Cruise Diary: Prinsendam’s 64-day Grand Mediterranean Voyage
Guests Jan and Dick Yetke set sail on Prinsendam’s 64-day Grand Mediterranean Voyage in March, and we’ve just received these wonderful posts. We’ll starting from the beginning so you don’t miss anything, and we’ll catch up as quickly as possible. Enjoy the journey with Jan and Dick!
Well, we are off again!!! This time on a 64-day Grand Mediterranean on the Holland America ship Prinsendam. The cruise line calls this their Elegant Explorer. It holds about 750 passengers but there are only 550 of us on board now.
Thursday, March 14, we boarded the ship and a little after 5 pm, we cast off the dock lines and sailed away, heading out the channel and into the Atlantic Ocean. We are now out in the middle of the ocean on our way to Madeira, our first stop. We have just left the Sargasso Sea area of the ocean, where you see a great deal of reddish brown looking-like seaweed which is plankton floating. It is a huge area on the Western side of the Atlantic Ocean, about 2000 miles wide and 750 miles from north to south.
Since we are sailing East, they do the time changes (which means we lose an hour each time) at mid-day. You don’t feel it as much that way!!! We now are on GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). The sky has been extremely clear the last several nights, so the Captain has put off the upper deck lights in order for us to observe the beautiful night sky. Of course, this is one of Dick’s favorite subjects, astronomy.
I finally got our things unpacked and put away by day two. We still have not unpacked and put together the bikes. That will get done some day before we arrive in Madeira.
We were invited to and attended a wonderful cocktails and dinner with the Captain on our third night out. This ship has the largest captain stateroom of any cruise ship afloat, so we had our cocktail party in his stateroom.
Beautiful!!! Then our dinner was in the Pinnacle Grill, the specialty restaurant on board. The Pinnacle was full of all people being entertained at this special dinner. Each table was hosted by one of the senior officers. We were very lucky since we were seated at the Captain’s table. I was actually seated to his immediate left. He is a very nice man!!! We had a wonderful evening and were presented with a lovely gift at the end of dinner!
