Burnie

Ok, so this is where the cruise took a sort of side trip down negative lane.  I don’t blame the cruise line at all – well, OK, I do a little bit.  The weather wasn’t as warm as a lot of people thought it was going to be (only about 14-15° C for most of the trip, so lots of pants and long sleeves being worn), so the pools were closed a lot of the time on the ship.  Driven indoors, most of the over-60 set sat down in every char on the ship and promptly fell asleep.  They fell asleep in the bars.  They fell asleep in the theaters.  Heck, they even fell asleep in the game room, where there are only about ten chairs to begin with.

Why so many sleepy seniors?  Oh you haven’t been on a cruise before?  Well allow me to explain.  There are about four distinct demographics of people that will typically take a cruise. 

1)      The newlyweds.  Harmless, they seldom come out of their rooms for air, and when they do, they are on the early-20s to early-30s age bracket and won’t look at you cross-eyed when you order your third scotch at dinner, probably because they are still so busy looking at each other and trying to figure out how to disengage from your conversation and head back to their room.  Like I said – harmless. They make up roughly 10-15% of the people on the boat.

2)      The couple that needs a break.  Not a break from each other, but a break from whatever jobs/callings/responsibilities they have back home.  No real age bracket on this one, but most of them are pretty cool to hang out with, engage in conversation, and have a drink with.  However, they only make up about 5-10% of the people on the ship – I’d put Jenny and I squarely in this demographic.

3)      The family with the obnoxious kids.  You probably won’t see the parents, just the kids.  What kids you ask?  Oh, those would be the kids that run around doing cannon balls in the “Adults Only” spa, make loud obnoxious remarks during the shows at night, and generally tend to flock to each other around the “you-must-be-18-to-get-in-here-nightclub-but-maybe-if-we-loiter-around-the-entrance-the-bouncer-will-think-I’m-“cool”-and-let-me-in” place on the ship.  You won’t see the parents because the parents are trying to enjoy their cruise like the couple from the second demographic, and thus have little desire or social wherewithal to corral their offspring.  Did I mention obnoxious?  Fortunately, these only make up about 10% of the passengers as well.

So where does the other 70-75% of the cruise passengers fit in on this scale?

4)      The senior citizen.  God bless ‘em.  On a boat of 2,000 passengers, at least 1,300 of them will be AARP-card-carrying members.  They have probably been on about 80 cruises by now during their retirement, and you can tell because they wear their “Platinum” and “Gold” member cruise cards around their necks on these tethers as if to scare other, lesser cruising passengers into submission through the sheer awesomeness of their metallic-colored cruise card.  Most of them are extremely nice, polite, will fill up the early seating at dinner and be in bed by 8 pm.  Thus, eat at the late dinner seating and go to the later shows, and you will, for the most part, not see most of them.  Unless of course, the weather sucks, like it did on our cruise, and everyone is driven inside, where a great number of these members of the greatest generation will fall asleep in every public space on this ship.  I love the senior citizens on the cruises, and I have no beef with them until they fall asleep at every table in the bar.

But I digress.  Except for the falling asleep at the bar deal, my biggest beef with the rest of our cruise has to do with the city councils of Burnie and Port Arthur.  I’ll explain.

After Melbourne, she ship sailed across the Tasman Sea to hit up three ports in Tasmania.  Awesome right?  Well our first stop was in Burnie, and tourist attraction it is NOT.  I feel bad because they obviously do a lot of industrial shipping out of Burnie, but when you dock a cruise ship in an industrial ship yard and have to put all the passengers on a bus to guide them out of the wharf area, maybe your wharf isn’t conducive to your tourist industry.

I will also admit that we arrived in Burnie on a Sunday – hence almost NONE of the shops and sites in Burnie were open.  I don’t blame the shop owners; I’d take my day off too.  But a message to the Burnie Chamber of Commerce – if a cruise ship arrives and disgorges 2,000 tourists who all have money burning holes in their pockets, you might want to entice your shop owners to open up and let that money get pumped into your economy.

I’m just saying.

So Jenny and I took a nice leisurely stroll on the beach and ate Fish and chips and basically just enjoyed each other’s company.  Which in the long run, was the whole point of our vacation.

A Target.  The first one Jenny had seen in almost two years.  She lost her mind.  We did not go in, as doing so would have created a public spectacle I wasn’t prepared to make.

 

 

Fish and chips on the beach.  Tasmania makes some pretty good beer too – Cascade.  More to come on that later.

The Beach.  It's only about 50 F out here and we are both freezing.  Leonardo DiCaprio, eat your heart out.