Shipboard
We had a cruise presenter assignment from Oct. 16th to Nov. 2nd
from Ft. Lauderdale to Santiago, Chile. We were early at the port
as usual and cooled our heels in the pleasant October morning.
Once on board, Dean took a photo of the hummingbird mural on the
port control tower.
The ship was the Zaandam, a new ship for us. In this atrium is
a full-on, working pipe organ. Unfortunately, no one played it
for a live concert. They just played a recording of its music
at 12:15 pm each day.
There were cow sculptures on the back pool deck and dolphins at
the main Lido deck pool.
There was an interesting collection of Egyptian artifacts near
the coffee bar...
...and other collections artfully displayed.
Our first cruise assignment was back in 2017: the
second half of an Inca
voyage to San Diego. We've come a long way since that first
assignment. I now have nearly 20 prepared presentations, but for
each assignment, I tweak them and make them more destination oriented.
For instance my rainforest presentation on this cruise included
a section on how important the rainforests are in the running
of the Panama Canal.
For the last few cruise assignments, we've been
showing a series of self-running slide shows that Dean put together
called The Nature of Our Travels. Now we have four 500+-slide
files. People really enjoy them and it helps to make the point
for people to open their eyes to nature as they travel. I have
also been selling my "Climate-Wise Landscaping" books.
I sold all 16 on this trip.
And several times on this trip the whole 500+-seat auditorium
was filled. People come early to see our nature photos.
On this cruise we got to meet Peggy Crane from the HAL Corporate
office, who I'd spoken to and traded emails with since 2017. She
was only on board for a few days, but we did get to spend a little
time with her for general feedback. And she attended some of my
presentations.
Here's the itinerary. This was not a usual grand voyage, but basically
a repositioning cruise as the Zaandam would be spending the winter
months (summer down there) making trips back and forth around
southern South America. The ship holds about 1200 passengers,
while some stayed onboard for the second leg over to Buenas Aires,
900 disembarked with us in Santiago. The airport was a bit overwhelmed
by such a big wad of people all flying out on the same day. More
on this later.
Love the spectacular Caribbean cloud formations.
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