Paul's birthday Cruise Day 13 - Sunday 11 October 2015 - at sea

The sea is much smoother today, but our plans are much the same as yesterday - to do as little as possible.
Paul's birthday today - this "Princess" birthday greeting was on the door of the cabin this morning:

Of course, today is sadly the second last day (the last day really; tomorrow we'll barely see the ship) and so we have to pack our suitcases and leave them out tonight.  Everyone has to be out of their cabin before 8am and then you have to go to a specified place to wait for your time to leave the ship. Due to our "Princess" loyalty status we can wait in a separate lounge away from the crowds but if everything is happening on time we won't have long to wait because our departure time from the ship is scheduled to be 8:05 am.   This all depends on Customs and Immigration though - we'll just have to see what happens.
For the rest of the day, again, we have no plans at all.
Dinner was very nice - an excellent meal, with the "Baked Alaska Parade" that Princess does on the last night of the cruise, and also for Paul the standard chocolate cake and singing of Happy Birthday!

Paul's birthday Cruise Day 12 - Saturday 10 October 2015 - at sea

The captain lied about smooth sailing. Or maybe he didn't say smooth sailing, maybe he just said good weather.  In any case, I knew immediately when we turned to the west and started heading for Sydney because the ship started a fairly slow but noticeable rolling motion.  In the end I had to take another Travacalm so I could get to sleep.  Generally when the ship has a slow and steady roll on I find it really easy and enjoyable to sleep, but this was a slow, deep, inconsistent and not really gentle roll - enough to make the TV move on it's stand and to cause you to lose your balance when walking if you're not careful.  Still going today too.
I'm not really complaining though - I plan to have two quiet days to finish the cruise and so far I'm succeeding!
Final report for the day - almost a complete success when it comes to relaxation.  We had a very late breakfast, then we didn't even wait for an afternoon nap, in fact we napped all through lunchtime.  I went to the Horizon Court at around 3pm for a snack, but Paul didn't even bother with that.  Then we watched some TV - a movie called Kingsman which wasn't too bad.  Then off to dinner - formal night tonight, and Lobster for main course (for me anyway) - yum.  Paul had Beef Wellington which was apparently also really good.
We had a group photo taken with our table mates; they're such nice people and we have had an excellent time with them.  Since I'll certainly forget their names if I don't write them down - they were Marilyn and Eric from Sydney and Bob and John from Wangaratta.
After dinner we lost a little money in the casino and off to bed.

Paul's birthday Cruise Day 11 - Friday 9 October 2015 - Bay of Islands

Turns out the mobile top-up we bought yesterday wasn't the right sort, so we're a bit short on cheap mobile data today.

The ship is docked in the Bay of Islands.  There's no port here where the ship can pull up alongside, so we have to go ashore via tender.  Our plans here were always to either stay onboard and do lots more nothing, or possibly to go ashore and to the closest town - Paihia - to have lunch and wander around a little before returning to the ship.

First part of that plan worked ok - we decided to go ashore as it was a lovely day.  We didn't have to wait too long for a tender, and the ride to shore wasn't at all rough.  We walked around to Paihia - there are shuttles but the walk along the shore is very nice.

However, when we got to Paihia we discovered that they were in the middle of a nasty problem - the power was out - actually in the whole of Northland, not just Paihia.  So, no ATMs or EFTPOS (except in one or two little shops that had their own power), and most of the cafes and restaurants had to shut.  This is a bit disastrous for them - they're heavily tourist dependent and cruise ships usually bring in a lot of money to the area - there would have been a lot less today.

One group was going well - the St Johns Ambulance was running a sausage sizzle which wasn't affected because they were cooking with gas, and they were doing a roaring trade!

As I said, we had planned to stay in Paihia for lunch - and a decent coffee - but with almost everything closed or only doing partial business there was no chance.  So we went back to the spot where the tenders pick you up - I walked but Paul got a shuttle.  We didn't have to wait for a tender, we just got straight on the one that was there.  However, as we pulled away they realised one of the engines wasn't working, so we had the slowest tender ride in history - seriously, on land, you could have run faster.  Fortunately though, the sea was really calm so it wasn't too uncomfortable.

While waiting for dinner time we watched from our balcony as the ship left, and we saw a stack of dolphins - here's one of them

The captain's announcement tonight assures us that although the Tasman Sea is notorious for bad weather, that our trip back to Sydney should be smooth sailing.

Paul's birthday Cruise Day 10 - Thursday 8 October 2015 - Auckland

Poor timing today - we got up fairly early and went out - our plans involved going to an Esquires coffee shop (for some proper coffee!!) then we planned to find a game shop that Paul wanted to visit.  And, I also wanted to check out the hotel I'm booked in for the night before my December cruise.  And, we wanted to top up our mobile internet to make sure we've got enough to get us through tomorrow.

We did all of those things, but in some fairly nasty weather - raining and windy.  By the time we did all this it was just about lunch time so we found a place to eat and then went back on board.  In the afternoon the weather was much better, but we didn't bother to go out again.

Basically, just a quiet day.

Paul's birthday Cruise Day 9 - Wednesday 7 October 2015 - Tauranga

We arrived in Tauranga on time this morning.  Since we've been here before and had no really complicated plans, we decided to do some laundry before breakfast.  This worked out well as far as doing the laundry was concerned, but it meant that we arrived at the Horizon Court for breakfast at a little after 9:30, which was approximately the same time as everyone else on the ship got there!  We found a seat eventually, but it was a long walk from the food!

Left the ship at around 11am and got onto the shuttle into Tauranga. This is actually the third time we have stopped here on a cruise,  but we had never been into Tauranga itself - although the ship docks at the "Port of Tauranga" this is actually at Mt Manganui, which is quite a nice little town to walk around.  Turns out that Tauranga is a slightly bigger nice little town to walk around  :-)

Anyway, we had some lunch there, then caught the shuttle back and had a wander around the Mt Manganui shops before coming back on board.  Just as we walked into the secure area of the port, we saw a bunch of people looking at the water - turns out they were all admiring this little guy:

Went back to our cabin to have a snooze. Went downstairs for dinner later and were surprised by a temporary change to the dining arrangements - I guess because the 'all aboard' time wasn't until 9pm they had closed at least one of the dining rooms and were seating people randomly.  We ended up with an Australian couple around our age and a slightly older couple from Fargo, North Dakota.  We had a nice chat about many topics including the lack of reality of the movie and TV show "Fargo".  Missing much of the South Island as we have is far more disappointing for them - everyone has told them (quite accurately) that Fiordland is a real high point of a cruise like this, and it's going to be a significant effort for them to come here again.

Anyway, back to pictures of the cabin.  These three shots are of the main room - not much to say except that you'll see that there are a lot of mirrors, I'm assuming to try to make the room seem bigger than it is.  It's quite a comfortable size, particularly one like this which has a balcony attached; the balcony also adds to the perception of space.

Paul's birthday Cruise Day 8 - Tuesday 6 October 2015 - at sea

The ship was rocking and rolling all night again.  In fact I felt off colour enough to take a couple of travel sickness tablets, which is a rare thing for me after the first day or so of a cruise.  It may not have been travel sickness anyway, dinner last night was heavier than usual and I stupidly crashed on the bed to watch a movie not long after dinner.  Hard to imagine for someone on a cruise, but I many have actually eaten too much  :-)

We woke up this morning at around 6am and then fell asleep again - in the end it was almost 10am before we were both awake.  We went up to Horizon Court for breakfast - it's served unti 11:30 - and we thought that it might be quiet up there by that time, but no such thing - it was as busy as it is earlier in the day.

We had breakfast and then went for our usual coffee downstairs - very crowded there too, but then it's quite reasonable to expect people might be having a morning tea sort of coffee by that time of day.

We then went into the Casino to lose some money on the pokies.  Both of us made it almost back to our cabin before we realised that we had started off the morning with me carrying a Kindle and Paul carrying his tablet computer and neither of those items were with us!  Paul rescued his from the poker machine where it was still waiting for him; I rescued my Kindle from the lost and found desk.

This was enough to make us realise that further resting was in order so we spent most of the rest of the daylight hours lazing around.  The only exception was lunch - the classic Australian meat pie and chips, topped up with the not quite so Australian 'green tea ice cream in a cone'.

We finished off the day with dinner at another of the specialty restaurants - this time the Italian inspired "Sabatinis".  We're convinced that their booking program had gone marginally insane, because they told us, and the couple in front, that we weren't booked for that day even though we were all quite sure we were.  Wasn't a problem anyway; they weren't booked out so we all got to eat there.  But then they decided to sing happy birthday to Paul and give him one of the chocolate mousse cakes that they do for birthdays, even though it's not his birthday until next week and we told them so.  And, just as we were leaving, the man at the table beside us said that it was his birthday - hopefully he didn't think we had stolen his chocolate cake.....

Over the next couple of days I'll post some pictures and details about our cabin.

When you walk in the door, the first thing on your right is this - shelves and hangers for clothes.  There is a door on the front of the shelves but it has a full length mirror and you don't really want to see a photo of me taking a photo.

On the right is the door to the tiny but functional bathroom.

Basin and some shelves

Toilet and towel racks

Shower

The shower cubicle is really small - the bathmat you see here is a normal sized small bathmat.

There are people on the ship who can't physically use these showers because of the small size - I gather they have to use the ones in the gym which are apparently larger than the ones in the cabins.

And one final shot - this is the same bathmat on the floor, showing just how little space there really is.

Mind you, it's not the smallest bathroom I've ever seen, I'd guess it's at least 50% bigger than the bathroom in our hotel in Copenhagen, where there was no separate shower cubicle at all, the floor of the bathroom was the floor of the shower.....


Just one final note - don't assume there's nothing much to do on cruise ships just because I don't write about doing too many things.  That's just our choice, but if you want to you can spend all day running around the ship watching and doing things.  I'll see if I can post an example of a day's activities just to give you an idea.

Paul's birthday Cruise Day 7 - Monday 5 October 2015 - Picton

Fairly rough night last night while we sailed around in the Cook Strait.  I don't think the waves were very big but there was a lot of wind and we weren't getting the nice gentle rock you can get in the open sea; it was a bit more bumpy than that.

Anyway, I woke up to the sounds of my 6am alarm and discovered that despite my fears we had just turned into Queen Charlotte Sound on our way in to Picton.

The captain backed into the dock - this is the view from our cabin as we were approaching and even at this distance you can barely see the dock.

We docked on time and were able to leave the ship quite quickly.  This is a busy working port, it seems they export a lot of logs - this is just a small part of it, as viewed from my cabin:

We got off the ship quite quickly, almost no wait for a shuttle.  We picked up our hire car without any hassles, and headed off towards Blenheim.

First stop was the Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre.  Really good display of WW1 vintage aircraft - some original, some reconstructions.  Also a lot of smaller informative displays about a large number of famous wartime pilots, including lots of items such as their flying gear, letters they wrote, photographs etc etc

The aviation heritage centre was mostly for Paul's interest, but right next door was the place for me - Omaka Classic Cars.  Heaps of classic cars, almost all from the 60s and 70s but some earlier ones also.  I really enjoyed this.

They're mostly cars that were "new in New Zealand" and there are some Australian cars - this lovely old classic was apparently imported into NZ for the use of the General Manager of GM in New Zealand.

After this we drove the long way around to the Makana Chocolate and Confectionary store.  This one is a regular on ships tours, and they make it sound like there's an actual tour where you get to see the chocolates made, but it's really just a shop.  We did spend some money there though!


As I said, we went the long way around to the chocolate place - this was to see if there was anything interesting to look at along the way.  There is actually, if you're into wine - I have never seen so many vineyards - and the area is renowned for its wine.  Maybe we'll get back here one day when we can actually stay nearby and try some of the wine; we didn't bother today.

Last stop was Blenheim - we parked the car and had lunch at a Turkish restaurant.  I should have taken a photo - all I can say is if we had small serves I couldn't imagine anyone getting through a large one!  Pretty good food.

Then, back to Picton to drop off the car - again, no problems.  We had to top up the fuel of course - we only used about 8 litres but at $2.05 per litre it still added about $17 to the price for the day.

However, I think we did much better than we would have on a ship's tour .  The ship was offering a tour of 3 hours 45 minutes where you got to see the Aviation Heritage Centre and the chocolate shop, and a brewery.  Now, the heritage centre costs $35, or $45 if you get the guided tour which I presume you would if you took the ship's tour.  The chocolate place doesn't have an entry fee, nor does the brewery.  So, car hire for us, including the petrol, was about $135.  Even if we had gone for the guided tour at the aviation centre, we'd have only spent another $90.  So, basically $240 for the day for both of us to do the ship's tour ourselves, with the added bonus that you can go other places if you want to, and of course you aren't caught up in the crowds (we were very lucky; we didn't see any of the big ship's tours anywhere).  My point is though that for the ship's tour they were charging almost twice as much - $219 per person.  It really can be much more sensible to organise your own tours and not do the ship's ones.  (Not always the case, but always worth checking out).

The captain made an announcement at dinner that the last night had reached 150kph, not just gusts but sustained at that speed.  No wonder the ship was rocking around a bit.  He warned us that there will be more of the same tomorrow.