Another highlight of our recent cruise and part of our chef tour was a tour of the galley. We have done galley tours before on numerous cruises, but ordinarily they are held in the morning, and the most exciting thing you see is someone making gravy! For this tour we were taken through the galley during dinner service, and it was quite an experience!
Chef Stephen on Celebrity SummitGalley tour on Celebrity Summit
It’s been a long time since I worked in any kind of restaurant environment, and I’m not sure I actually qualify to say that I worked in any kind of restaurant! But the things we found most impressive were how clean and organized things were, and how friendly everyone was, especially while they were busy. I took a lot of photos on this tour, and these are just a few, to give you a “taste” of the experience!
Escalator from the dining room to the galleyExecutive Chef Kuldeep Singh on Celebrity SummitDessert station!Dessert station!Dessert station!Galley tour on Celebrity SummitGalley tour on Celebrity SummitGalley tour on Celebrity SummitGalley tour on Celebrity SummitGalley tour on Celebrity SummitGalley tour on Celebrity Summit
In my earlier post about the Conch Guy I mentioned that we had taken a tour in Nassau with one of the chefs from our ship. In addition to the fish market, we visited a roadside vegetable stand, a couple of guys cutting up coconuts for juice and meat, as well as a distillery. Here are a few more photos from that trip.
Chef Stephen at a roadside fish market
Our guide was Chef Stephen from Jamaica, and he explained a lot about the different things we saw and how they were used in island cooking. While we or the chef weren’t permitted to bring anything back to the ship due to health regulations and ship policy, Stephen used many of these same ingredients and themes when preparing the meal that we had back on the ship that evening.
Roadside produce standRoadside fish marketRoadside produce standRoadside produce standRoadside produce stand
In a separate post I’ll share photos from our galley tour. But unfortunately I was too busy enjoying the food to take any photos at dinner!
Sampling fresh coconut and coconut waterSampling fresh coconut and coconut waterSampling fresh coconut and coconut waterJohn Watling’s DistilleryJohn Watling’s DistilleryJohn Watling’s DistilleryJohn Watling’s Distillery
Nickel & Nickel Winery in Rutherford, near Napa, California
Back in February 2016 I wrote this post titled Storage and Clutter, about my quest to delete files and free up space on my hard drives. At that point I was through 2008 and had deleted 23,000 files worth 236GB. I’ve working slowly but steadily on that project and today I finished 2012. At this point I have jettisoned 56,000 files and reclaimed about 478 GB. Not a bad effort so far, and the farther I go the more confident I become in my previous editing. I’ll need to go a little further with my more recent years because I’m not sure I’ve been doing as good a job lately. We’ll see!
Fisher Vineyards near Santa Rosa, California
These photos are from our 2012 cruise to Alaska from San Francisco, hence the diverse geography. 🙂 They are previously unprocessed files that I discovered while I was reviewing photos, but are not ones that had been scheduled for deletion. 😉
The Golden Gate Bridge viewed from our harbor tour aboard Blue & Gold FleetA visit to the town of Napa, CaliforniaKetchikan, AlaskaAboard the White Pass & Yukon Railway in Skagway, AlaskaWhale watching cruise in Auke Bay near Juneau Alaska with Harv & Marv’s Outback Alaska aboard the M/V “Alaskan” with Captain ShawnWhale watching cruise in Auke Bay near Juneau Alaska with Harv & Marv’s Outback Alaska aboard the M/V “Alaskan” with Captain Shawn
It’s hard to believe, but until a few weeks ago we hadn’t been on a cruise in over 2 years. It’s especially hard to believe when we had previously averaged almost 2 per year for a number of years before that. Our son Kevin recently sailed on a Norwegian Cruise Line ship and liked it so much he did another one late last year and has several more on the calendar. On his advice we decided to give it a try and booked a week on Norwegian Epic out of Port Canaveral, with stops in St. Thomas, Tortola and Great Stirrup Cay, Norwegian’s private island in the Bahamas. This isn’t intended to be a cruise review, so I don’t plan to go into a lot of detail about the cruise other than to say that it was good to be back on a ship, the food was good and we had excellent weather.
While we have friends that live and have lived in Florida, we generally think of Florida as a place to go to get on a cruise ship. But we decided to do this vacation a little differently and check out some towns that we have heard about but hadn’t previously visited. That led us to New Smyrna Beach and to St. Augustine. I’ll have more about those places in another post, but wanted to get something written about the cruise itself and share a few photos.
A couple of our ports involved the possibility of wading in salt water, which of course is not friendly to cameras or other electronics. So I convinced myself that I needed to have a compact waterproof camera in the event we got wet, and purchased an Olympus “Tough TG-4” point & shoot. It got good reviews and had a reasonable pricetag, so I bought one. In fact, these photos are all from that camera. I also took the Fuji, and it managed to make its share of photos too.
Unfortunately, I never had a chance to test the waterproofness of the Olympus. Our catamaran sail to Jost Van Dyke took us practically onto the beach and I barely got my shorts wet getting ashore. And we ended up not going to the private island, preferring instead to enjoy the relative peace and quiet on the ship while most of the other 4,000+ passengers stood in line for drinks and a buffet lunch. It also gave me a chance to take a few photos on board the ship without having to worry about the paranoid and camera shy. I did say it wasn’t our first cruise!
Sunset aboard Celebrity Equinox, somewhere in the Atlantic
I’ve been away for a little while, but it looks like everyone has behaved. Kathy & I just returned to Charlotte from Fort Lauderdale, disembarking our cruise ship this morning after 10 days in the Caribbean. Sitting in the airport this morning, I looked at the weather forecast and thought seriously about hopping the flight to San Juan instead. 🙂
I’ll have some photos to post once I get them downloaded and processed, but for now here’s one I took with my tablet and processed with Snapseed. The Nexus 10 has a pretty decent camera, but it’s a little tough to hold a tablet still in the breeze on the deck of a moving ship. The colors are a little juicy, but that’s the whole point of Snapseed, right? 🙂
I had intended to post this from the airport this morning, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the photo into the post from my tablet. Strange. I guess I’ll need to do some research.
