Dearest Rachel –
I was putting together Friday’s video together during the evening, and I was beginning to wonder if I’m not getting too munificent in my praise of the various restaurants. Do I like things too much, and dish out praise too effusively, for my own good? Am I trying to hard not to offend by calling something out for not meeting expectations?
Well, as it turns out, maybe not. Yesterday morning started out with breakfast in the hotel atrium – because it comes with the stay, so why not? – and I woke Daniel up in order to join me for it. He’d gotten to bed at three o’clock – you would have been proud of him in that respect, honey – and probably could have stood a few more minutes, or hours there. To be sure, he’d still need to get up in order for us to pack up and get out, so it was warranted, anyway.
But breakfast wasn’t so much as all that. I know that I’ve mentioned Randy Stonehill’s take on Ramada Inn before; the best I can say about breakfast is that it was ‘adequate.’ It was filling, it was ‘free,’ and as such, it was worth what I paid for it. On the other hand, if it had been absolutely wonderful, maybe I would have eaten far too much of it for my own good (something to worry about for the upcoming cruise).
Come to think of it, maybe this is the point of such mediocrity; if a hotel offers a truly good complimentary breakfast, they could bankrupt themselves in short order with their guests gorging themselves while picking it absolutely clean. So they offer something that’s okay, but little better than that, so their guests take advantage of it, but not to the point of really taking advantage of the hotel. Now, that may be a hotter take than their pancakes, but that’s not a high bar to clear.
So we were back upstairs in fairly short order, complete with going online and writing (for me) and watching YouTube (for him). Fairly typical stuff, to be honest. But I should mention that, about a half hour into our lounging about, we noticed a flashing light out in the hall, and the shrilling of a klaxon. Was this a fire alarm?
However, no sooner were we aware of this situation than our phone erupted; a voice on the speaker announced, unbidden, that there was no actual emergency, and there was no need to evacuate, or perform any sort of action at all. For all we know, somebody just burned a bagel… or pulled the fire alarm (either by accident or as a stupid prank, neither of which would be unfamiliar to us. We’ve been to too many conventions that featured something like that happening). Everybody, just go back to what you were doing.
Which no one had to tell us a second time. Indeed, we had barely needed to be told the first time; we were already going forward like this anyway. But I suppose there were others who needed to be told things were okay. We’ve had a few upsets swirling around us that some people need the reassurance at this point.
***
We’d less to complain – or more positively stated, more to praise – about the transition between the hotel and the port.
We’d dawdled in our room for a little too long – for whatever reason, Daniel’s computer hadn’t figured out that we were in the Eastern time zone, so he thought we still had an hour to go before checkout – and as a result, we had a bit of a scramble for the elevators not unlike Sunday morning at the end of an anime convention. Still, we managed to get to the front desk with a few minutes to spare. I probably didn’t even need to do more than drop the keys off, but I still found myself wanting a moment of face time with the clerk, just to make sure – which, of course, proved utterly unnecessary, but hey… you never know.
Once that was out of the way, I figured we ought to head to the side entrance where we were to pick up our shuttle; they were to come on the hour, and we were an hour ahead of schedule, but there might be a chance that we could hop the earlier trip.
There was a bit of confusion as we stopped at the Royal Caribbean port, and everyone was asked to disembark. Sitting as we were (per usual) at the back of the bus, we actually never made it off before we and a few others were then told we could return to our seats, as the bus would be moving on to the Eurodam, and everything would be okay.
The ship is a little different than those we’ve been on in the past – they all are, really – and I expect I’ll go into more detail about that as we go on for the next week or so. For now, we just made a point of getting ourselves hooked up with internet access and checking out our room… which had its uniquely good points, like a bathtub for Daniel…
All things considered though – and bearing in mind the chaos we’ve been hearing about that we just missed – it’s reassuring to be here, knowing that, now that we’re here, we can enjoy ourselves. Whatever’s going on in the wider world, it’ll be okay. Maybe not perfect, but okay. And that’s all we can ask for sometimes, isn’t it?
