Norwegian Jade, Day 9

Day 9 is disembarkation.

Contrary to the fiasco of boarding, disembarkation is much smoother. We had breakfast in the room, and then (tracking my wife driving to come and get us) we then told the bulter (Putu) we were ready to leave. He had the lift on a key (as he says, otherwise, it is 15 minute wait!), and he helped with luggage escorting us past the queue to leave. We were then escorted by the concierge (Omar) out to the gangplank where we jumped the whole queue. We then moved quite quickly through the port and out to pick up area as my wife pulled up - perfect timing and no need for short stay car park!

I did do a bit more video of the suite, and have made a video tour...




P.S. The fluid tripod head is on order now :-)

Norwegian Jade, Day 8

The last day, a sea day.

We did not do a lot, but we did get a bridge tour, which is reserved for very few people in the top suites if you are very lucky. We met the 2nd officer, who was not Commander Data. She did however tell us how they steer the ship, and so on. Very interesting.

The captain's young daughter was also given an Ignis.

I did a lot of video editing, and we did try to get a video to you tube - sadly ship's internet was not only slow but also a tad flaky so we scrapped that idea on the basis that a hard drive in a car from the port this morning was higher bandwidth.

This is the time-lapse I did of us leaving Geiranger. 8300 separate stills done at around 1 second intervals thanks to a small shell script on my laptop and wifi to camera. Done with mirror lock up to avoid wear on the mechanism.

Final cut pro did a nice job of compiling in to a video. All I lack at this point is a nice background sound track.

Norwegian Jade, Day 7: Bergen

Bergen is a much larger city, second largest in Norway and once capital.

Yeh, I sound like a tour guide, which is all down to spending a while on one of the sight seeing busses around the town centre. Then we took the train to the top of one hill, some nice views.

We did play cards in the suite quite a lot. We do seem to finally be getting the hang of ship life. Nice dinner in the Italian restaurant (which captain was also in).

Norwegian Jade, Day 6: Geiranger

Today was Geiranger, another village of a few hundred people at the end of a fjord.

This was a much more impressive fjord with sides so steep we had no ship's WiFi all day!

We took a sight seeing bus ride. One of the really impressive parts was the way the driver managed to get the bus round the corners! The road zig-zags up the mountain.

Leaving the fjord, we decided to try and create a proper time lapse. It has worked well and I'll add to this blog post when I am back. We set up a small shell script to take a picture every second, remembering to set the camera in mirror lock up to avoid wearing it out. It managed 8300 shots before the battery ran out, so over two hours. The end result, composed using final cut, is quite impressive.

Norwegian Jade, Day 5: Ålesund

Another day, another fjord. Ålesund was a larger town, damp, gloomy, but they had a Burger King!

Yes, I left the cruise ship with the meals and drink all included to pay for some chilli cheese bites from Burger King. Just don't tell the butler.

With very little to say about Ålesund it may be time for a different whinge...

I appreciate the space on board is very limited, but in this cabin all 4 of the toilets are tiny little cubicles. In the main bathroom of the master room it seems so pointless - they could have just put it in the bathroom. It has a glass door (!) so not for privacy reasons. Every time I go in there I end up knocking the phone that is one the wall on one side and calling room service or something. I am not that fat, honest, but there are people that are, and would find is seriously annoying, I am sure. An inconvenient convenience...

Norwegian Jade, Day 4: Skjolden

Unfortunately, today, I did not feel too well. Obviously it could be related to staying up until 1am drinking southern comfort whilst chatting in the Haven lounge, but to be honest I don't think that was it. Just not quite right, and my blood sugar was also a bit off. I think the change of regular routine when it comes to eating and drinking is not ideal.

Today was Skjolden which is a tiny little place at the end of a very long fjord, something like 200km in from the sea! Over night we navigated the fjord, which we did not see. But when leaving you see how the ship has to navigate this long and windy passage between peaks either side. Definitely Slartibartfast's crinkly bits! I have done a nice video of some of it, which I am not going to try and upload on the ship's wifi. I am quite glad that I brought the tripod with me for that.

We had a nice long walk of a couple of miles around the bay, and I have lots of shots of the impressive scenery. It seems odd having several thousand people decsend on a village of some 200 people!

Norwegian Jade, Day 3: Stavanger

Day 3 is Stavanger, and we went round the town and visited the petroleum museum, which was actually quite interesting.

We also tried the 4G router and setting up fallback L2TP via 4G and ship's wifi. The Ship's wifi has in fact been especially flakey today, starting with the AP even being unhappy (red/green lights and lots of flashing and no SSID). Seems mostly better now.

We met a couple that we chatted to yesterday and gave them a tour of the suite :-)

We did find Starbucks, Burger King, and McDonalds... And some shops that were closed...

Norwegian Jade, Day 2

We had a nice meal last night - a Brazilian style restaurant with a red/green card on the table for whether you want more meat or not, and they come around with different meat on skewers.

The bed was comfortable (I always bring my own pillow). The only problem was the vibration from the engines appears to resonate a bit up here on deck 14, and something in my room was making a knocking noise most of the night. Even so, I managed to get some sleep. Sitting here at the table in the suite is like sitting on a washing machine, but the rest of the ship is calm. Very odd.

Bulter arrived with breakfast this morning (I brought my own marmite, as usual).

Today we are at sea, so a chance to work out what trips we want to take over the week. We think tomorrow we'll just go in to Stavanger town.

A bit more about the Internet access. First off, the "unlimited" does seem to be (in terms of volume). It seems I have thunderbird on this laptop set (as default) to sync folders, and I have a folder with a load of call recordings filed for Lenny, which is huge, and well, you can imagine the rest. I have changed the settings this morning, but not before we had downloaded over 3GB over the satellite. They do not seem to have shut down or complained. Certainly was not my intention to do that, and not exactly fair on other passengers.

The package can be moved between devices, but one device at a time, so you can log in from iPhone and close the session to the laptop, for example. That makes it a lot more flexible.

The actual wifi connection has some interesting restrictions. So far I see they seem to restrict DNS records, so no AAAA records returned by the look of it (so I expect tunnel over DNS won't work). They block some sites, seemingly by IP, such as youtube.com. They appear to even block IPsec though once it connected but did not pass data, which was odd. What is good news is they don't block L2TP. So I have may Mac doing IPsec over IPv6 over L2TP over IPv4 over ship's wifi over satellite... It works :-)

We went to the captain's drinks reception today, and met him briefly. We also got the chance to talk to some of the other passengers. Having a nice suite means you tend not to go out in the ship as much. What was quite amusing was the fact that several people came up to us and had a nice long chat because they had seen us in the Slartibartfast shirts on the dock! People still don't what HHGTTG is but they were interested to ask - a real conversation starter, so well done to my wife for coming up with the idea. Interesting people telling stories of other cruises and ships.

As it happens I am now somewhat knackered. I did not get as much sleep as I would have liked last night, and at 21:35 here I am going to call it a night whilst Simon and Mike go to a show. Shame, looks a nice show, but no point if I am not feeling up to it. My twisted ankle is starting to feel slightly better today too.

Tomorrow should be a fun day in Stavanger.

Norwegian Jade, day 1

As you may have gathered, myself and two mates are on a cruise, and this is day 1.

The stateroom is amazing, and when I am not on slow satellite latency internet I'll upload some videos and pictures.

Getting on board was not quite as it should be. They can definitely improve.

We have tickets in the "Haven" section, which is the premium part of the ship (upper decks) and is meant to have a priority boarding. As you can imagine, a dock where several thousand people are boarding is busy and lots of slow moving queues. They have security checks like airports, and check-in.

So we started on the dock asking someone official looking if there was a separate queue for Haven/priority. They said they had no clue, but they checked with someone else and took us through another door to the head of the queue as it entered the building. This was a good start as the queue went on some way outside. However, there was a long queue in the building still.

We persisted in that queue, and were joined by three other people, also with Haven tickets. I hasten to add that there was no obvious signage for any priority boarding or Haven queues or anything. After some time in that queue, and the check-in desk breaking so we were stalled, one of the other group asked another official looking person. Again the person was not sure, but escorted us to the front of that queue so we were next through security, when it started working again.

Having gone through security there is a massive room full of queue for the check-in desks. We asked, and were told that there was not any priority boarding, so persisted in that a bit until we saw someone from this other group managing to be escorted to the other end of the room. So again we asked someone. This time we were taken to the front of that main check-in queue and checked in.

The check-in person was nice, and helpful, and again did not know of priority boarding at all, but checked us in and said "Oh, it says you are VIP". She asked someone else for help, and apparently we should have been at the other end anyway for a priority checking, a separate Haven lounge, and so on. She was told to escort us there to the concierge.

Finally, in the right place, the concierge was much more on the ball, and we have a separate waiting area and then went in to board the ship. But we spent maybe an hour in queues and asked about 5 people where we should go with nobody having any clue. I do not know if it is Southampton Docks at fault or Norwegian Cruise Line, but it was not really very good for what we paid. A simple sign to another entrance or a couple of signs inside, or just staff that had a clue would have helped. It was clear we were very much not alone in this situation, and it was rather embarrassing at each point having someone escort us past a chunk of the queue instead of to the right place to start with.

However, now on the ship, and if you can get one of these Haven staterooms, they are excellent. Apparently Priscilla Presley had this stateroom last week!

As for internet, yes, for $239 we can have one device WiFi/Internet for whole 8 days, which fits in well enough with the £200 refund from Thomas Cook. It even says "unlimited"! It is for one device, and only one device is connected to the wifi (all the rest are connected to it). Given this was sold as having "Free WiFi", I think that is only fair, to be honest. It works well enough at around 750ms. By the way, there is a now new alpha of FireBrick that is way better at doing DNS cache/relay when the latency is that high.

Also, as I found before on a cruise, if you have an iPhone then iMessage works when on ship's wifi even if you have not purchased any internet package. They try to sell you a $9.99 package to allow you to message and call between guests, which is a bit of a cheek when iMessage works anyway!

It is Simon's birthday today! There was meant to be a cake. No cake!

Anyway, off to a restaurant this evening.

I'd like to thank my lovely wife for packing my case, driving us all here, and making T-shirts for us especially. Not a single person we have met has heard of The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, which is a shame... It is a good conversation starter.

P.S. I twisted my ankle getting in to the car and so I am still limping and on pain killers, not a good start...