Daily Archives: August 25, 2018
Pool Parties and Staterooms . . .
Brandi, Lowell, and Landon closed on their new house yesterday morning and then the movers showed up on schedule in the afternoon.
Jan called this afternoon to see if we needed to come up tomorrow to help unpack, but apparently they’re taking the weekend off and just hanging out around the pool with friends.
And that’s a pool you want to hang out around.
We’ve got our stateroom assigned for the ‘Skirnir’, the Viking Longship for our upcoming cruise. And it’s the cheapest room available. And that’s not because I’m cheap.
Well, not ‘;just’ because I’m cheap.
When we did our Alaskan cruise in 1998, we decided that on our next cruise we would get the cheapest room available since we found we were only in it to shower and sleep. On an ocean cruise that would be an inside room with no window, but on a Viking River Cruise it’s apparently a room down in the bilge of the ship.
Well, maybe not quite that low, but it is on the bottom of the 4 decks, which for some reason is called the ‘main’ deck.
Our room is listed as a ‘Standard’ room and is150 sf. It looks like this.
What I still haven’t figured out is how the rooms are priced vs. where they’re located. There are two different levels of each of 3 of the 4 room types. The rooms themselves are identical, just the location is different. In our case, our room, #110, is right next to the more expensive version. More expensive by $150.
I emailed a Viking representative to ask the reason for the $150 difference when the rooms are pretty much side-by-side, and wondered if the cheap ones were over the engines, or something. But he just said that the more expensive ones were ‘better’. Well that was helpful.
What even stranger is the next room up in price. It’s called a ‘French Balcony’’. But apparently the French don’t really have balconies, because neither does this room.
All it has is a sliding glass door that you can open, but there is no balcony. Just an opening that’s blocked off. And it’s $1050 more than our room. And it’s only 135 sf., 15 sf. smaller than ours.
If you want to have an actual balcony, you have to get a Veranda stateroom like this.
It’s $1850 more, and is a little bigger at 205 sf.
Now if you won the lottery and want to celebrate with a river cruise, you can book one of the two Explorer suites on the ship.
At 445 sf. it’s almost 3 times the size of our room, and it costs a whopping $13,000!
Yikes!
Today was another one of those errand days, interrupted by a nice lunch. After dropping some stuff off at both storage rooms, our next stop was at a Chase Bank to deposit the $100 American Express Traveler’s Cheque that Jan found in an old purse into our account.
The teller had never seen one and didn’t really know what to do with it. And neither did the other teller, so they called the manager over. She said she hadn’t seen one in years, and didn’t think they even sold them anymore. At least they didn’t have any at that bank.
Next up was lunch/breakfast at The Egg and I up in Webster. Love their food, especially their Hazelnut coffee. While I got my usual Two eggs over medium, bacon, fruit, and an English Muffin, Jan tried their Build Your Own Omelet, with Greens, and an English Muffin.
She said the Lemon Vinaigrette on the Greens was really good. And it was neat how they put a little of the ingredients, tomatoes, onions, and mushrooms on the omelet as a topping.
Finally after a quick WalMart stop, it was back to the rig a little before 4pm.
A nice easy fun day.
Thought for the Day:
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” – Mark Twain
dghg
