Monday, September 12, 2016
Last night we gained another hour. That always makes a
restful night’s sleep. Clay went to the gym around 6am and I slept until almost
7am. We went to Lido for breakfast. We went to Palm Court for me to be there
for 9am Gentle Yoga. We saw an NCL ship heading north this morning. Today was
the final Gentle Yoga class. On the 10am morning of Newport there will be a
final combined yoga class. I don’t know if I’ll make that so this may have been
the end for me. I went to final Chair Yoga at 10:15am. Clay went to the
Captain’s Q&A at 11am and I watched on TV from the cabin. I was happy to
hear John Stoll is considering the North East Passage! I suspect he was talking
about doing it with the new polar-rated expedition yacht they have recently
purchased. It may be too far out for me, but I can hope. 2017 is a repeat of
this sailing on Serenity and 2018 they plan to do it with the new expedition
yacht. So, I wouldn’t expect the North East Passage could be a possibility
before 2018. It was interesting that they started planning for this when NYK (a
Japanese company) owned Crystal and it got more feasible when Genting (a
Chinese company) who are less fiscally conservative bought Crystal. Obviously,
we consider this effort by Crystal a huge success. I hope that the majority, or
everyone, onboard feels the same way.
We came out of the Cabot Strait about 7am and it got
rockier. We are sailing along the coast of Nova Scotia and passed by Sydney and
Halifax. The Captain said he didn’t want to visit those ports in order to get
as far south and to fuel and supplies in reliable and affordable ports ASAP so
we are sailing through and by the Canadian Maritimes without any stops. We’ve
probably been to all of these ports anyway including ports like Corner Brook
which passed yesterday so we’re fine with it but they are nice ports and would
be a great contrast with the far Northern communities we visited earlier.
John Stoll just told us to expect a gala greeting when we
reach the Statue of Liberty in NY harbor! It sounds like they are pulling out
all the stops and expect NBC helicopter news coverage.
At noon, the captain made his final noon announcement. We
had American Specialties at Lido buffet for lunch. We could just see Whitehead
Island off Nova Scotia on the starboard side. When we got back to the cabin, we
found every cabin had an envelope outside. In the category of best laid plans
and all, the letter informed us that we were assigned to Group 4 for US Customs
and Immigration clearance tomorrow starting at 9:30am. Clay went down and asked
if we could be in the first group and the guy told him the groups were just
suggestions to keep everyone from trying to be first in line, but to come as
early as we felt we needed to get ashore on time. This has cluster cuss written
all over it. Crystal has done an exemplary job thus far in efficiency in
getting people on and off the ship so I guess we’ll see what happens. This is
the only port where we booked an independent tour. We booked an 11am departure
on Oli’s Trolley Acadia National Park tour. Unfortunately, we’ve been informed
we must check in for it no later than 10:30am and they advise to allow 30
minutes to tender ashore. We’ll just cross our fingers and hope everything
works out. Otherwise we’ll have wasted our money on this one. I am going to
reply to their email reminder to let them know what our circumstances are and
maybe they’ll just let us board at 11am and check us in then and there. We’ll
see. We thought we were allowing a couple of hours when we booked thinking we
anchored at 9am and not considering the US Immigration delays. This could go
either way. Good news. Oli’s Trolleys let us move our booking to 1pm. We will have
plenty of time to get there now.
Today was a pretty lazy last sea day. It was close to 70F
today and the sun shone all day. Now if they’d just clean the windows it would
be a clear day all around. About 5:30pm as we passed Halifax we saw Canadian
Naval ships sailing nearby. That was interesting. Dinner at Prego was good.
Tomorrow we’ll be back in the USA.
