Bermuda NCL Spirit Notes
Sunday, May 17th
Sunday morning dawned with motion in the ship still - not enough to bother me, but I could see how some people might mind some of the movements. It wasn't that long before we were able to see Bermuda out the window. There had been a time change overnight - we were now on "Bermuda time" which was one hour ahead of Boston Time. It was 8:30 on the old clocks but we changed them to be 9:30 and headed up to Raffles. It was MOBBED there with all the tables completely full. We went out onto the back open area of the deck. Even the tables here were full. We had to walk down a level to find open tables by the ping pong tables, overlooking the kid's slide area. Bob had warned me that the premade scrambled eggs were watery (a typical problem anywhere) and they were. I didn't feel like waiting in the custom-made-eggs line, though.
We were back in the room about 10am. The ship was pretty much docked by now, but they were handling all the customs activities. Long lines began forming at the stairwells. We were already on the 4th floor and the ship happened to dock with the port side against the dock so we were on the "correct side" in terms of just walking down our hallway to get to the gangplank. At 11 they announced the doors were ready to open but it was a while before the lines got through. The actual process was very easy. You just present your card, have it swiped, and walk off the ship. Voila! There's a building at the bottom that has visitor information and such, and then you take a left and walk down the dock to the taxi / bus / shuttle area. They have a free train-like shuttle that does a loop around the little town. Really it took us only 10 minutes to walk from the ship to the far end of the town. There are 2 pubs, a few small shops, a tiny movie theater, a bank, and at the far end is the snorkle park, the dolphin swim and the glassblowing location.
We were off very quickly and walked straight towards the beach so there was pretty much nobody there at all when we got there. It was very quiet, rather small, shallow at the front, perfect for kids. It did get interesting further out, great for snorkeling. There were a few pieces of glass in the rock area, so be careful if you go in that directon. They had a "food service" building there with typical tourist prices and items - hot dogs, sodas etc. We walked all around town, including down the other half of the dock which was empty right now. We saw a pair of cool wading birds and some sparrows. Then it was back onto the ship.
To reboard first you go through the visitor center building, where they want your key card and a photo ID. We took our passports, and showed those. Now up the gangplank onto the ship. We had to swipe our cards to get on, and then go through a security / metal detector.
Just as we were getting on we met Bill and Sarah (and Liam) who were just coming back from getting some food into them. They were preparing to head on out and explore! We told them we were going to have some lunch and then we'd be back out to meet up with them.
Bob and I are journalists so we had access to eat at Cagney's at lunchtime, and decided to give that a try. We met up with a couple we'd seen at a number of other events, Bruce and his wife from Rhode Island. I had a great salad with honey dressing. Then I ordered the tuna with sesame, which is normally a sandwich, but I had it without the bun. I had it with "seasonal vegetables" - broccoli, cauliflower and carrots. It was delicious that way. I was getting chilly and had some chamomile tea, Bob had the banana pie. He found it good tasting, with fresh bananas, not rich.
Our plan was to head right out to go snorkeling, but I was worried about my camera's memory card filling up so we stopped by the room to offload all the photos and clear off the card. Unfortunately, Bob promptly fell asleep while I was in the process of doing that. So now it was 3:07 and I spent the time typing up my notes until this moment. I was supposed to do an internet chat tonight at 9pm for BellaOnline's MUSED literary magazine, but the internet connections here are DOG slow and I thought there was no way I'd manage to get a chat to run properly. I decided to head upstairs to the lobby and connect to sent an email out to my BellaOnline editors letting them know the chat was postponed until I was back on land.
...
When I got back to the room, Bob said he was ready to head out snorkeling. It took us about a half hour to track down all our gear, get changed into our swimsuits and cover gear, get the underwater camera casing set up for the camera and so on. It was about 4 when we headed out again. The walk over to the beach was, again, quite short and relaxing. We got there expecting there to be tons of people - but it was actually very quiet! There were only a few people on the beach and they'd already deflated the water slide. We laid out our ship towel (very noticeable with giant blue and white stripes, we'd seen a number of them around on the island). We put our water shoes and other items on it. Note - we did see shards of glass occasionally on the beach (very sad) so wearing water shoes is a good idea. We put on our mask, snorkel and fins and were ready!
I've snorkeled a few times, but I am very much a newbie at this. My fins caught in the sand as I headed towards the water. I got about three steps into the water before I fell back onto my butt! Nonplussed, I inched my way into the water on my butt and once I was in about 3' I was able to flip over and start out. Bob soon joined me. We stayed in the "beach" area. There's a yellow pole at the end of the rocky breaker on the left side of the beach and we stayed within that area. There is coral and a cannon down there, a number of sea cucumbers, green frondy plants and yes, fish! We had a ton of fun. Just about at the yellow pole area the waves started to get rougher so I didn't want to go past that. Still, we had a lot of fun swimming around and taking a ton of photos. I hav a Sony cyber-shot camera and we'd bought a special plastic housing that goes on it so you can push the buttons and such through the plastic water-tight case. It worked very well!
Finally I was worn down and we headed back in. As an experiment I took off my fins and tried to swim - and I didn't move an inch! So I highly recommend if you're going to snorkel that you bring fins. I was going to just bring masks and snorkels but the fins are really helpful. I would definitely of course recommend having a mask and snorkel - the waves were definitely noticeable even in that beach area. Snorkels help with breathing :)
So we rinsed off the sand, headed back to the ship and then both took showers to get the salt off of everything. That took a while! After we'd pulled out the "string clothes line" in the shower and gotten everything hung up, it was time to think about dinner. We left a note on our white-board door that we were going to go investigate either the Garden room menu or sushi. The Garden room had a nice menu and only a 15 minute wait, so I got in line while Bob went down to get a bottle of wine (Conundrum) from the room and to let Bill and Sarah know. Before he got back up, I was led to a table. The Garden room looks like a tiny room from the entry way but it's really rather big! It's in a big letter "U" so each part of it seems relatively small - not tiny, but not gargantuan like some cruise ship main dining rooms. They put me in the far back corner and it took Bob a while to find me again. I had salmon, they brought over an ice bucket to chill the Conundrum down and it was very tasty with the meal. I folded a number of cranes during dinner and various waiters and waitresses came by to have some. It was a good meal with good service although at times the waiter would be really friendly with another table and take a while to get to us :).
When we were leaving, Bill came running after us - it turns out they were in there two and thought we'd gone elsewhere because they couldn't find us! The multi-part dining room does have its downsides. We went to check if the Celtics final game was on anywhere. Henry's Pub was running a trivia contest, but the Shanghai bar looked promising. Jenn and Chuck were in there with their baby, so we talked for a few minutes, and then the tyke began to wake up so they headed downstairs with their oysters. I left Bob there to go find Bill and Sarah to ask what they'd like to do. It turns out Sarah wanted to see the Second City comedy act (it was nearly 9:30) and Bill wanted to see the game. Since the game is easier to pop in and out of, he took Liam for this portion while Sarah and I headed to the theater.
Second City was very much like Whose Line is it Anyway. Someone in the audience would shout out a title and they'd have to put together a story based on that, with different people adding on different parts. They did "start a broadway song" games, they did a number of cute skits about cruising activities and Boston driving. We had a good time. It ended about 10:30 and we headed over to the sports bar. The Celtics weren't doing well, but the guys wanted to see the rest of the game, so Sarah and I took Liam and headed up to the Galaxy of the Stars where they were having a 70s disco party. Liam loved the music! He was dancing around and the waiter brought him an ice with a straw to sip on. He had a lot of fun until he needed a diaper change. We brought him down to the room and I brought in my iPod with Classic Disney on it, and while Sarah went up to walk around the ship I lulled him to sleep with Beauty and the Beast. Soon he was out like a light.
Eventually Sarah and Bill came back, and I headed in to sleep! Bob had an early morning wake-up call set for 6am the following morning. We have two battery-powered travel alarm clocks with us - the room has a clock on its phone, but no "regular" clock in the room. We also left the curtains wide open so the sun would wake us up.
Thoughts for Sunday -
I'm writing this part on Monday so I'm trying to remember back. The town was much easier to walk around than I thought it would be. When we took the Majesty to St. Georges it was a fair hike to get to the beach, up and over a hill, past a golf course. Here it was an easy straight line along the edge of town to get there, under 10 minutes. Having the cabin on the 4th floor makes it super easy to just walk down the hall and get off the ship. It's a lovely little town, but very quiet. Two pubs, a few little shops and that's it. I wonder if in a few years there will be a lot more shops and such, with the cruise ships being right there.
As much as I enjoyed snorkeling near St Georges last time, I *loved* snorkeling here. The water is much deeper in the snorkeling part, so you're looking down at coral and fish and waving plants. In fact I was nervous that it seemed fairly deep and if the waves shut my snorkel I'd be in trouble. It took me a little while to feel comfortable with that. I was also worried when first seeing the size of the beach that it'd be jam packed with people, but the two times we went it was really quiet. I'm sure part of that is that we're the only ship here, and that it will be much more crowded on Mon and Tue when two ships of people are there.
The Garden room was lovely, although a strange mix of dress. Some people had jeans, some very nice outfits, some guys had on sports jerseys and we did see a few pairs of long shorts on men even though they were supposed to be not allowed.
The ship is very clean, and the staff very friendly and helpful. The dockyards people are also extremely helpful, pointing you towards the beach, offering advice and cheery greetings. I did find glass and metal bottle caps in the beach area which I picked up and threw into the trash but I definitely recommend wearing beach shoes and not going barefoot. Also, man o wars are stinging jellyfish so while I personally only saw one dead one on the beach, that would be something for everyone to be aware of and to steer clear of.
NCL Spirit Photos from Sunday - 277 in total
NCL Spirit Photos - no captions, all on one page
NCL Spirit Photos - from Bob's camera - no captions, all on one page
Bermuda NCL Spirit Travelogue