Valentine’s Day 2024.  Happy Valentine’s Day to those that celebrate it. I don’t.  I don’t celebrate the days of many Christian martyrs, come to that!

Puerto Limon, Costa Rica. Been here, done that. Didn’t get off. I think we’ve just been overdoing it and our systems are rebelling.  So we both needed a Slow Day.

As I sit and type this after dinner (roast lamb and mint sauce), I am handed my second rose of the evening.  The first, a full long-stemmed red rose from my cabin steward; the second, a shorter one from one of the drinks waiters! I do better on board for flowers than I ever have done at home!

Update on the Canal: we went through the older, smaller locks. Of course we did. Someone misunderstood the talk given beforehand!  We watched it on the telly last night – both parts. He clearly is not from an engineering background – or a speaking one, come to that. He showed us every graph from the three or four different feasibility studies and economic justification plans! He barely touched on the pioneering engineering solutions they created to solve the various issues they faced.  Which is probably what most of the audience were interested in. People don’t travel halfway around the world to look at the graphs of expected usage vs. capacity. They want to see the structures and mechanics of building new locks in the middle of a working canal. But, hey, I’m sure he was cheap, so P&O can rest easy. 

We have very strict BOB times, as we have a time slot allocated by the ports.  Think about an aeroplane takeoff slot.  We have them too, but ours are less flexible because we need the tide to be right! MANY times on this cruise, we have left late – on two occasions, we were still stationary at 10pm, having been due to depart at 6. This is extremely exasperating, because we rush to get back on time, and then sit and stare at all the stuff we could have still been doing for two or three hours.  Often we could have eaten ashore, somewhere local, which is usually fun.  We never get an explanation or apology, but it’s usually a medical issue, whereby the ship and the shore are arguing the toss about whether or not a person can be disembarked at this location – negotiating with their insurers, finding their stuff and packing it up, locating their passports, their spouses, doing the necessary offloading paperwork, hospital admission forms, ambulances, etc.  It’s a very slow process. 

But today, it wasn’t us that was late leaving, for a change. It was the Saga Ruby Princess that was moored next to us.  They were probably due to leave at about 5pm. But when I got into the cabin, Dad was counting, and he was up to 67.  It seems that several of their excursion buses had not returned, and he was counting passengers still strolling down the pier to get back on board.  There were a LOT of officers on the quayside, looking at their watches and glaring down the pier towards the land.  We sat there and watched what we thought were the last stragglers.  But the final count was somewhere in the region of 196.  They had got to cast off time with 200 passengers unaccounted for! THAT is the stuff of nightmares for a cruise captain and crew!  They eventually set off well after 6pm, and, when we’d finished laughing our heads off, we went to dinner, just after we, too, set sail.

Two sea days to come. Bliss.

I am now very confused as regards the time and date. Happy Birthday, Angie and Aicha! I don’t know if I’m late or early or what. But have a nice day!