Now that I have been home for six days it’s time to catch up a bit. I figured I would spend some time chatting a bit about our vacation and travel philosophy, or rather why we do certain things that most people do but ignore other things. It makes sense to chat about this now as the next day after Puerto Madryn was a sea day.
We woke up on January 27 to fair seas and warm air – warm enough to sit in the sun but maybe not quite lay there as if you are at a beach. As we had had a bit of sun in Puerto Madryn this was fine with us anyway. And one of the things I enjoy most about cruising is watching the sea change as the weather changes. The nice thing about this north to south and then south back north again cruise is the weather, temperature, and sea conditions changed noticeably day to day.
Our philosophy when on vacation is to start the day early, often with the sun, and not stay out too late. This is mostly because we both like to get some fitness or reading in early in the morning before we go out and do things. We happened upon this approach during the covid shutdowns and have essentially stuck with them. So, January 27 was typical of this, but to a degree we made an exception – we went to the ship’s show that evening.
Oosterdam’s main stage production was a show called Move. As one of my fellow cruise passengers described it the only thread holding the story together was dancing. Fortunately these productions on ship only last 45 minutes. By the time you’re no longer impressed by the dancing and looking for something more substantial it’s time to get up and go to bed – or go to the casino.
Early in the cruise it felt like we would frequently have dinner every evening and then sit through a band set for forty-five minutes. Later in the cruise it felt like instead we would have dinner and then play in the casino a bit. We do typically call it a night before the ship does, but we have dinner later than most on the ship do – starting at 7:30pm – so our evenings are short.
Wait, we made a second exception. I think this was the night we stayed late at the casino – past 11pm. Or that may have been the night before as we were leaving Puerto Madryn.
Sea days are important on a cruise. It’s the down time you take to take a nap, organize your baggage to go home several days later, figure out how port transfers are going to work, or spend a couple hours walking in circles on the Promenade Deck working off the steak you ate the night before. It’s also good down time for wandering around the ship taking photographs of all of the artwork, to decide if you’re ever going to do something with them.
We always found the lady in the red dress as a way to find our cabin door. Turn towards the lady, walk left, and then walk right to the end.
When we have a sea day we wake up early (6:30 or 7am), have a sit-down breakfast, read or go to the treadmill or otherwise exercise (this is where I chose the promenade rather than the treadmill), skip lunch, play a board game (we played Carcassonne with my mother and her friend four times during this cruise), get organized (laundry, throwing out the detritus of paperwork collecting on the desk in the cabin), and attend a fancy dinner if available.
January 27 was also our final dressy night. We dressed in our finest and even had pictures taken.
We also learned that night that our waiter and assistant waiter were going home and we only had one more dinner with them. We’ve gotten to know them fairly well over the course of three weeks; we actually found our waiter better at organizing different cuisine for dietary preferences elsewhere in the ship than the Neptune Lounge concierge was.
There really was not much else to this day. Our last sea day disappeared before we even knew it. The next four days – five actually – would be spent relatively flat out.
