December 17 - Bridgetown, Barbados

 It was nice to arrive at land again.  We didn't dock until 10:00 am and the morning was very quiet since we changed Cruise Directors today.  No lectures (they all got off here as well) and no trivia.  We were able to do another load of laundry since many people had gone off on excursions leaving the machines available.  It's really hard with only 6 sets of machines for the whole ship of 620 people.  The penthouses do get 3 free laundry services, so many people probably use those, easing the demand some.

So after our laundry was done, we ventured off to see what was going on outside.  There were some shops right here at the terminal, but the prices seemed a bit high.  So we headed off to town.  It was hot and humid again.  Since it was Sunday, it seemed pretty quiet.  We didn't really make it into the town center but checked out a couple of little tourist shops.

It's a pretty industrial port and we had to take a shuttle to get to the gate area.

This looked like a cute shopping center, but it was closed.

I guess a "friendly bookie" is better than an enemy bookie. (You'll have to click on this to enlarge it to read the sign.)

After an hour or so, we headed back.  I had a small lunch at the buffet on board which wasn't that great, but then ran into trivia teammates, Mishawn and George, who said they had greata flying fish sandwiches at the little grill in the pier shopping area.  We thought that sounded good so headed back out to the shuttle again.  Unfortunately, by the time we got there around 2:00 pm, they had run out of the flying fish.  Rats.  You would have thought they'd have a good supply since there were 4 ships in port today.  Ah well, not to be. We had a beer and chatted with a couple from a different ship who shared our table.

It poured rain after we got back, fortunately.  We hung out in the cabin before joining Jan and Tom in the upper lounge for a beverage before heading to the Red Ginger for dinner.  It was delicious as usual, although the sorbet dessert was almost tasteless.  Then we were able to join the weekly sibling Zoom with a remarkably good quality connection.