3 nights, 2 days, 1 ship… Pacific Dawn ‘Food & Wine Cruise’ - Part 1

So, it’s taken me an entire week to get back to Steemit after my pre-cruise venting session but finally I have managed to pull it together.

To recap breifly, I was feeling exhausted after my Mum’s recent passing, caring for my Dad, and my immune system staging a mutiny, so I grabbed a last minute cruise deal for 3 nights and 2 days out of Brissy (aka Brisbane, Queensland) to attempt a reboot and recovery.

This ‘Food and Wine Cruise’ on Pacific Dawn was touted as the perfect short getaway, and for those of you considering such a cruise I will give you a blow by blow of events in the following posts, but this post will just focus on the getting to the ship phase of the journey, which turned out to be it's own little adventure.

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Pre-cruise prep:

Because I care for my Dad I had been cooking his meals in preparation of my departure so he just had to throw them in the microwave. Also I had asked the neighbour to hop the fence daily to check on him and also had @mumofmany come check on and call him daily too. So with drop ins in place and freezer and pantry stocked, home front sorted!

All that was left to do was drive to Brissy, park the car in short term under cover parking and board the ship. Sounds so simple doesn’t it…. Well apparently not quite so simple! It seems nothing I plan goes quite so simply…

Pre-cruise shore tour - ambulance:

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For those of you brave enough to read my ramblings regularly, you will know that 48 hours before sailing I was sent to hospital in an ambulance by my doctor. You can read my post about that little debacle here: https://steemit.com/health/@aussiesteem/sometimes-you-just-need-to-vent

However, determined I was not going to miss, at the very least 3 nights of wonderfully cool air con and 2 days of snoozing on a deck chair in the shade somewhere, when I discovered the hospital registrar and the endochronologist were not coming to my aid, self- help became the order of the day!

NB: I am not advocating self medicating for anyone, especially those with complex medical conditions like prednisone dependancy! I have had a decade to learn how to manage my conditions. Also I knew there was a doctor on board the ship who had my full medical history and I was seeing my own doctor in 3 days and my travel companion was a nurse, so I was very well supported.

Pre-cruise - car hire service

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Then 36 hours out I get a slightly frantic call from @mumofmany saying her car has imploded! With 6 children more than half of which have autism and need to be taken to therapy and doctor’s appointments as well as school, she needs to borrow my 8 seater SUV while her car is being resuscitated. I know how that feels LOL…

Even though I had upped my prednisone dose I had promised my doctor I wouldn’t drive so despite needing a couple more items before I left, I had to do without them, so no drama. I would, just need my SUV back in time to drive to the ship (my friend would drive, with me as a passenger).

Of course, 12 hours out @mumofmany calls again and needless to say the mechanic doesn’t have the parts. Fortunately, my friend that was sailing with me, took her car instead. So still not much of a kerfuffel, I phoned the short-term parking folks to let them know we were bringing a different car and of course, they wanted to know the rego, the make the model all information I didn’t have. So 2 more phone calls later it was all sorted, everyone was back on the same page.

Now I can’t sleep!

Unforunately, my increased dose of prednisone now decided to kick in with avengance and I couldn’t sleep at all. However, Dad could, so I’m trying to clean and organise and well run around like a crazy person without waking him up.

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The result was that I didn’t actually go to bed at all the night before departure, I rearranged my office, filed, dusted, packed and repacked and generally sorted and collected items for donation and rubbish tip runs when I returned,

I need my car!

Finally comes daylight, and I’m packing the last couple of items in my handbag when I realise I can’t find my sunglasses anywhere. Why? Because they are in my car…. Urgent last minute call to @mumofmany to request drive by to drop off my sunglasses before I get picked up for the drive to Brissy. My sunnies are prescription and so I can’t just pick up a new pair at the first servo down the road, damn it!

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We have lift off:

My friend arrived and we loaded my bags in her car, @mumofmany turned up with my sunnies, I gave Dad final emergency instructions and pointed out all the food locations and reconfirmed with the neighbour that he would keep an eye on Dad who is prone to use chainsaws and jackhammers when I’m not around to keep an eye on him.

Finally, we were on the road, with plenty of time to spare and feeling very much in festive holiday mode, we departed the Sunshine Coast, but we were both hanging for a coffee.

Held hostage at McDonalds…

So at the first Maccas we spotted we pulled into the drive thru for a caffine fix. This should have taken at most 5 minutes… Should have! Any time, any lane... Hmmmm

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Firstly, we sat at the speaker waiting to take our order for a good 5 minutes. We could hear them talking among themselves in the store (they had left the mic on) but clearly didn’t have the speaker on to pick up customers orders…

We tried shouting at the speaker, even beeping our horn. Nothing! It was one of the 2 lane drive thrus, so we could hear and see the customers in the lane to our left being served.

Then we wound down our window and called out to the customer’s ordering in the next lane and asked them if they could pass a message to their server, that we would really, really like to order.

That was eventually successful and coffee was finally ordered. Then unbelievably it took about another 10 minutes for them to make the coffee. Clearly they were having a bad day! Now we were a little bit behind schedule and still had quite a long way to go...

Federal, State and Local Government conspiracy? Or just crappy GPS?

Back on the road again, I mentioned to my friend that when I cruised in September I had a lot of trouble with my GPS not being able to finding the short-term cruise parking centre, despite putting in all the correct details.

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There was a lot of construction and roadworks taking place around the cruise terminal in September 2017 and clearly GPS does not cope well with this kind of activity. We laughed about this and carried on driving.

Eventally, my friend's GPS brought us a few streets from the cruise terminal and the short-term parking centre and I was surprised to see that there was still a lot of roadworks going on. Also my friends GPS brought us in an entirely different way than mine had in September 2017.

Not phased, because I thought this would avoid the debacle I had experienced, we followed the instructions and found ourselves in an industrial area, at a dead end being told to turn left onto a street that simply didn’t exist. Right! Houston we have a problem…

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We exchanged a look, checked the time and decided despite being held hostage at McDonalds and a bit more traffic than we had expected due to all the roadworks on the Gateway Arterial and the roadworks we seemed to be falling victim to right now, we still had a little wiggle room before technical lateness had to be declared.

We chucked a u-turn, back tracked and discovered we could see the back of the ship. That was at least heartening, the ship was in sight. We couldn’t get to it, but at least we were in the right area. 'Like no place on Earth' was right, it may as well have been on Mars at this point because we couldn't get to the big bugger!

Additionally, there was a very determined officially dressed woman standing in the gateway to the carpark in front of the ship and it was fairly clear from her demeanor that we were probably not going to be allowed in there without a police escort.

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I pulled out my phone and called the short-term cruise parking centre and they assured me that the street they were located in (only 100 metres from the ship) was directly opposite the driveway occuppied by the very determined lady.

No problem, we can see the ship, it’s not exactly small! We will just drive towards the enormous great ship and then turn down the street opposite the driveway entrance…

Yeah, not so much. Remember those roadworks I mentioned! They (being the Brisbane City Council or possibly Main Roads Queensland or even the Federal Government, who knows the actual kulprit/s) had put up fluro tape, witches hats, oneway signs, turn left signs, no entry signs and deployed large quantities of seemingly annoyed workers, determined to stop us from gaining access to said street, or pretty much any street that might be helpful actually.

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I say annoyed because there seemed to be some confusion about whether they wanted us to ‘STOP’ or ‘SLOW’ and bloody great dump trucks kept backing out in front of us almost taking us out, at almost every turn.

Finally, despite the best efforts of our road workers, we visually located the relevant street, but there was no way in hell we could get to it, our friends in high vis had it well and truly blocked off. Undetered, we continued past the street until we came to a 'pop up' round about, which we entered and went back the way we just came, again, this time on the correct side of the huge concrete barriers to enter the relevant street.

Of course we hadn’t anticipated the addition of a huge water tanker to the proceedings! This tanker now pushed directly in front of us, and decided that right this moment was when he was going to water the plants that had been recently planted in the median strip in the centre of the road.

Suddenly we were in the middle of 'Cyclone Roadworks'. Torrential amounts of a water poured onto the windscreen and of course we had no visibility at all. By the time we finished cursing the moron in the water truck, we had gone past our street and needed to repeat the whole process from the 'pop up' round about for a second time.

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Finally, despite the universe throwing a few curve balls at us, we made it to the short-term cruise parking, unloaded our bags, were loaded into the shuttle bus and on our way to cruising pleasure. Of course not without a smile and a wave to the very formally dressed, stern looking lady at the gate to the port car park!

Thanks for reading...