Monthly Archives: August 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
Mackinac and More . . .
Today started out on an upnote when Jan was going through some of her old purses and found a nice surprise.
It was a $100 American Express Traveler’s Cheque.
Before we started RV’ing, I bought a couple of thousand in AMEX Traveler’s Cheque to tuck away for emergencies. I thought I had cashed all of them in over the last 11 years, mostly after I discovered that they weren’t all that accepted any more.
Apparently there’s been so many forgeries and counterfeits that everyone is leery of them, even banks. And even the bank chain (Chase) that issued them to me.
I guess that I gave Jan one to hide away and it just was forgotten.
Hopefully Chase will cash this one. We’ll see tomorrow.
Nothing much else interesting happened today so I thought I’d replay our visit to Mackinac Island in July 2013.
Three Things to Do When Visiting Mackinac Island . . .
1, Watch Where You Walk.
2. Don’t Step In Yellow Puddles.
3. Bring Plenty of Money.
After one of the muffins we got at Tim Horton’s yesterday, Jan and I headed about 50 miles south to St. Ignace, MI to catch the ferry over to Mackinac Island. To allow plenty of time to catch the 10:00 run, we left about 8:15. But making good time we got there about 9:15, just in time to catch the 9:30 trip.
Heading across the lake we found a lot of people already out there ahead of us.
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One of the reasons we wanted to make the 9:30 or 10am ferry, is that these two make a quick detour over by, and under the Mackinac Bridge.
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The two towers are 550 feet tall, and the suspended roadway between them is over 8600 feet long, making it the longest suspension bridge in the US, and the third longest in the world.
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The supporting cables are 24-1/2 inches in diameter and made up of over 12,000 smaller cables woven together. And even though the roadway is open grillwork to let the wind blow through, the bridge can still sway up to 15 feet during high winds. Hopefully not this Saturday.
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Finally approaching the island, the first thing you can really see is the world-famous Grand Hotel, site of two movies, including 1979’s “Somewhere In Time” with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour.
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Pretty much everywhere you look is a postcard view.
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Getting our feet back on dry land, we spent some time walking the streets and checking out the scenery.
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There are flowers everywhere you look.
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Except for two police vans and three fire trucks, no motorized vehicles are allowed on the island. So this wagon is the UPS delivery van. There is a driver for the wagon, but a real UPS guy in his brown shorts actually delivers the packages.
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And this is why you need to watch where you walk when you’re on the island. I also think it’s why the flowers are so bright and the grass is so green. They’ve got to do something with all that ‘fertilizer’.
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Taking the Carriage Tour, we drove past the Grand Hotel, the only hotel I’ve ever seen that charges you $10 just to walk into the place. Needless to say, we didn’t visit.
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Our next stop along the tour was Arch Rock that looks down on the beach way below.
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Finally leaving the carriage tour at Fort Mackinac, we decided to have lunch at the Tea Room there that overlooks the harbor.
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One of the other ferry companies uses jet boat ferries, giving them this distinctive “rooster tail”.
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There’s even this beautiful two-masted schooner tooling around the harbor
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Sometimes there are so many ferries coming into the harbor it’s almost a traffic jam.
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Looking down from our restaurant perch, seeing all the neat, colorful houses, manicured lawns, and brilliant flower gardens, I almost expected to see a large white ball named Rover go bouncing by.
Walking back down the hill from the Fort, we once again walked along the quaint streets, checking out the many shops, even stopping to buy some of the famous Mackinac fudge from Murdicks.
Later we spent an hour or so sitting in the rockers on the big front porch of the Lakeview Hotel, just people watching. Very nice.
A little later we caught the 4pm ferry back to St. Ignace on the mainland, giving us this great view of the Mackinac Bridge, a bridge that we’ll be crossing in our rig this coming Saturday as we head for Elkhart.
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Before getting back on I-75N we stopped for gas, giving Jan a thrill and ending her day on a very moose note.
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Taking our exit off I-75 into Sault Ste. Marie, we drove through a nearby Holiday gas station to check out rig access to tank up with diesel when we leave here on Saturday.
Thought for the Day:
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.~Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
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