You never know what a new embark day may bring. A lot people ask us – in all innocence – how long a break we have between cruises, to which we shrug, and tell them the truth: four hours. Four hours where the ship is ours, because the few guests who stay on from cruise to cruise are out enjoying the city and the new arrivals haven’t boarded yet. Four hours where we can crawl back into bed, or actually manage to have breakfast…
In fact, the new guests usually find my little neck of the woods last. Everyone always gravitates to the food first, but once they do find me, the barista and I have about five minutes to look at each other and say a silent “here we go again” before the hordes descend.
And then, off we go…round and round again.
There is a certain relaxation to 7 day runs, for one thing they go terribly fast, so if you’re having a rough time of it you can always hold tight to the knowledge that in 7 days most of these people are going home. Of course, the frustrating part is you have to retrain all those people every week – just when I get one group of people educated in the ways of the internet system on board, they leave and I have to start all over again with a new class (now I know how teachers feel!).
I do wish, sometimes, that people would be a little more polite about it, or pay a little more attention to what I’m actually saying so that I don’t have to answer the same question six times in a row…but ah well, you can’t have everything!
So…here we go again! Goodbye Montréal, hello Boston….