came from - places like Hayfield and Glossop and Chinley.  Then, we're going to Cambridge as we originally planned, to see the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and also just to see Cambridge - it seems to me that you could spend months exploring Cambridge, but we've got three days! Then, we'll be off to London to start the coach tour.

Have also booked the flights from London to Copenhagen (British Airways) and from Washington to Miami (American Airlines).  Nothing much interesting in the way of choice for either flight - there were some cheaper flights but mostly on airlines with less comfort, more charges and less service, more fighting over seating / overhead lockers and in some cases less certainty that the flight will actually happen :-)    Rather than flying, we're going from New York to Washington via Amtrak, and that's booked too!


There's only one more major thing we have to book, which is the flight home from Los Angeles. It's still a bit too early to actually book the flights, but of course I've been checking it out.  Same as for all the rest of our flights, it's a one-way trip so there's little to no chance of ever getting a special deal.  I'm really torn about this one.

• It would be possible to fly home for as little as maybe $800 each, but that's on Air Pacific with a stopover in Nadi and reviews tell me their fleet of planes is fairly old, not so comfortable and with fairly ordinary inflight entertainment.  
• Qantas of course is an option. At the moment it looks like they'll charge us about $1390 each - a bit annoying when an American on the same flight travelling to Sydney and back going back to Los Angeles later will have only paid about $1290 return!  The Qantas flight would almost certainly be on an A380 and of course direct to Sydney.  And, because of Qantas Club (and frequent flyer points) it would be a better deal for us than almost any of the other airlines we could fly with.  Princess will kick us off the cruise ship before 10am but most flights to Australia leave late at night, so there's a long wait in LA regardless of who you fly with, and the Qantas Club is a reasonable place to wait in..   
• There's also a possibility that Princess will be able to book a flight for us.  Mostly it doesn't make a lot of sense to let a cruise line pick your flights, for normal return trips especially - they often chose horrendous connections and you regularly get charged a lot more than you would to book it yourself.  But, for one-way fares, they can be really really competitive because you can get the benefit of their bulk fare purchases.
• And finally, Air New Zealand offers a really interesting alternative. They're currently saying around $1300 each for the trip, with a stopover in Auckland which isn't all that exciting since it's not long enough to leave the airport, it just means it takes 2 hours longer than the Qantas option.  But, the attractive thing about Air New Zealand is that for an extra $300 each, we can get one of their Skycouches.  This means we'd get three economy seats together for the two of us.  This alone is definitely a huge improvement in comfort over only having two seats.  But, even better, the Skycouch seats are deliberately set up so that the footrests can come up level with the seats and create almost a bed to sleep on - not quite long enough to stretch out and not particularly wide either but definitely room to lie down.  I suspect we're going to be really worn out by this time, and the thought of this level of comfort for such a small extra price is very attractive.  I've got a little while longer to decide, but this is looking like a fairly good plan right now.

I've probably raved on enough for now - next step is actually getting ready for the P&O cruise which is only 4 weeks away now!  I am so busy at work I have no idea how I'm going to find time to even pack, but I'll be on that cruise even if I have to buy a new tacky t-shirt from the shop on the ship every day!!!!

Looking at the past

It occurred to me a while ago that with a trip to the UK coming up, there might be an opportunity to look up where some of my ancestors came from.  What I've proved so far is that:

• I'm definitely a Queenslander.  Everyone in my family's past was born in Queensland, or came direct to Queensland when they immigrated and married someone with the same sort of background!  And, very few of us ever seem to leave - I'm feeling like such a traitor living here in Canberra!
• I've got more German ancestry than I thought - on both sides of the family.  

My mum's family basically came from Ireland (her dad's family - the Strains) and Germany (her mum's - the Weckers).  There's a bit of confusion about the Strain family, there seems to have been some movement between Scotland and Ireland that I'm still trying to track down.  As it happens, we won't be getting to Ireland or Germany on our trip next year. We will be getting to Scotland but we'll have to see if I can track down any actual family history there rather than just vague confusion about whether they were there or not  :-)

My dad's family is a different story - both his mum and dad were born in London and the small amount I've found so far about their parents seems to be saying the same thing about them, although any further back on his mum's side will also take me to Germany.  The houses at all of the London addresses I can find have clearly been rebuilt over more than once since then - one of the streets doesn't even exist any more.  And to be blunt it seems fairly likely that if I found pictures of these places when my forbears lived there, they wouldn't exactly be the nice open streets and upmarket looking houses and units that Google Street View shows me today.  One of the streets for example rates a mention on website about Jack the Ripper, and at about the time the family was there.  I'll still go and look at some of them - as it happens they're mostly within walking distance of our London hotel - but the actual houses all seem to be long gone.

Once I started looking at my family history, we got interested in Paul's too.  So far we've only started looking at his dad's family a little.  Turns out they're all Queenslanders too, but originally were country people from the Peak District (a bit of a surprise since we thought they were from Wales!).  The two main towns we've come across so far are Hayfield and Glossop.  So, although it doesn't seem that there are many Brelsfords left there - they apparently all went to the USA or Australia long ago - we've decided to go to Manchester first and have a look at both places, and hopefully in the meantime we can track down some more information about the Brelsford past.