Key West

Thursday - We docked in Key West at about 10:00. It is about 60 degrees and there is nothing special we wanted to do, so we stayed onboard and made the Welcome calls to all of the Ensemble passengers. In doing that I found that no one had received their welcome letters. Back to the “Front Desk”. She told me they were delivered last night… after some checking she found them and said “they forgot”. The letters will be delivered right away. It is now 3 hours later and we haven’t seen them yet, but we will keep checking. Things are a bit more disorganized than on past Holland America cruises. An example - our steward came in last night at 10:30 to turn down the bed and deliver the HAL gifts. We were already in bed, as I expect most people were on the first night. They are still saying all the glitches are due to the long dry dock and it will get back to normal soon.


The ship is lovely, at least the main areas which aren’t still under construction. The aft pool and several aft decks are closed for construction that is supposed to be completed today… it doesn’t look promising. We just looked down from the lido deck and I’d guess there isn’t a chance of it being finished today. The library seems to have a fairly large selection of books which I love as I spend most of my down time reading. I was able to connect to the internet easily from our cabin this morning - This is really important to me!!

The Ensemble letters were finally delivered about dinner time - I had made several other trips to the desk asking about them. It seems that over half of the people in the group were moved at boarding so our manifest with the cabin numbers needed a lot of updating.

Friday will be a sea day… more soon.