Cruise Day Fourteen: Coconut Yogurt

Packing for a 17-day cruise presents some interesting problems, particularly when there are six consecutive sea days at the end. You have to make sure that you have enough of certain things that you cannot do without, like allergy pills. You have to make sure that you have enough clothes, although the ship's handy and relatively inexpensive self-serve laundry has been a godsend.

In our case, you have to make sure you have enough reading material as well. I am working my way through the second-from-last book I brought with me, including one book I bought in Philadelphia (I needed to add it to another book I was buying my dad for Chanukah to get to use a discount coupon and I figured it might be needed) and one I bought in the Dublin airport. If I finish the book I started today, I will only have the Philadelphia book left unread. Marjorie has read nearly everything she brought, too, and is just about finished with one we bought in Gibraltar (a history of the Mediterranean, which seemed to cover a lot of the places we went to for some reason), and I think all she has left is another book we bought in Dublin airport. I'm sure glad the bookstore in Dublin airport was open that early in the morning.

When you're running a cruise line, the same thing applies: you have to make sure you have everything you need for a 17-day cruise, and once you leave your last port, you'd better have enough of everything.

In this regard, Princess has done an okay, but not a great job. There is still plenty of fresh fruit available, the milk still tastes fresh (at least on cereal), the meat still tastes good (I assume a lot of it is frozen), and they do a lot of baking on board.

Two small bitches. One is that they had had tons of lemon slices avaiable at every meal, which have been great to put in iced tea and ice water as well as tea, but now they only seem to have lime left. Lime doesn't make it for me. I have to admit that Carnival was worse last year; they had lemon slices available only sporadically. The lemons here ran out today, so it's not like a huge problem to live with for one more day.

The other problem is really less explicable. At the beginning of the cruise, there was a nice variety of yogurt, clearly purchased in Europe, available at breakfast. There was cherry, there was lemon, there was peach. It was very good, too.

Since we left Madeira, however, they have had only one variety of yogurt available all the time, and it's coconut. They usually have plain (which is all Marjorie wants) and they usually have banana, but there has been nothing else. And as far as I can tell, no one is eating the coconut yogurt.

It's not like coconut yogurt is some kind of Madeiran specialty; the palm trees in that part of the world are either ornamental or date palms. They do indeed grow a lot of bananas on Madeira, but I doubt very much that they are processed into yogurt there (no dairy pasture). Instead, I suspect that someone screwed up in their purchasing or their logistics and either we got the wrong yogurt, or someone was trying to be a hero and got a bargain on a ton of coconut yogurt, or something is really screwy in their purchasing program.

As I think I've mentioned before, the demographics of the passengers on a 17-day transatlantic cruise in December are very different from, say, a week long cruise to the Caribbean at the same time. At least 95% of the passengers on this ship are older than us, and based on the people we've met I'd guess that nearly 80% are retired. A huge number live in Florida either all year long, or a relatively wealthy snowbirds who come down from Canada or the US north for the winter, and used this cruise as a means of making their transition to their southern homes.

As a result, the demographics of what happens on the cruise are different as well. There are fewer people who stay up late; when Marjorie and I went up to the Lido Deck for a cup of tea after midnight tonight, there were four other people there. On our last cruise, there were a lot of teenagers and twentysomethings and they would be checking out anywhere that served food at nearly any hour of the day or night (Carnival had a wonderful 24-hour pizza and caesar salad bar that I miss on this cruise; fresh pizza is avaiable on the Star Princess only from 11 am to 6 pm, which is pretty limiting.

But while it is possible that the demographics on this ship are different from usual cruises, and therefor the logistics would be different, too, in fact Princess (and Carnival, which owns it as well as many other cruise lines) have enough data on these repositioning cruises that no one should have been surprised. So the absence of cherry and peach yogurt remains inexplicable. And rather annoying, if you've ever tasted coconut yogurt.