St Anthony Newfoundland

St Anthony Newfoundland….

Had a rude awakening this morning after a great nights sleep, it's 0800, our coffee just arrived and the captain announced that we were lowering the tenders already. I'd slept right through. All I can see from our cabin are rugged green hills and a few low lying buildings. We're told it's a pretty little place so we're looking forward to going ashore.

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We'll go to the dining room for breakfast and let the hoards push and shove for their tender tickets. The lady who hands them out threatened to call security if the pushing didn't stop at our call in Greenland on Sunday, that cured the rudeness in a hurry, but some twit reported her for being insolent, we and others came to her rescue though and Dorothy drafted a letter to the captain with signatures telling how it really went down.

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The tenders were late leaving the ship due to a heavy swell making it dangerous to step from ship to life boat, the Maasdam then moved closer to the harbor entrance where there was less swell, making it a short tender ride. Had there been any wind we would have had to miss this call, so we were indeed lucky.

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St. Anthony is a fishing village, hit hard by the moratorium on fishing, we had hoped to book a whale watching and iceberg tour but darn it, Holland America had booked every available boat. The weather is awesome though so we walked around the town chatting to the locals and that was fun. Dorothy wanted to check out the shopping so I left her to it and headed for the tender dock and back to the ship.

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It was a reminder of home to see the RCMP and a Tim Hortons coffee shop, also the "Newfy" dialect which we hear a lot of in Alberta

as many Newfoundlanders work on the oil rigs and tar sands. I had conversations with at least three who had sons living and working in Calgary and it's environs.

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After our time ashore, we had lunch and went to our cabin where the carpet was wet and bumpy just as it was last week when they'd shampooed it. I had my nap, woke up and found it was wetter and bumpier, "My god I thought, we're sinking". Called the front desk who responded right away, seems that we'd sprung a leak in the wall, our cabin and the one next door were flooding. Two pieces of luggage under the bed were soaking, Dorothy's slippers were drenched and it's very squelchy.

There was much apologizing from the hotel manager on down through the ranks, and a temporary move for tonight.

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We had just finished dinner when a humpback whale breached and entertained us for a few minutes off the aft end, as our table is right by the window we had an excellent view. You'll all be pleased to know that I had fruit plate for dessert, see, I knew I could do it :)

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So here we are in our temp. quarters, at the port side on Promenade deck, Dorothy's gone to the show and I'm calming myself after all the excitement. The staff are bending over backwards for us, all rather embarrassing, I mean these things happen. I'm glad they had another cabin though, I just went to retrieve some things and it's a real mess in there.

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To be continued.