krebabble

Surprise! On Wednesday, we slept in again. But this day we had actual plans, and this was part of them. The plan was to fill up on lunch, then take the bus halfway across the island to the capital city of Hamilton. We’d spend the day looking around at the sights, have dinner there, and then attend the special evening festival, which seemed to consist mainly of the shops being open late.

The plans started off without a hitch. Lunch was acquired at the buffet, and after we were done with our turkey and had stopped by the cabin to grab our things, we disembarked and walked over to the tourism office to buy some bus tokens. The woman there gave us directions to the bus stop, and we walked down the street. A bus was already waiting there, and we hopped on board.

The weather was grey and drizzly as it had been the day before, though this time the wet was a bit more pervasive. However, we had brought our umbrellas, and we hoped that the rain might pass eventually. The ride on the bus was uneventful, and provided us with a nice view of all the houses and inns and other things along the road that it took. Even without a tour guide, it was a really great way to see the island, and since I always adore looking at houses (the main problem with our highway system is that there are none to see on it, just trees, trees and more trees), I enjoyed it very much.

We got to Hamilton in good time, and the rain had stopped for the moment. So we got out and began to follow the walking tour in the tourist pamphlet E had picked up. The directions were good, and we made our way through several parks and churches, with only a minor detour into the post office so we could buy some postcard stamps.

As we were walking, E discovered the drawback, previously demonstrated by Marilyn Monroe, of wearing a floaty skirt around a lot of wind. She kept having to hold it down or show half of Hamilton her underpants. But there wasn’t much to do about it but press on, and we hiked up a hill to Fort Hamilton, where we met a friendly cat and started to get rained on. Fortunately for us, the Fort had a series of underground tunnels to explore, and by the time we were done with those — after lingering for a bit — the rain had abated enough that we felt we could leave.

We made our way back to the center of town and walked down Front Street, which is the street which goes right along the ocean there, and contains most of the shops and restaurants. Along the way we passed the Pickled Onion, which was where we intended to eat dinner — so E ran up and made us a reservation so we’d be sure to get an immediate seating. That set for 6pm, we had more than two hours yet to kill, so we continued walking. After tooling around in a bookshop, we walked out to one of the points near the ocean and sat on a damp bench for a time.

But it soon started to drizzle again and being right on the ocean was chilly, so we left that and headed for the library. Now, we had been told by websites and various tour books that there was no free internet access on Bermuda — so when I found out that my classes wouldn’t start until after our trip, we’d pretty much given up on worrying about finding any. We certainly had no intentions of paying exorbitant prices for it when it wasn’t necessary. But the tour pamphlet said the library had free internet. We decided this needed to be checked out.

After a minor detour, we found the library and headed inside. We briefly tried to use the wrong computers, but after the librarian directed us, we got online. I have to say, though, that whatever program they used to lock down their computers, it was the stupidest program ever. There are lots of programs written for the purpose of preventing public computers from being altered or misused, and none of them are as ridiculous as this one: no icons were available on the desktop, which was completly blank. All that was available was Internet Explorer, which was partially non-functional due to internet filtering. And once an IE window had been spawned, the user could not close it, nor could a webpage call the close function itself. So all of the computers had about a hundred IE windows floating on them. So so stupid.

In any case, we managed to check what we could, and by that time, it was nearing 5:30, so we headed back to the restaurant. Still a little early, we ducked into a sort of indoor walkway lined with shops and claimed a bench to wait for a bit. E pulled out her DS and I watched her play Tetris for a while. When it was time, we trotted over to the restaurant and were seated immediately.

NCL, as part of its freestyle program, has struck deals with a number of the restaurants on Bermuda. Passengers are issued vouchers good for $25 for lunch at any of these restaurants, and charged $5 to their accounts on the ship. The vouchers can be returned and the charge reversed if you don’t want them, or they can be upgraded to dinner for an additional $5 so that they’re worth $50. Now, the values are deceptive — it’s not like you get access to the regular dinner menu and can choose anything up to that amount. What you get is a limited menu, and for most places, it looked like you got an appetizer, an entree and a dessert. The prices were irrelevant, and the restaurant would just charge NCL the full amount they were entitled to. In any case, we decided this was a pretty good deal, and of the available restaurants, we chose the Pickled Onion, which seemed to have the best dinner choices.

And it was good. I had the caesar salad, the prime rib and the chocolate cake, and they were all extremely tasty and well prepared. All the more satisfying was that they were real restaurant portions, unlike the portions you’d get on the ship, which were probably the nutritionally correct portions, but smaller than most Americans are used to. Of course, on the ship you could just keep ordering more things until you were full, but it’s inconvenient to have to wait.

During dinner, there was quite a deluge outside, though it had pretty much subsided by the time we left the restaurant. It was after 7pm though, and with no evidence of this festival starting up, we decided the rain had probably cancelled it out. So we headed back toward the bus station. Once there, we found a bus that was going to St. George’s, but was packed to the gills with people. So we decided we would wait for the next one. As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait long, because the first bus driver managed to convince another bus driver to take all of her excess passengers and drive the same route rather than making us wait until the next scheduled bus. Needless to say, this would not happen in the US.

When we got back to the ship, we collected our Uno cards from the room (E and Carl had checked them out from the library) and headed up to the nice chairs on deck 5 to sit and play. We had several false starts where first we weren’t skipping people correctly after they got draw cards, and then we discovered that the rule we all remembered — that if you couldn’t play, you had to draw cards until you could — was not, in fact, a real rule at all! You’re only supposed to draw one card, and if that’s not playable, your turn is over. The game got much faster after that, and we continued playing even after we came back down to the cabin with trays full of pizza from the 24-hour grille/pizza place. But even that wasn’t quite enough food, because we also ordered room service again before we headed to bed.