kochleffel

Paddington Bear tweeted, “Thank you, Ma’am, for everything,” the same words he said at the end of a video they made for the Platinum Jubilee. Here's the video:

I'm going to wait a bit on a new booster: partly because I received #4 at the end of September and there is some reason to think that any booster will be less effective if it's too soon after the last one, and partly because my next travel isn't until the end of January.

My first job was as a teacher assistant in adult basic education, and I am definitely in favor of literacy. Also in favor of date-nut bread, for which I have a family recipe. And of ampersands, although I think they are overused. I do typesetting and layout, and occasionally in decorative work I can use a typeface in which the italic ampersand is ornate, and switch to it if the situation allows. Remember that my flight from Amsterdam was full of passengers who seemed to be ill? On Tuesday I had an acupuncture appointment and tested before it: negative. Later that day I started to feel ill myself, but more like the onset of a cold. I started taking echinacea and zinc plus extra vitamin C, and rested yesterday, and this morning I feel OK. On my last cruise I had RCI's coffee card, so I was frequently at the Café Promenade for an Americano, although RCI's ordinary coffee isn't as bad as NCL's. My next cruise is on NCL and I am considering cancelling it, not because of the coffee but because there will be some sort of vlogger's convention aboard and it sounds as if the ship will be full of vloggers and their groupies, and also because the flight arrangements have been changed and now include a connection at JFK, although that could possibly be changed.

Friends of mine were on the Norwegian Epic a bit before that on an itinerary that started and was supposed to end at San Juan, but while they were at sea, Puerto Rico barred cruise ships and they disembarked at Port Canaveral. I advised them in email to rebook their flights as soon as they knew where they would disembark, but they didn't; they thought that NCL would arrange it. They are still talking about the long wait and horrible routing to fly home.

I've cruised once from Port Canaveral. Here's where I stayed the night before in Cocoa Beach.

Last week on the Voyager OTS (RCI), a waiter brought coffee within seconds after I was seated. Otherwise, breakfast wasn't a success. I sent one MDR order back; two room-service orders were wrong; and one morning a waiter told me that it would take 20 minutes to make an omelet. The record, however, remains with the Nieuw Amsterdam MDR in 2020, when more than an hour after we ordered, no food had arrived. At that point I left for the M&G. NCL's breakfast service has been better, but their coffee is terrible.

Thank you! Alas, in the week after a cruise I usually don't drink at all, having imbibed rather freely during the cruise. But I may conclude that an exception is warranted.

When it comes to fighting, it’s often better to procrastinate. Mrs. Roosevelt is right—my work engenders frequent worry about what people will think and it’s always pointless. I pass on the menu, cocktail, and wine suggestions, but would like to visit Skye. I got home just before midnight on Sunday, at which point I had been awake for 24 hours. I fed the Junior Cat, went to bed, and slept for ten hours. Today I woke up at 4:00 a.m.

In DTW airport. From all the coughing, sniffling, sneezing, and wheezing on the flight from AMS, I suspect that half the passengers were ill, some seriously ill. I tried to stay masked but was too hungry not to eat.

At CPH airport waiting for the gate to be posted.

Our guide in Aarhus today ventured into a delicate topic today when she tried to explain why no homeless people or beggars are seen on the streets there—except Greenlanders, who are Inuit. Her explanation was that police roust everyone else, but tolerate Greenlanders because Danes (guide was a Hungarian immigrant to Denmark) feel guilty about having introduced alcohol to Greenland. I have only been panhandled once in Denmark, in Copenhagen, not by a Greenlander. I had just left the dentist and wasn’t sympathetic.

What is an Eskimo Pie called now?

Some posts here have suggested that the shipping company might not allow liquids, but you can ask when you’re setting it up. If you have to take full sizes on the plane they’ll need to be in a checked bag. From posts in other forums, you might want to use a suitcase instead of a box, if you have an extra one, so that you can use it for purchases, unless you never shop when traveling. DISCLAIMER: I do not meet your stated requirement of having done this myself, so feel free to ignore this reply, or report it if you must.

I’m to fly home tomorrow on KLM and Delta, and the latter wants me to upload various documents to something called FlyReady. But the site won’t load, NONE of the documents is actually required for my travel, and one of them seems not even to exist. They also want me to check in online, which isn’t going to work….

At Aarhus/Århus. Visited the Moesgaard Museum and Den Gamle By. Tour bus unintentionally amusing when remembering that "buss" used to be American slang for "kiss."

Grüner Veltliner is grown where I live, and I drank plenty of it as a student in Vienna, decades ago. Varieties from that region tend to grow well in the Finger Lakes.

At Skagen in Denmark. Walked out the sand spit that separates the North Sea from the Baltic. As far as I am concerned, eels should stay where they belong, which is in rivers and the ocean. And Royal Caribbean should not label a dish "pasta with salmon" and then put shrimps, no matter how tiny, in it. And autocorrect should not change eels to feels.

Unanswerable question: why do people whose goal is to talk constantly and loudly choose a venue where there is live music to do it? And: why do people push their way into an elevator before others can exit the elevator and make room for them?

Rabbit, rabbit. I stopped myself before saying that to a server in Café Promenade— the menu there is limited and certainly doesn’t include rabbit. I particularly like ginger (red tabby) cats but don’t have one. This is the only sea day and I am sprawled on a lounger in the solarium. I have no interest in, or talent for, music trivia, which there seems to be a lot of, or in a half-price sale on t-shirts depicting ports that the itinerary doesn’t visit.

About trains: if you don't need a car at the port, regular Amtrak trains go from NYC, DC, etc., to Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami.

Yes, or 2024.

I would be interested in sailing from Port Canaveral, and have done on aNother Cruise Line. It’s convenient for me to fly into SFB.

At Kristiansand, Norway, today, and rode the Setesdal railway. Many people were complaining about the short train ride (and longer bus ride to get to it), but the description was clear about the length of the surviving part of the historic narrow-gauge line. A beautiful sunny day, although things were damp from rain overnight. I don’t have the ideal mix of clothing. Outdoors is OK, but I didn’t expect the public areas of the ship to be as frigid as they are.

Today I visited the Norsk Folkemuseet. It needs more than a day, maybe more than a week, and I barely got back to the ship in time. A question that is not specific to HAL, but applies to every cruise line in my experience, including HAL: is it typical for crew members to address a passenger as Mr. Firstname, or does it only happen because my surname is difficult?

NCL has offered this in their app for a while and I liked it, although I wouldn’t be happy if paper were discontinued. I’m on the Voyager now and I don’t think it’s offered. I’ll try not to comment on those who are ostentatiously proud of locking their phones in the safe, leaving them at home, or still using a phone where you wait for an operator to come on and ask, “Number, plee-uz.”