Day 2
Barbados

DAY 2: BARBADOS: Docked uneventfully at 7:00 a.m. Seas flat, partly cloudy. We're docked by a rust-bucket ship, the Freewinds. Airtours' Carousel , formerly RCCL's Nordic Prince, now sadly sans Viking Crown Lounge (RCCL insisted it be removed when they sold it) enters port an hour after us. I'm exiled to the verandah while my wife sleeps. Shuttle busses circle the quay, at $1.00 a head to take us into Bridgetown, about a mile to the shopping district. We have no tours planned, only the promise of a free set of diamond stud earrings just to visit the newly opened Diamonds International shop. We'll see.

After a breakfast in the dining room (I think I could eat smoked salmon for breakfast every day) we rode the shuttle bus into Georgetown for some shopping. The free diamond stud earrings turn out to be as expected, minuscule chips and the store was overpriced. Cave-Shepard's is a true department store, three stories with many name lines of clothing, cosmetic

s, a full book store, liquor store, a cigar shop, etc. Unusual for the Caribbean, most of the customers (>90%) are Bajans (natives of Barbados.) It reminded us of a department store of our childhood, kind of shopworn but lots of attentive, courteous service. A stop at the ubiquitous Little Switzerland, to add a piece to my wife's Baccarat nativity set (a wise man, for the minutia minded.)

Lunch in the dining room: very acceptable buffalo mozzarella with tomato salad, rockfish filet (taste and consistency of monkfish) and a macadamia Bavarian creme and a slab of bing cherry sponge cake for my wife. Highly suspect and subjective judging of the afternoon trivia contest prevented a consecutive triumph, but we had already won the proffered prizes in a previous match. Sniff!

Dinner in the Florentine was English night. (menu) Smoked salmon (must have been Scottish) for me; the rest teased their palates with a mint-sauced pineapple fan. Soup for all was a cold peach-apple cream puree with a dash of rum. Pasta course was a fresh pesto pasta that Amy had as an entree. The rest of us had prime rib - excellent considering the number served; Patsy had roast leg of pork (much overlooked and infinitely better than the often dry loin), Matt had baked spring chicken and I had sauteed ocean perch with an interesting touch - instead of a batter or breading, there was a wafer thin omelette coating. As fresh as it tasted, I should have ordered the Dover sole, but sole just doesn't stand up to freezing. You don't suppose the foods loaded in Barbados included fresh fish. Oh well, next cruise I'll have the sole.

We actually went to a show, "PIRATES - Hi-jinx on The High Seas." It's hard to take these productions seriously if you've ever seen any live theater outside of amateur productions, so we didn't. We did feel that the principals, Siri Pursey (Lady Kate) and Wayne Morton (The Pirate King) had relatives in the P & O hierarchy, as the secondary players were a bit more well-received. Both had fairly adequate voices (hers tended to wander) but both had the stage presence and dancing ability of well-intentioned sheep. The dancers were good, the Shen Yang Acrobats did little but hang from yardarms and sail rigging and grin; the orchestra was superb (but partly canned); a male/female gymnastic dance duo was the hit of the show, performing a shucked-down pas-de-deux that was at the upper range of PG 13. Production values and staging were outstanding; all did very well considering the motion of the ocean.

This is probably a very dry review for those wanting information on lounges, bars and late-night goings on; none of us drinks and at least the older set is abed fairly early. I'll see if any of the kids did any late night stuff and add it on.

Continue on to Section 4; Day 3, St. Lucia

Embarkation;  At Sea;   Barbados;  St. Lucia; Martinique;  St. Martin;
St. Thomas;  Disembarkation