2004 Europe

ms Noordam





April 15 – After breakfast at the hotel we boarded the shuttle to go to the ms Noordam. Even though it was just after noon we were taken straight on the ship and to our rooms. The ship had arrived in Tampa 4 days earlier and they were all ready for us. We have room 711 on B deck. An extraordinarily large E class room. It’s the largest room we’ve ever had on a ship. There are only two rooms like this on the ship and both are located just aft of the doors for the gangway on the starboard and port sides of the ship. We are on the starboard side. I think these rooms were once offices for one of the officers but were redone as passenger space during a refit.



The Noordam is a small ship by modern standards at 33,930 gross tons. The other ships in the HAL fleet are mostly 55,000 to 65,000 gross tons and the new Vista class ships are about 85,000 tons. The QM2 is the largest cruise ship currently afloat at 150,000 gross tons.



I managed to get my new Fujitsu laptop connected to the ship’s wireless network and am ready to send reports back to the USA. For some reason I can’t send mail to AOL accounts from the network on the ship. I had the same problem while I was on the Kinko’s network several years ago while traveling in Denver. I hope I can find a way around that. Maybe I’ll use my AOL ‘bring your own access’ account to send to my AOL buddies.



April 16 – The first of 7 full days at sea. The current ghost band of Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians is on the ship, playing big band music as arranged and scored by Guy and his brother. I enjoy the brass and woodwind sections. Two years ago HAL decided to take the brass section out of the ship’s bands completely and cut back on the woodwinds leaving only one. They added a keyboard and guitar. They theory being that the keyboard could be configured to play the brass parts where necessary. As a theory that’s interesting, but in practice it is a disaster. The ship’s band’s music now sounds very flat. I think they were updating the general music mix to use less ‘big band’ music and move into the 50-60’s oldies that their clients now view as their music. Unfortunately, the person who designed the new band configuration forgot or never knew how important brass is to that type of music. Another place this shortcoming shows up is in accompanying the performers who bring charts for the band to play to back up their shows. Most of the charts have a brass line that the keyboard now plays and it’s terrible. Every cruise evaluation I do for HAL includes this sentence. Please, please bring back the BRASS section of the band. This is another reason I’m glad the Guy Lombardo band is with us. They have a full brass section and lots of woodwinds. Unfortunately all they play is ‘big band’ music so the 50-60s oldies still sound weak and flat.



There are two lecturers on board. One is a historian. His first lecture was about the train that was built across Mexico, at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, to carry cargo from the Atlantic to the Pacific 7 years before the Panama Canal was finished. It did well but after the canal was finished it went broke in 3 years. It was much faster and cheaper to ship through the canal. The seas are fairly smooth. The ship started moving a little late in the evening. He’s a college professor somewhere and all I can say is I hope his students have large reserves of NoDoze. The information he has is fine, but his presentation is stilted and boring and his speech patterns are distracting. In short, I’ll probably skip his future lectures.



Diana and I have sailed on the ms Noordam before, a 12-day Christmas cruise in 1990. We also sailed on her sister ship the ms Niew Amsterdam on a 16-day Panama Canal cruise and a 35-day South Pacific Cruise in 1986 and 1991 respectively. We had forgotten how much we liked the smaller ships. It was very nostalgic to be back aboard. HAL sold the Niew Amsterdam several years ago and is selling the Noordam this November, lease with option to buy actually, to the same company. They are getting a little old and don’t have the modern amenities that the newer cruisers like, balcony rooms, etc. Since these things don’t mean much to Diana or I, we are a little sad to see the older ships leave the fleet.

(c) 2004 Rod Longenberger