We’re feeling a little nostalgic today. One of our favorite ships, the Norwegian Sun, has a new home and one that’s not especially easy to get to, should the mood strike us.
When it’s not on a road trip, the Sun is bedding down in Port Canaveral and, while that’s just a car rental from Miami, it’s a long way from California. It’s going to be on Eastern and Western Caribbean runs for the next year and a half, until April 2012. We hope it doesn’t get bored.
More importantly, we hope the Sun’s crew doesn’t get bored, even though its cast has changed since we last met. This particular group of cruise employees was among the nicest we have encountered. They dressed her up right.
There was Dollerage, who seemed to be our waiter every night and who seemed to enjoy our unique brand of interaction as much as we did. He’s from Mumbai, India, and we think he’s at home now attending to his flowers and his young family, his cruise days behind him. When our time together was ending and we brought out the camera to have a photo taken with him, Dollerage quipped: “Family picture.”
There was a sweet server named Amee from Indonesdia. There was a room steward we affectionately called Bernabe “Squared” because his first name was the same as his list. There was Andrea, a highly educated and entertaining Italian who was the cruise director, in more languages than we could count. And there was Darren, then a rookie server from Trinidad in the main dining room who has gone on to bigger things, and deservedly so, with Norwegian.
The Sun was our introduction to freestyle cruising, and we took to it like butter to bread. She was our home for almost three weeks, the longest we’ve ever been on any cruise ship, and we were sorry to see her go on to another port without us.
Now, to see this Sun setting on Florida horizons is obviously a little bittersweet, but these things happen. You raise three kids and set them free. You have a favorite ship, and watch it sail to someplace that’s a little geographically undesirable.
Such is life.