Packing day. Yuck. Four suitcases, one garment bag. There’d be little time to do it unless I wanted to spend all of the last night taking care of it. I woke up, Neesh was tooling around the ship somewhere, and I got right going, starting with all the souvenirs and gifts. Thankfully(?), that was only about half a suitcase. It took about 4 hours, off and on, but I got it done after some prodding for Neesh to pick out what clothes she wanted. My goal was to minimize what went in the large duffle I had brought for extra space and that I’d have to carry off. Meeting that goal was looking marginal due to a bottle of liquor I’d have to carry as well as a billion hangers that were taking up a lot of space.
Another order of business was to figure out the extra tips to leave. Tipping is very personal to us. Neesh moonlighted as a cocktail waitress when she was raising 3 kids herself, and her son Corey is a bartender. We know how hard these folks work, usually getting a lot of crap or lousy tips in the process. So we started a few years ago just leaving an extra dollar with every round on top of the included 15%. The bartenders and waiters have been clearly touched by this. In addition, we always leave our favorites a chunky tip at the very end, telling them how much we appreciate them particularly. Also, our cabin stewards were excellent, so we had to leave them something too.
Today was the grand buffet for lunch out by the pool, so I took a break and we went up to see what’s what. Oh yeah, it was grand. The entire pool was surrounded by tables and tables of food. Suckling pig, grilled lobster tail (yummy!) and other grilled goodies, shrimp, desserts, stir fry, etc. etc.
The self-proclaimed Lobster Man
Piggy all dressed up for lunch
Man, Holland America knows how to do food.
I finished what packing I could and shoved what I could under the bed. With effort. We did the usual stuff, stopping in at The Mix to see Glen Pearson play the guitar. He had played us some of his CD, and it sounded excellent even through his smart phone, so I told him to bring one by tomorrow. He’s a great, funny guy, full of energy and a wit similar to mine.
Hit the sack now really just wanting to be home, but we have a stop in Bar Harbor tomorrow. First things first!
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