A/NZ - Getting On The Ship - Day 2

Updated 1/21/2012 - I took some heat for referring to the Volendam as a boat instead of a ship. I will try to correct my mistaken terminology so as to not distress future visitors to the blog. I am a Midwest guy who grew up watching the "Love Boat" on TV and just didn't know any better. Some reference was also made to inaccurate information in the postings. I did my best to get it right but there may be some. As you view the posts, let me know via the comments if there are any corrections necessary. I know there are typos....I am prone to those and the spell checker doesn't help when the wrong word is spelled correctly.

This is a view of downtown Sydney from our hotel room. We stayed at the Swissotel for one night. It was a nice hotel on a par with a Grand Hyatt. It is the hotel that Holland America uses for those who purchase a pre-cruise package. As I mentioned before, Australia isn't cheap and the hotel wasn't either. We had a very European style breakfast buffet with a tab of $50 for the two of us. That is a record high for breakfast for us.

While we were in the room, we Skyped with our friend, Edel. I held the Net Book up to the window so see could see the city....pretty neat.

The building with the green dome is the Queen Elizabeth Building, a former government building that has been turned into a shopping mall. It is one of the highlights of Sydney.

This is the oldest house in Sydney and dates back to the founding of the city. It is part of The Rocks.

Sigrid loved the open air markets spread throughout the area.

The Asian influence is strong in Australia.

It was cloudy and rainy when we arrived yesterday, but we had a little sun from time-to-time this day.

We got on the ship with little hassle although the lines were long. It is a good feeling to know that the ship can't sail without you after such a long journey full of potential pitfalls.




Part of The Rocks. Old military buildings.

Wolfie's is in one of the buildings. We ate under the white tent yesterday.

The Overseas Passenger Terminal where all the cruise ships dock and where immigration/customs officials check all passengers.

The Lido Dining Room on board the Volendam. It offers cafeteria style service. We ate most of our meals here because the food is excellent with lots of variety. There are six different places to eat on the ship including room service (24/7) at no additional cost.

This is the indoor pool area with the rolling roof retracted.

Some shots of downtown Sydney from the harbor.

A drug sniffing dog was used to checkout the incoming cargo of food and supplies for the ship.

The m/s Volendam is a medium sized ship with 63,000 tons of displacement. It can accommodate 1,440 passengers with a crew of 620. It has 10 decks, 12 elevators, and is 785 feet in length. It is powered by a diesel electric propulsion system. The ship was built in 2000. Probably more than you wanted to know.

If you have never been on a cruise ship to see a typical cabin, I will take care of that for you. It is tight but you really don't spend that much time in your cabin if you don't want to. This cabin is one step above entry level in that it has windows. On our Alaska cruise we had an inside stateroom and missed the ability to look out at the ocean or to even know if it was night or day.

It is a one person bath, but that wasn't a problem at all. The only challenge is showering during rough seas.

They aren't big windows but they were enough. The bed was really comfortable....as good as any hotel we have ever stayed at.

We stayed in this cabin for the first two weeks. We were at the far aft part of the ship so every movement of the ship was multiplied. I got seasick on the first day at sea which surprised me. We were in 20 foot seas in Alaska and I had no problem while Sigrid got sick. This time I got sick in five foot seas and Sigrid didn't. Confusing. I took a few pills and was unconscious for the rest of the day. I was better on the second day and ultimately got my sea legs and had no further problems even though we had a few more rough days.

We had other problems with our location. We were close to where maintenance was being done on lower decks and we heard lots of banging during the day. We also had problems with paint fumes on three consecutive days. They continually paint the ship to keep up with the sea salt induced corrosion. I guess they were working too close to us.

We complained and asked to be moved to another cabin. After a couple of suggestion by the ship staff, we decided to up grade to a veranda room since we didn't like the other offerings. We were able to do this for the second two weeks and loved it. Holland America gave us a very good price for the upgrade.....about 25% of regular cost because it was going to be empty if we didn't take it. More later on the new room.

There is even a water park on the ship for kids but there weren't any kids on the cruise.

We were welcomed aboard by a band playing 60's and 70's music by the indoor pool.

The indoor pool is the location for many special events. Here they are serving ethnic food from Indonesia. Each event has a theme from another country. Notice the overhead doors are closed due to rain showers.

The Terrance Grill is also located by the pool. You can get cheeseburgers, hot dogs, or make your own Mexican just about any time you want. You can sit along the sides of the pool and have a view out to port or the ocean as you eat.

One of the challenges that some people take in Sydney, is to climb the structure of the Harbour Bridge. You can see a few people making their way up the walkway in this photo. I am sure the view is great but I was not tempted to climb.

These folks made it to the top.

As we were leaving the harbor, I had to take one more photo of the Opera House from another angle.

We are off now for two days at sea to get to New Caledonia.

Australia, New Zealand, South Pacific Islands Cruise - 11/2/2010

This is the first of a series of about 25 posts covering the 32 days that were on our adventure to the "down under". The blogger stacks posts from the bottom up, so if you want to see the posts in chronological order, you have to start at the bottom of the list and work your way up to a newer post. For those who have been following our Face Book posting, you will see some of the same photos and comments. We used Face Book on the ship because it is much faster than blogging and Internet time cost was $0.44/minute. As I re-post on the blog, I will be adding more photos and commentary that was not practical for Face Book. Hopefully, there will be enough new here to make it worth looking at a second time.

We left for the airport around noon on November 2 so we would have time for a nice lunch in preparation for the grueling trip ahead. Our United flight took off from KCI around 4:45pm. We stopped in Denver for a short time (1 1/2 hour flight) and then headed for San Francisco (2 hour flight). We had several hours layover in S. F. and time for another meal. We left for Sydney at 7:30pm CA time. The San Francisco to Sydney flight was the longest we have ever had at 14 hours. We landed in Sydney at 7:20am on November 4. We lost a day as we crossed the International Dateline.

Once in Sydney, we had prearranged for a shuttle bus to our hotel. Unfortunately, the shuttle made us wait for nearly an hour to accumulate enough riders to fill the the bus. As it turned out, it was really a bunch of little buses so why we had to wait, I will never understand. We finally got to our hotel in Sydney about 11:00am Sydney time. We had been traveling for about 24 hours at that time. We were tired and a little smelly.

We were in Sydney a day before the embarkation day for the ship. We wanted a little slack in case the airlines failed us and some time to explore Sydney. So, instead of sleeping, we showered up and walked the mile from our hotel down to The Rocks through downtown Sydney.

Sydney is a nice city with a mix of old and new. Its founding was recent enough that many of the original buildings are still standing in what is called "The Rocks" area. The city is very vibrant with lots of people shopping and dining in the city's core. It is clean and appears to be fairly safe. There are parks and gardens everywhere around the city. One is in the photo below.

I should mention that all the photos can be enlarged simply by clicking on the photo. To return to the blog after viewing, click on the "Back" arrow at the top left-hand side of the screen.

I don't recall what this attractive memorial was about, but it is just one of many we saw as we walked.

This is part of The Rocks area. The Overseas Passenger Terminal is located here and is the place where we will board our ship tomorrow.

Fabulous flowering trees lined the wharf area.


The Circular Quay area is next to The Rocks and has a number of excursion boats and ferry boats operating from its docks. It is a transportation hub since the city train system and the bus system all have stops here.

A cruise ship (not ours) has the famous Harbour Bridge as a backdrop.

Sigrid was pretty excited about the sight seeing and the lack of sleep didn't slow us down. We still had a one mile walk uphill back to the hotel.

Our first look at the Sydney Opera House....a spectacular building.

We were hungry, so we stopped at a restaurant that was located in an old military barracks. Wolfie's was fairly upscale but what the heck....we are on an adventure.

Sigrid had Crocodile and Kangaroo while I had plain old fish and chips. The food was expertly done. I don't know how to explain the taste of Kangaroo but it isn't gamey at all. It looks like beef or bison in color but it tastes a little more like lamb....sorta. It was good. The crock was a little chewy, but not bad. With a bottle of Aussie beer and a glass of wine, lunch was $100. Australia isn't cheap. Australian dollars were pretty much equal to U. S. dollars while we were there.

Interesting perspective.

Australia is very European in architecture and culture.....not too surprising.

Every big city park has to have its "bird man".

A better view of the Harbour Bridge.... an engineering marvel in its time.

It goes without saying that we slept hard once we got back to our hotel. Tomorrow is "get on the boat day".

We are back home

We got home just after 1:00am Saturday morning but it took an hour to get the house back to normal (turn everything on). We had turned off the water heaters so we had no hot water for showers, the thermostats had been left at 65 deg so it was chilly, etc.

The flight from Auckland to San Francisco was only 11 hours due to a strong tail wind. That is three hours quicker than San Francisco to Sydney was going out. We had longer layovers this trip so it still took about 24 hours of travel time to get back. We had to get up early to get off the ship and then took a four hour tour of Auckland before going to the airport so it was really a 32 hour day.

We flew Air New Zealand and it was an extremely pleasant flight. The flight crew were unusually friendly, the seats were very comfortable (even in Economy where we were), the food was excellent, the movie selection was vast, the flight information available on the individual video screens was the best I have seen. No wonder Air NZ is just about the top rated airline in the world. To be fair to United and other U.S. airlines, I have to also mention that Air NZ is a government owned airline and considered to be one of the "faces" of New Zealand, so I don't think that making money is a big concern for them. The United flights from San Fransisco to Denver and Denver to Kansas City were also good flights.

Posting on the vacation will now shift from Face Book to this blog. FB has severe limits on the amount of text in each post and I could not tell the story of our vacation there. I will be posting the entire trip again here with more photos and much more written information about our adventure. We have lots of things to catch up on after being gone for over a month so it may take a while before I can get the posts going so please be patient and keep checking us for new stuff.

The trip was great, but it is good to be home again.

Touring Kauffman Stadium - September 23, 2010

As you can see, I am a little behind with our postings. Nothing new about that I guess.

On September 23, Sigrid and I attended a Power Partners reception at the baseball stadium. The Power partners is the retirement club for Kansas City Power & Light employees. I retired from Aquila, but it was bought by KCPL, so I am officially a retiree of theirs now. At least that is where the check comes from. At the meeting, I was elected to the club's Board of Directors which is an honor since I am the first former Aquila person to serve on the Board.

Following lunch at the Hall of Fame center, we got a great tour of the stadium which has just undergone a major upgrade. The scoreboard below is the latest technology and at the time of installation, it was the largest one of its kind.

This is all new.........the Hall of Fame Center and a Stroud's Restaurant. For those who don't know, Stroud's is just about the best pan fried chicken in the world according to many

culinary experts.

Center & Right Field with more new facilities.

A little closer view of the Party Deck.

There used to be more fountains at the stadium, but the new construction eliminated all but these.

One of the many indoor restaurants where you can eat and watch.

The visitors locker room. We couldn't go in the Royals locker room because it is off limits given the personal nature of the items that players keep there during the playing season.

A nice original mural.

Entrance to another exclusive club at the stadium.

Sigrid in the dugout.

The press box.

Who knows.........this might have been the infamous Jason Whitlock's seat.

The view from the press box.

The press room. This is where all the interviews are conducted at the stadium.