HAPPY NEW WEEK!
I hope everyone has a joyful week. The Brood X cicadas were screaming today on my patch. About a week ago, I noticed some big holes at the bottom of my trees. Various critters dig holes in my yard, so I didn't think much about it. Since then, I've seen articles about some of last year's Brood X cicadas popping up this year. Apparently, some of the bugs, called "stragglers," decided to sleep in, and they're appearing this year instead of last year. In most cases, it's because our soil didn't warm up to the required 64 degrees Fahrenheit until too late to wake them up in 2021. So, some of the noisy screechers decided to hit their snooze alarm and climb out this year instead!
Onwards with my descriptions. (My OH has been out all day today at golf so I've been lazy, & had some chance to catch up on things)
The next morning we awoke to see that we were pulling into our 1st port of call: Belfast. We did not rush, and had a leisurely breakfast as we thought we were going to be there all day. We were told by announcement from the Captain that over 230 people were going to join the ship there. The night before, a fellow passenger had told us that the ship was less than half full! This explained our upgrade!
Then the captain said that the gangway would be closed by 12 noon, and we would be leaving half an hour later! It was already gone 10.30am. We were so disappointed, as my OH had wanted to visit the Titanic Exhibition. We hadn't booked an organised trip to it as it cost an eye watering £129 each. I had Googled it, & it only cost £25 each to enter the building. So we walked off the ship & tried to find a bus - there was a shuttle laid on, which took us straight into the centre of the city. On the way we saw the Exhibition building in the distance, and the huge cranes named Sampson and Goliath from the days of prosperity in the region. We were set down outside the Belfast City Hall, so decided to walk around the area. It was dry & bright.
You can't see them here, but its surrounded by trees. We examined the various memorials around it, mostly for those soldiers lost. One was for the victims of the Titanic disaster.
An elegant memorial to those lost, I now forget which war it was, but I always find it sad that they would have been young men. The birds were chirping madly in the trees, and there was not such a noise of traffic as usual in a city, as all the buses are electric.
There were shops nearby, but I decided not to inflict them on my OH, who hates shopping.
A side wing of the City Hall.
Another interesting bit of architecture, opposite. We then jumped back on the next shuttle bus so as not to miss the boat!
That afternoon we had another announcement from the Captain - we were sailing up the Scottish coast, and the weather forecast was Force 8 gales for some time. At first, it wasn't too bad, but it soon got much worse. We decided we couldn't face eating. We were told later that there were few people in the dining rooms. In the night, we were tossed around and had nothing but water to drink. They call it pitching and rolling, as the ship was rocking from side to side and up and down at the same time . My OH was violently sick. In the early hours I was a little sick, and we both laid on our beds and prayed for an end to it. If they had announced "Abandon ship, go to the lifeboats" we would probably not have moved, and just waited to die! We were so wretched. The next morning my OH went to breakfast but I had nothing. It was supposed to be A Day at Sea that day and we had earmarked it as a day to explore the ship. The ship calmed a bit and was less grim, eventually. But we just rested and dozed until late afternoon. We then went to an evening meal but ate little.
Rusty- we had precisely three quarters of an hour in the middle of Belfast. We sat on a bench for ten minutes of it. My legs were aching from the large amount of walking we'd done the previous day. It was a long walk into the nearby Central Arena from the car park, where we had to wait to take a covid test before boarding. Then we walked the full length of the ship, outside it, to the gangway, only to find that although the lifts took us right up to our deck, our cabin was, you've guessed it, the full length of the ship in the other direction. Ha!
We asked about stabilisers and there were some, apparently, but not as good as on the recently built ships. This ship had been built in 1997, and recently been refurbished. I worked out that our wonderful cabin was in fact one of the worst places to be in a stormy sea. Normally we ask for a central cabin if possible, as the front and rear ones are more uncomfortable. Anyway, eventually things calmed down on the sea as we sailed towards Norway, and the Captain promised us that once in the Fjords, it would be a flat sea. And so it was, thank goodness.
After all that waffle, I thought that some of you might like to see some lovely knitted tributes to Her Majesty which have been put online recently. They're so clever.