Saturday: July 5
Dubrovnik Croatia, Walking the Walls
We each woke up at about 6:00, but we stayed in bed until 6:15 when the alarm went off. We got our typical breakfast, and then Amy headed off. I noticed that Amy forgot her cooling damp neck cloth, so I ran that down to the theater along with a tube of sun screen.
I puttered around, got myself ready, and then went down. I got there right at the scheduled time, but I figured that we would be sitting around for 10 minutes before leaving. I took off my pack, sat down, and they called my group. It was literally that fast. I guess I got there at the perfect time.
On the way out, I ran into Russell Lee, who was seeing people out. I chatted with him for a short while. Not surprisingly, he said that some of his talks were ones that he had previously designed, and some were written just for that presentation. When he said that I would enjoy walking the wall, I couldn’t help but think about Game of Thrones, and the Night Watch walking The Wall, so I felt compelled to reply that this wall was a bit smaller than the Westeros wall.
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It was “hurry up and wait”, though. When we got to the town and met up with our guide, he directed us to a shady spot, where we waited for a bit of time. I think he was short a guest, and either we were waiting for that person, or he was maybe just checking things out.
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The guide was good, I rather liked him. We did a mini-tour of the town, where he got us tickets for the wall, and then we returned almost to where we started and went up.
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I had been thinking that we were going to get a tour of a fort, or something related to the military, but that was not the case. The old town is surrounded by a large wall, with a walkway on top. This tour was basically walking the circumference of the wall, as it gave good views of the city and the surrounding area.
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Of course, there is very little shade on top of the wall. In places, there were breezes, but in other places, not so much. I put on a terribly geeky electric fan that you wore around your neck. I figured even though it probably looked ridiculous, “any port in a storm”, or in my case, when I’m really hot. It was not unusually hot, but apparently it is unusually humid. When I first got on the pier, I took out my SLR and got a picture. It seemed a bit blurry, but after I took the picture, I realized that my camera’s filter was completely fogged over.
I enjoyed the tour quite a bit, but I wanted to get back to the boat in time to eat something, and then return for the afternoon excursion. About 3/4 of the way through the tour, he said that we could continue, or we could bail. I was concerned about the time, so I left the tour and did a quick walk along the remaining portion of the wall (much faster than the group’s pace), came down, and caught the tender back to the boat.
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I figured that I had a half hour to grab some food, get reorganized, and leave to go back on shore. On the boat, I doubled checked the time. I found that I had screwed up. I didn’t have a 30 minutes to scarf down some food. I had 90 minutes to do so. I was an hour off. I could have stayed with the tour for significantly longer or perhaps to the end. It was too late at that point, however.
I got back on the ship, got to lunch just as they were opening, had lunch, and now I’m typing this up.
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I got reorganized, took the tender back, met up with Amy, and joined the afternoon tour, and ... waited. I don’t know if people for our tour missed the tender and we had to wait for the next tender, or whether they were in town but slow getting there, but we waited about 10-15 minutes and then finally got going.
We wandered through the town as the guide talked about the buildings, history, and Game of Thrones. It was interesting enough, and most of the guide said agreed with the first guide. At one point, he took us out of the far side (from the port) of the walled city and took us down to “Blackwater Bay” (from Game of Thrones). It was fairly hot, but mostly rather humid. Our only real complaint was that our guide went on rather long. Several times, he seemed about to end the tour, but then he would go on to one more thing. We were literally through one opening from the port. He was talking about whether he should end it here or show us where the pier was. Amy and I thanked him, handed him a tip, and then left skid marks.
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It turns out that we both had the same idea--we both wanted to get some ice cream before returning. I was going to ask our guide, but Amy already had a place picked out. We went there, got a scoop in a cup for each of us, then found a shady spot to eat it. The tender left while we were eating, so we had to wait for the next one.
Amy thought that our tender was coming in, so she started down the pier, and I followed. She started nibbling at some cookies and such, not realizing that this was for a different ship and not Viking. The tender that had been coming in was from the other ship, so we had to wait maybe 5 minutes before our tender came in.
I had checked on my way out after lunch, and in round numbers, each boat could seat roughly 200 with another 50 standing. So the four big boats could, in theory, evacuate all of the passengers. Then there were two smaller boats that presumably could hold all of the crew. It doesn’t seem reasonable, but it looks like in the event of a sinking at sea, the six lifeboats would be enough for everyone.
Once we got back on board, I went forward to take some pictures. It struck me that on the ocean cruise, there is almost always gobs of food on board. On my way to the bow to take the pictures, I passed a spread of several kinds of cakes, meat, cheese, and other stuff.
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I went back to the room, took a shower, and changed into clean clothes. We missed the port talk, but we went down for the Explorer’s Club, i.e. people who have sailed with Viking before. It turns out, as I expected, to be roughly half the ship.
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The lecture didn’t seem that interesting to us, so we decided to skip it and get an earlier dinner (roughly 6:30). This ended up being a good thing, because we were seated next to a delightful couple (Paul and Mary, no Peter). We hit off very well with them and spent all of dinner and some time afterwards talking. We got along splendidly. I hope we run across them again on the trip.
We left The Restaurant at probably 9 or 9:15 (it closes at 9:30). We watched the replay of the Port Talk (talking about the details of tomorrow’s visit to Corfu). It turns out that as we’ll be in Greece, we’ll be in a different time zone, so we lose an hour of sleep tonight. Perhaps because of that, the morning’s excursions start a bit later in the day.
I went down to the Atrium to finish typing up today’s events, and something really interesting just happened. I’m sitting in a little alcove that has tables and chairs suitable for typing, and it happens to be next to a small corridor that leads to some bathrooms. I’m a little unclear on the details, but apparently something in the women’s bathroom is overflowing. The floor inside was a large puddle, and it spilled out into the hallway, across the tile floor, and into the carpeted area. Someone grabbed a staff person, who called someone and said that they needed a plumber. I moved over a few tables to be out of the way. As I’m typing this, I see people with big squeegees trying to corral the water, others with rags trying to dry the floor, etc.
It is now 10pm and time for me to head upstairs, get ready, and hit the sack. Because of the time zone shift, it is effectively 11pm, at least relative to what time it will be tomorrow morning. Even though we went to dinner earlier than we have been, we had such a good time talking with Paul and Mary that we didn’t end dinner until very late, and so there has been essentially no time after dinner to do anything. There was a musical show in the theater, but we were more interesting in sleeping than attending.