Day 3 - Thu 12/07/18 - Cartegena, Spain

We've been to this port several times before so we elected to sleep in and explore it on our own. There was one little problem: I had booked a private shore excursion here but mentally associated it with our next port of call. So we missed it and for that I apologize profusely to those I caused a delay. It's the first excursion we've missed in over 365 days of cruising. But back to our day.

Getting off the ship we walked to the very lovely pedestrian mall that runs for at least a mile through the heart of the city to Plaza España. There was a very large sailboat in the shipyard across the bay from us. Later we learned its worth $500 million, has a sister ship, and both are own by the same Russian billionaire.

We shopped (found some 12 packs of Coke Zero) and ate and enjoyed the sights along the way noting all we remembered from our previous visits. We continued walking in what formed a giant square around the hilltop fort that defines the port area of the city. For the first time, in our cruising history, we were back on the ship before 2pm where we enjoyed a light sushi lunch before settling down in a deck chair on deck 10 above the Lido Pool. There I enjoyed a little nap.

We took the opportunity to test out the Bose speaker delivered to our room with some Christmas music, and it definitely passed muster.

All aboard time was 4:30pm, but when the gangplank didn't come up, I felt something was wrong. Around 5pm the Captain came on the PA and announced that divers were in the water looking for a plastic life raft cover that fell overboard during a drill earlier in the day. That 1/2 hour delay came and went and it wasn't until 6:15pm that we set sail for Malaga. We never heard further whether the retrieval was successful. By then we were enjoying a Lido dinner with Patrick & Billie who we ate with the previous night in the Main Dining Room.

Lance gave his port talk on Malaga on the World Stage and he was followed by a fantastic young English opera singer Annette Wardell. Afterwards we watched performances by the dueling pianists in Billboard Onboard and BB King venues. Both were packed and Orlando Ashford was quite pleased. I did take the opportunity to talk with him about the $2.0 million loss of books (he corrected my reporting a $2.5 million loss). He remained emphatic about it being a real loss of the expensive reference books just among the 15 ships in the HAL fleet. With that, I'm going to let the library issue fade as I have no skin in the game so to speak.

We capped off the night watching the 10pm showing of Alpha (I missed the last 1/2 hour) on the big screen in the Lido pool area. While this screen is impressive, it's very pixilated and text is hard to read, and this movie had subtitles.

Back at the room we enjoyed some premium chocolate that was part of the turndown service. Tomorrow will be an early day as we are going on a HAL excursion to a white village out of town since we've been here twice before. We will not miss this one! Stay tuned.