From Annoying to Comical May 11, 2011

You know how things can just get so bad sometimes that you have to laugh? I think we’re there. Now don’t get me wrong—the dining room experience in the evenings is still excellent. As a matter of fact, on these long days at sea, they have been the highlight of our days.

But when you’ve got the loud, and I mean LOUD, clanging going on 24 hours a day and the toilets not working and the constant rolling of the ship causing seasickness in everyone & causing me to stay on the lower decks---well, it’s hard to think of this as a luxury cruise. I had heard so many good things about the Princess cruise ships, but I have to say that I am not impressed.

After complaining 5 times, the purser finally sent an engineer down to hear the clanging for himself. He assures everyone that it is just the expanding and contracting of the expansion joints causing the extremely loud noise that is keeping everyone up all night. Believe me, if it gets RAY complaining—it’s pretty bad. Last night, Ray put on a playlist on songs to run all night to help drown out the sound. It didn’t work, but at least my brain could MAYBE think that the clanging was part of the music. Or maybe I was just SO tired from losing sleep the nights before that I would’ve slept anyway.

The toilets are those vacuum kind and they only work when they decide they want to. Oh, and most of the day, we only have hot water, no cold. Strange, huh? Well, at least we are doing as badly as others. One lady down the hall is having to put all her things in a large bag because there was a leak in her cabin and now they have to replace her carpeting. We walk down the hallways and see open electrical wires hanging out of the walls, trash cans at some doors to catch leaks, carpet still not installed. This ship was definitely NOT ready to come out of drydock. Or maybe they just spent the time and money on the wrong things.

Like Ray said, we would just feel better if someone would act like they care at all that they are truly letting so many passengers down. They ignore complaints until they absolutely must do something then they say they can’t do anything. Just a simple “I’m so sorry” would help guys.

On the up side—the food in the Da Vinci dining room is the best ever. And our waiters, Russell and Claudia, are excellent. On top of being excellent, they are funny and keep us entertained throughout dinner.

Our cabin steward is Rodrigo, and he cleans this cabin thoroughly in 5 minutes flat. I just realized we’re not getting towel animals on this cruise. Oh well, I would just settle for a working toilet, proper working water system, and a good night’s sleep.

I did have a surprise yesterday—I was looking out our large window at the waves and suddenly there was an oval section of water that turned a much lighter blue with a white border. Then suddenly, the back of a whale just arched through the oval and disappeared again. The sight of him made my day.

***I wrote the above almost an hour ago, and things have definitely changed—no more storms, no more rolling seas, the toilets are working, the cold water is back, and the clanging is down to only one every once in a while. Don’t want to jinx anything by celebrating too early, but hopefully bluer skies are ahead.