Don's Travel Blog

First Day - MacMania11

Settled in the cabin (Stateroom no less). No balcony this time, but a big picture window, which is fine by me. Some of the rooms have sliding doors that lead onto a walkway around the ship, but ours is more traditional.

Initial impressions of Holland America are excellent with the ship having great facilities and seemingly in good order!

Even more people joined today making the MacMania group around 117 strong with around 70 odd signed up for the sessions. One treat is that we have Steve Wozniak with us on this trip. He’s here for pleasure but has agreed to do a question and answer session towards the end of the trip. Goodness knows what I’ll do if he turns up to any of my sessions - no pressure!

The ship has capacity for 1200 passengers and 500 crew so it’s not one of the mega liners but it’s certainly not a small ship, by any account.

If you’ve not been on a cruise, a lot of the focus is around food. You can basically eat yourself to oblivion round the clock, so I’ll need to be careful… but not too careful. The Withins Internet scales will be dusted off and reconnected once I get back from this trip to shame me into getting back into shape.

Breakfast and Lunch are flexible with a great choice of healthy and not so healthy options. Dinner is at 8pm for all the MacManiacs, with a block of reserved seating in the main restaurant. First day you’re assigned to a set table but for following evenings, you’re free to move around. The late dinner is to fit in with the sessions on sea days and it’s difficult sometimes, to adjust to eating so late. Once dinner is over, it can be 10:00pm or later and rather than catch the late show in the theatre, we tend to just crash out.

We left Buenos Aires at around 9pm with just a short voyage across the river to Montevideo, Uruguay - our first port of call. We’ll have the morning to ourselves and then a short excursion in the afternoon.

No MacMania sessions tomorrow, they start on Sunday, when we make a 2 day voyage down to the Falkland Islands.

Although I’ve finished most of the outlines and slide sets for my eight sessions, I need to polish them and do some rehearsal, so a good part of the two days at sea will be assigned to that.

This post is being posted via the Ships Internet service which actually includes WiFi access in the cabin. It’s slow (Apple mail really grinds considerably with all the syncing over the slow connection) but the idea is to download mail or create content offline, login, sync and log off again. I’ve bought 1000 minutes of access for the next 12 days which should be enough to keep on top of email and publish the show next week.

We’ll see!