The sea is both smooth and rough today. We sleep a little late because we moved into a new time zone during the night. One hour lost.
Brian and I attempted to find the dining room for breakfast, and did eventually figure out the difference between the named Skagway, Juneau and Ketchikan dining options and how to access them which is a little convoluted. At a certain point in the ship on deck six there is a dead end, and one has to go up to seven and then down to six. It depends on which place in the ship you take the elevator.
There is a Discovery Princess website which I used just after we booked the cruise and in the last week or so to get boarding documentation. It is possibly very fortunate that I did because in attempting to get boarding passes I discovered Brian’s birth day is recorded as the 22nd not the 26th in the Princess cruise information. This must have been done on a previous trip; certainly neither of us are claiming responsibility! Our travel agent was able to change it for the current documents, but advised us to contact Princess for correction in their system.
We do not have internet service. It is possible – at $25 per day and signing up for the entire 30 days. We declined this offer. There is an app for our phones using a MedallionNet Wi-Fi. This doesn’t give us any internet service, but it has the daily events, schedules, entertainment, maps and such along with a chat feature. I am an app idiot but managed to get it set up on my phone using the login and password for my online account. Then with some more sleuthing I learned to access the various information. I discovered the chat option and linked Wes as a shipmate so we could message back and forth. (With our rooms on the opposite side of the ship we are not able to lean across the balcony or knock on the wall to communicate, as we expected we could.) The only problem with the chat feature is that it does not have any means of alerting one that there is a message, so to be helpful one needs to continually check for messages.
Because Brian leaves all this travel access to me, he had never registered with Princess online. So how to get the app on his phone? I played with it for a bit, and concluded that the app would only download with internet service. But he thought Guest Services might help so we stopped there on our way to breakfast. After playing with Brian’s phone – and checking mine for comparison – the attendant concluded that he needed to download the app with internet service. They had none to ‘borrow’ to do that. Apparently all passengers had 15 minutes of free internet to enable downloading the app – not that we ever heard that message – and I had unknowingly used both his 15 and my 15 with WhatsApp messages to Heather and Mo to tell them we were safely onboard.
We had been asked for our NZTD reference number on a required form in order to disembark in NZ. Because Brian had used webmail, he could not access his number. The attendant was able to find this number from his passport, so now all our r’s and p’s should be in order. This declaration is (supposedly) linked to our passports, but you will recall that our Australian visas were also linked to our passports and we saw how that worked. Since we were required to give a reference number on a printed form, and remembering that the check-in attendant preferred my paper copy of the NZTD to my passport information, I think they might also have found that paper is best.
This attendant was also able to correct Brian’s birth day error.
We went to the information talk about Auckland. I think we missed the one on Tauranga, which is our first stop. We have three back-to-back ports here: Tauranga, Auckland, Bay of Islands.
Carol ZZ and I go to the spa and have pedicures. I had also planned a manicure but either because my feet were in such bad shape and needed more time (quite likely!) or she did not monitor the time, the manicure was moved to tomorrow morning.
AT noon Captain Tony announced that we were 500 nautical miles north of Auckland. Cyclone Vaianu is expected to hit land on 12 April, and will impact our itinerary. More details will be given at 5:00 pm. Current weather is 20 degrees and partly cloudy. Our time jumps ahead another hour tonight.
Captain Tony Ruggero was born in Sarinia, Italy, and has been with Princess for 27 years. There are mariners in his family, and at the age of 13 he entered the Nautical Institute of La Maddalena in Italy. Brian admires his daily reports: short and precise.
At 5:00 pm we learned that the cyclone is moving south-southwesterly toward North Island and expected to bring heavy rain and gale-force winds. The call at Tauranga on 11th April is cancelled. Instead the ship will proceed to Auckland with an anticipated arrival there on or about midnight on Saturday the 11th. The ship can be in port overnight and until 3:00 pm when it is required to depart the berth. Passengers will be allowed off the ship once immigration officials are finished with the paperwork, possibly by 8:00 am, but must be back on board at 12:00 noon.
Departing the dock, the ship will reposition to sheltered waters for the remainder of Saturday and for Sunday, 12th April, to allow the storm to pass. The plan is to return to berth in Auckland on Monday 13th April at 8:00 am with departure at 4:00 pm. We are to be back on schedule with our arrival in Tahiti on 18th April.
So instead of a day (Saturday 11th April) in Tauranga, a day (Sunday 12th April) in Auckland and a day (13th April) in Bay of Islands we have 3 hours in Auckland on Saturday and 7 hours in Auckland on Monday. It is a disappointment. But Mother Nature rules.
What are the chances of two cyclones in one holiday? I am sure we have missed a few. The one that hit Cairns area on 20th March - the day we took the Spirit of Queensland back to Brisbane - was called Narelle. If they are named alphabetically, we've missed M to U. But that's okay with me.
No comments:
Post a Comment