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| Packin' 'em in |
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| Looking Up? Things Will Start Looking Up When We Leave. |
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| Lower Deck, Looking Forward |
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| Lower Deck, Looking Aft |
In my album for last year's cruise, I talked briefly about the tenders: The Norway draws too much water to dock at any of the ports in the Carribean, so the passengers have to ride in and out of port on smaller ships (yes, they are officially "ships," based on gross tonnage and passenger capacity) called tenders. I thought I'd try to capture a little more of the "tender experience" in this album.
At first blush, the tenders seem like a pain in the keester -- I mean, it's so much more convenient to be able to stroll off and on the ship whenever you feel like it. But it depends on where you are when you stroll off the ship. In a lot of the ports of call (St. Thomas, for example), the other cruise ships moor at a dock that's pretty far away from the action, so you still have to take a bus, or taxi, or some other means of transport to get to the good stuff. Norway's small tenders can deliver you right into the heart of things. And then pick you up and take you back. So it's not all bad. Having to get tender tickets is the real pain.
Norway has two tenders, which are stowed on the forward deck when not in use (last picture, below). When they're packed full, they are really packed. For the first picture on this page, I just held the camera as far above my head as I could, and shot. It was taken from the upper deck (the tenders have two decks).
The next picture is what you see when you are sitting impatiently on the upper deck of a tender, waiting for it to leave for shore, and you look up.
The next couple of pictures were taken on the lower deck, when the tender was returning to the Norway (and was less crowded).
At the bottom of this page I have pictures, from an upper deck of the Norway, of a tender zooming off, a tender zooming back, and a tender really, really full of returning pasengers.
