The view from my writing desk the day we were in Noumea.

As you know, we love cruising, and we’ve finally managed to cruise after all the years of not doing so as a result of covid.

First, a poll. (Excuse the format, it’s so long since I had to do anything in WordPress except post that I haven’t yet worked out how to change the font.)

Do you capitalise covid? My logic is that when you’re specifically naming the novel coronavirus disease that started in 2019 then it’s COVID-19 (because COVID is an acronym) but in general it’s okay to refer to it non-capitalised. i.e. covid, even though technically it’s sloppy and one should refer to it as coronavirus. I think of it like flu. Lots of people shorten influenza to flu.

I suspect many people will disagree with me. Which spelling do you use?

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Which spelling do you prefer?

Which do you use?

Covid-19, Covid, coronavirus COVID-19, covid, coronavirus Covid-19, coronavirus COVID-19, coronavirus Other

Time's up

Cancel

Anyway, post-covid cruising has definitely changed, at least on the two cruise lines we have been on.

If you’ve never been cruising before, I always imagine that an equivalent would be those old-fashioned holiday camps. (A “Nobody puts baby in the corner,” type resort.) In some ways it sounds awful, but there’s a magic about being on the water that I absolutely love. I mean, look at the view (above).

There were less staff, resulting in reduced service. The internet queue, for example, was still an hour-plus long three days into the cruise because there was only one person sorting out issues.

There were less activities. On one ship practically the only daytime activities the ship ran were trivia quizzes. Now, I do love trivia, but five, six times a day? Especially when the only alternative appeared to be bingo.

Most of all though were the extra costs creeping into everything. Want to do an aerobics class? Pay for it. Want to go to a speciality restaurant? Pay standard a-la-carte prices for it. Worst of all, half the food in the supposedly ‘free’ restaurants cost money.

So, cost-cutting is a big thing.

Both cruise lines we went on were on the lower-priced end of the spectrum. We’ll try a mid-range cruise next, to see if the cost-cutting is as bad there.

Despite all that, despite internet issues, and despite my own self-introduced technical problems once the internet got sorted out, it was a great break and writing got done, even if no posts were posted.