The Cruise:Part 2

Monday morning, the first morning on the cruise, I woke up and turned on the television. One of the channels had a map of the route the cruise was to take down the Florida. The map showed where the ship was currently on the route. My initial impression was that we hadn't traveled very far for having been on the boat for 15 hours. We joined my family for breakfast and I expressed my surprise that the next morning we were suppose to be in Florida when we hadn't covered much distance thus far. They didn't think much of it until early in the afternoon when the cruise director and captain of the boat made an announcement that the "electrical" problem they had the night before was still a problem. The problem was that one of the ship's two propulsion systems wasn't working, so we were traveling at half speed. They had tried unsuccessfully throughout the night the fix the problem and because of a bad storm their only choice was to pull into port in Norfolk, Virginia and continue to work on the propulsion system. Of course this little detour would change the itinerary of the cruise; over the course of the next couple days we would found out exactly how much. People were very, very upset. Some people rioted, and were arrested and removed from the ship.
Initially the plan was to stay in Norfolk until the problem was fixed and the storm passed, which they were hopeful would be around 5pm on Tuesday. We decided not to get off the boat on Tuesday because the weather was bad and we figured we could keep ourselves entertained doing things on the ship. Early Tuesday afternoon they made an announcement that we wouldn’t be leaving that night because they hadn’t been able to fix the propulsion system. Chad, my brother, and I decided to get off the ship and check out the town of Norfolk. The tide had come in very high because of the storm, so when we got off the ship we ended up having to walk through 8 inches of water in order the get into Norfolk.
Here’s a picture of my brother and I in Norfolk. It was very cold and very rainy. From what I could tell though, it was a beautiful city. I would like to visit it again some day, but not under the same circumstances.

Stay tuned...