I have never been so glad I did NOT take an excursion.

It’s been an eventful trip, especially for the captain.

I’m quite confident the entire population of this ship has smart phones. I know this not because of the demographic, but because of the cacophony when the following was blasted into space:

Before the advent of cellphones, the captain would’ve received the warning, quietly notified the crew and there we go.

Now, we have a horde of people worried about going airborne as we chugged along the Hudson.

It’d been raining hard, so there had been no going outside, so I was relaxing in the cabin. Buggered if I’m sitting in the hallway for 40 minutes. I stayed put.

It was, of course, fine, but the poor staff had to go out to try to secure the furniture.

Then, the next day, we’d all agreed none of us were interested in touring West Point.

However, we weren’t allowed to dock there; we had to tender in. Not sure why, unless there’s something about the military doesn’t allow non-DOD vessels to park.

I asked if I could hop off the ship and grab an Uber to the nearby town where there was a farmers market. The Hudson Valley is renowned for their apples and the harvest is coming in… yuuuuummm…

They were hesitant about it – they’d not done this stop before and were concerned the academy wouldn’t want someone there who wasn’t with a guide. Granny said not to rock the boat (arf, arf).

Sigh. Okay. I guess I’ll pound out laundry and just relax.

As we ate lunch, the ship started moving like a bat outta hell. What the heck?

You remember the rain? Yeah. The cruise line decided it was too dangerous to try to get almost 100 mostly elderly people onto the tenders.

Somebody’s gonna break a hip.

The alternative: head back to where we docked the day before, an almost two hour cruise back up the Hudson.

That little pointy-out bit on the west bank in the bottom of the picture? That’s West Point, where we offloaded all but 14 of the passengers.

I gather that wasn’t the best bus ride back to Milton, NY, where we met up with them. Apparently the busses reeked of French fries as stopping for lunch wasn’t an option… they needed to get us back on schedule and this rather buggered it up. I wonder if that MacDonalds got much warning.

Still, I’d wager to guess that would be better than arriving back from the farmers market, Uber disappearing into the distance as I realized the… ship… wasn’t… there.