Travel Blogging IV

Piraeus, Greece: We’re sitting alongside in Piraeus, the harbor for Athens. The ship is quiet as most passengers are ashore poking about in Piraeus or have figured a way to get to Athens in spite of the transport workers strike.

Meanwhile the DrsC are enjoying shipboard life. The crew does the cooking, cleaning, tidying, drink-mixing, and entertaining; we do the consuming.

On this cruise we are going back to several ports we’ve visited before so going ashore is optional. We may go ashore this afternoon, or not. We’ve been in Athens more than once, including recently.

When you start out cruising you tend to avoid cruises with many “sea days,” days not in port. If you are a person who’ll love cruising, you’ll begin cherishing sea days and end up treating many port days as faux sea days, staying aboard while almost everyone else goes ashore.

The other DrC says these faux sea days are the very best because you have this enormous ‘yacht’ with a thousand crewmembers and hardly anyone to share it with. I begin to concur.

There are seniors who treat cruise ships as assisted living facilities, who stay aboard for very long periods of time. They’ve penciled it our and conclude that the facilities are nicer and the costs not much higher.

I have no idea if the claimed cost equivalence is true, having not done the math myself, but it is a charming idea if you don’t mind the occasional rough water – a feature not found on land. Our captain told a Cruise Critic© gathering aboard that he has two doctors and five nurses for a ‘community’ of just over five thousand people, a higher ratio than found in most towns and an attractive feature for seniors.

A thing you learn when cruising a lot as we have is ship terminology: fueling the ship is called “bunkering, no idea why. We've been bunkering today. If you have friends who cruise, give them the following good thought: “I wish you fair winds and following seas.”

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On an entirely different topic, it appears that the group running for GOP presidential nominee has stabilized, and is focusing on Mitt Romney. Now it remains to be seen whether the anxiety evangelical Christians feel about a Mormon candidate translates into a refusal to vote for him.

I live in a largely Mormon community in Wyoming, although I am not a member of that faith. I find them the best neighbors you could ask for.

Any reluctance I have voting for Romney has nothing whatsoever to do with his faith. It is mostly about his willingness to move far enough left to be elected governor of Massachusetts.

Romneycare, ancestor of Obamacare, needs a lot of “splainin’” as Desi used to ask of Lucy. Mostly we need to be reassured that Mitt “gets” that we want Obamacare repealed, not replaced with an “improved” version.