May 2022

Firstly, my thanks to Richard for holding down the fort while I was away. I have to say it is the worst cruise I have ever been on. It was Adonia’s first sailing back since covid struck and it was just not ready. There was no excuse as they had months to put everything back into place plus an extra eight days that they announced they were cutting the cruise by. I won’t even begin to bore you with details as those that follow my Facebook page will have seen my various posts.

The most unforgivable things were the lies and misdirection of the captain and his crew in the announcements. I collared the captain on one of the days and asked him why he couldn’t be more transparent in what he was saying and he replied “I can only say what head office tells me to”, so obviously gone are the days when the skipper was in charge of his own vessel.

Covid was rife and instead of ordering a test on everyone, they left it to passengers to come forward if they had symptoms. Ridiculous as by that time they had infected loads of others. We had to go to Barbados twice to offload those with symptoms onto Queen Victoria which was acting as an isolation vessel for crew and passengers who had been infected with the virus. This didn’t just pertain to Adonia but any other Carnival ship sailing the Caribbean.

Coming back the seven sea days saw no one in reception, no pool bar open, no librarian and most of the buffet closed. And one of the speciality restaurants was closed permanently since leaving Southampton. The crew had gone down hard and it was a complete shambles. Enough said. I don’t blame them for the covid cases but for the way they handled everything.

There was a long delay getting back off the ship in Southampton as we didn’t get clearance for ages and on getting to the car park I found my driving glasses severed in half and the satnav broken courtesy of the valet service. I might very well have done that journey a hundred times but I am useless without the GPS. I had to use packaging tape on my glasses and my son was guiding me to the motorway by talking into my phone which was laying on the passenger seat.

This was 1^st April and I had made arrangements to stay in Harrow so I could see my son and celebrate my birthday the next day with him. Several hours later the dog started barking at the front door. Justine’s father opened it to show the dog there was nothing to be excited about but he was very wrong. At first I thought someone might have tried to break into my car to get at the luggage but Greg shouted to me that was not the case (do you like the pun, lol) but that it did involve my car. Getting to the front door I saw police everywhere; they had closed off the road from both ends and there were car parts everywhere. It would seem an idiot coming the other way had lost control of her vehicle, crossed the road, mounted the pavement and hit my car shunting it onto the other side of the road and quite a ways from the house.

Again I won’t bore you with the details but it was probably the worst birthday I have ever had. The insurance company couldn’t supply me with a courtesy car until a week later as there was a shortage of small automatic cars so my poor son had to make the six-hour round trip to take me home on the Monday. I had to get back as the continuation of my book publicity was re-starting on Tuesday. Anyway, the car was a write-off and so began a hunt for a new car.