Departure day!

After returning the rental car to the airport, I took the slowest taxi from the airport to the dock (less than 2 miles away). Once the drivers realize that you are only going to the port, they take as long as possible to get you there and it cost me $13 to make the trip! Even though the ship wasn't leaving until later that night, they wanted passengers onboard by 4 pm. They told us to arrive after 11 am, so I (and a couple of hundred other passengers) thought that 1 pm would be a good time to show up. We were wrong. The ship had been in dry dock undergoing renovations and it was clear that it was not ready to take on passengers yet. We waited for over an hour in various waiting rooms before we were allowed to board the ship. When I got onboard, I found out that I had been upgraded from a small interior room to a larger exterior room with a window – nice!
After grabbing some lunch in the cafeteria, I explored the ship. The Prinsendam is smaller than the QE2 and only holds about 800 passengers and 400 crew members. The officers are mainly Dutch and European, the cabin staff are mainly Indonesian and there are lots and lots of Canadian passengers onboard. In fact, everyone at my dinner table is Canadian. Most of the passengers are younger than the QE2 crowd, although not by much. While most the the QE2 crowd looked like they were one day away from a coroner's toe tag, most of the people I have seen are between 65 and 75. But even then, it was apparent that some had waited too late to do their travelling. Soon after getting onboard we had a lifeboat drill. Just standing by the lifeboat was too much for one old lady and she collapsed right beside our lifeboat. The cruise hadn't even started and already she was on her way to the doctor's office.