Saturday 25 August 2007. We are joining the cruise ship Island Star for their Mediterranean Explorer cruise. Eagle-eyed readers will perhaps spot that we did this exact same cruise in 2006. Ah yes - but this time we'll do different excursions!
We drove off to Manchester Airport and left the hire car (as mine was having dents removed) and Fran suggested checking in the bags before dropping the key off at the hire desk. So we parked in the hire car drop off place and checked our luggage and ourselves on the plane and we then found that the hire car desk was back outside in the car park instead of in the check-in area... Warning bells rang, but thankfully only in my head. "You realise we've just checked two suitcases onto an aeroplane and now we are walking back to the car park?" I said, picturing large uniformed people with guns wondering why we were taking this course of action. Either thankfully or worryingly the security didn't notice this...
Skip forward to Palma, Majorca. We got a coach from the airport to the ship and checked into our cabin on Deck 6 without any worries that we might decide to to anything faintly suspicious on the dockside. Then it was out onto the Pool Deck to grab something to eat and have a look at Palma.
We spent the rest of the afternoon lazing about, watching boat sail in and out of the harbour and watching planes flying down the mountain range and into the airport, adding to the compliment of passengers aboard the Island Star. Flights were delayed. Therefore so were we. We ate in the Beachcomber Restaurant which was the self-service eatery onboard. It was starting to go dark once we got back to the open deck.
The magnificent cathedral is way across the bay, but I was playing with my telephoto lens, resting the camera on top of my camera bag on the ship's rail to steady it for a quite long exposure.
The drool-worthy yacht apparently belonged to the King of Spain. We were sitting at the blunt end of the ship or "aft" as the ship's officers prefer to call it. There's a grill restaurant there and also people can take out meals from the main Beachcomber Restaurant, to sit and eat al fresco on the deck. This is our only glimpse of a port after dark. All other nights during the holiday we will be at sea before it goes dark.
Back on the main Pool Deck they were starting to think about their Welcome Aboard Party. We decided we'd have a listen to the band and join in the fun!
By the time we joined the party there was already a full compliment so we stood by the rail on the upper deck above the pool and along with a few score of others, swayed, danced, and waved from there! The band were quite good but the blokes doing the mixing didn't quite understand that voices were supposed to be heard over the instruments and the guitarist may as well have packed up and gone home. He may have been a bit uncertain of his prowess - when there was any sort of guitar solo it was played by the bass player, high up on the neck of his 5-string bass. Once this was done with and one or two people had fallen over each other, we were divided into two teams - port and starboard - and had a singing contest to see if starboard (that's us!) could remember more words to 1970s hits than the port side could remember to 1980s hits! By now we were at sea and the terrible caterwauling didn't disturb any sensitive Spanish ears... After YMCA we gave up and staggered down to our cabin... I mean... how do you top that???
