Day 20 (January 21). “Be careful what you wish for! You might get it.”

 (At Sea, Caribbean Sea, north of Venezuela)

Ric has Covid.

So, I’ve been bemoaning the rapid pace of our Road Scholar tour, what with morning lectures on sea days, bus rides and walking tours on port days, and leisurely but enjoyable dinners in the main dining. Well, now I have lots of free time, but am confined to our cabin. After our last day on the Amazon and our long jungle hike—I’ll catch up on those later—I felt I had nasty cold coming on. Two days later, having no relief, and knowing that my colds usually go into bronchitis, I made appointment at Medical Center yesterday and was diagnosed Covid positive. Rats! Now my self-imposed quarantine extends through Wednesday. So, no more bemoaning rapid Road Scholar pace. Lots of time to do what I’m doing right this moment—catching up on blog, Rosetta Stone, watching movies (Oppenheimer, Walk in the Woods), and vegging out, being sleepy from codeine-laced Tylenol. Since my diagnosis, Holland America has treated us exceedingly well, availing of special, more interesting Room Service menus, providing good, bottled water, and surprising us with a nice selection of high tea sandwiches and pastries!

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I’ve become a Holland America fan!

We were not pleased with some of the things we read regarding Holland America as we were planning our packing. We were under the impression that there would be no coffee setup in the room (True) and that you had to order an expensive “package” to have coffee at other times (False. Misunderstanding.) In truth, you can fill up your thermos or bring down a cup of coffee anytime a dining venue is open. The package apparently referred to barista-coffees at certain bars.) Further, bottled water in your cabin requires a separate “package.” (I have no problem with the faucet water (True). The tap water tastes fine to me, but Anne, with her more sensitive palate, can’t get “bilge water” out of her mind. We also read that you had to purchase a package for Wi-Fi, either for one ($999.99) or four ($1999.99) devices. (True) But we misunderstood what that meant. You don’t have to designate the devices beforehand. Rather, you can use any one or four devices at a time, you just can’t have two or five, respectively connected at the same time. So, I opted for the four-device package which works out to about fifteen dollars a day. Anne has her cell phone and iPad connected and I have my cellphone and laptop connected. At some point I want to connect my new Kindle Paper White device in order to download another book, so I’ll have to disconnect one of the others temporarily. We were also warned by Road Scholar that the Wi-Fi would be very spotty. Rather, it is excellent most of the time, apparently thanks to Elon Musk’s Sky Link or whatever it’s called. (The only issues, suffered by many, was the complexity of getting it connected after it automatically shuts down every once in a while. Also, there have been actual technical issues a couple times.) But on whole, I’m in nerd green pastures. Speaking of which, I did obtain a free Mozilla VPN (Virtual Private Network) account. That’s proven useful on a couple of occasions when I could not access a website with the ship’s Wi-Fi.

Finally, the Holland America staff are invariably cheerful, friendly, and helpful. They go out of their way to assist you. Today, Anne started to carry a couple of plates of food and cup of coffee down from the Lido Market, our buffet dining area, and one of the wait staff intercepted her and insisted on helping her carry things down to our cabin. If we need anything, we can dial 90 and have one of our two stewards attend to us. And more. Now, such service is in part due to a good complement of staff—800 for the ship which can carry almost two thousand passengers. Of course, much, maybe most of the staff are tasked with ship duties, not tending to the passengers. But I get the feeling that the staff we do come in contact with are quite happy, suggesting good pay and benefits but also excellent training.

Anne has Covid, too.

So, today Anne started feeling a cold coming on. But it turns out she had become covid positive since testing negative yesterday. So now we are both quarantined. (Holland America offers to reimburse us of our lost cruise days, but in credit toward future travel. Nice.) We’ll both miss tomorrow’s excursion on Willemstad, Curacao, but our Road Scholar group leader will try to get me hearing aid batteries, the only thing we’re critically short on.

And now, in the next post, I’ll pick up trip log from for our Amazon River adventure, a week ago.