Hello again!

January 17, 2023

Perhaps all the anticipation and preparation leading up to our actually leaving tired me more than I realized! In fact, both of us were dead to the world last night within seconds of our heads hitting the pillow. Even more rare for me, I didn’t get up once during the night and I even slept until daylight this morning, waking up in Ensenada, Mexico.

The sight I woke to...

a few hours later

our ship, Oceania's Insignia

Of course Ronnie was up early but even his leaving the room to go down and get coffee and do his morning stuff didn’t disturb me. After waking, I stepped out on the balcony to snap a few pics with my phone. The weather here is what I would call “jacket” cool.

Ensenada, Mexico

 

This is a port where we intended to just get off the ship for awhile and mill around. However, it poured raining both before and after the above photo was taken. It was super windy and chilly as well, so we opted to head back to the ship. 

The cruise package we chose includes 32 shore excursions. Of course we will visit many more ports than that, so we had to be somewhat selective in our choices. For example, having stopped at ports in Mexico in the past, we agreed that we didn’t want to “burn” an excursion in Mexico but rather use them in places we’ve never been or would likely never go. Even without an excursion, there are usually shops and businesses around the ports that cater to tourists. Being that this is an 180 day cruise (60 of those sea days) we will definitely want to get off the ship in every port - excursion or not.

We also wanted to use our excursions where we couldn’t or wouldn’t feel comfortable exploring on our own. For example, some cities on our itinerary are modern and have hop on/hop off buses so we would feel perfectly safe sightseeing on our own. Using the same reasoning, we reserved excursions where we would feel less comfortable outside the safety of a group. *As a side note, if a ship sponsored excursion is running late, the ship will not sail until all passengers are back on board. However, with a non-ship sponsored excursion, if you are delayed and fail to make it back to the ship by boarding time they can and will sail without you! So this is a cruise line’s incentive for passengers to purchase their excursions through the ship, even though they are almost always going to cost more.

Each evening when our room gets serviced, our cabin steward leaves a Currents magazine for the following day. It’s like a mini-newspaper with the day’s date, information about the port, weather, activities on board, etc. If you know me, you know that I take tons of pictures when I travel. But then when I start to organize them, sometimes I can’t remember where we were, what it was, etc. This morning I had the bright idea of snapping a picture of the front of the Currents paper before I start clicking away for the day. So by the end of the trip, I’ll know where certain photos were taken. So yay! The ship also provides a mini-newspaper “USA Times” with the day’s top news stories at a glance. Of course the TV in our room carries a variety of news stations as well. But Currents is a good way to stay informed of what’s going on in the world outside of this ship and will also serve as a handy marker among what will end up being thousands of photos. 

By the way, did I mention that the ship has 24 hour room service and free laundry service? I’m still loving the idea of no cooking and no laundry for 6 months - woohoo!!