We stopped at our first port of call for the cruise today, arriving it Ponta Delgada, Azores, right on schedule at 7:00 AM. We had set our wake up call for 6:30 AM, which was the earliest we had gotten up on any day so far. We have traveled something like 2,600 nautical miles since we left Ft. Lauderdale a week ago.
Arriving in Ponta Delgada
We turned in a little earlier last night, and certainly did not celebrate as much knowing we would be getting up early today.
It was a clear weather morning, and the full moon was glowing orange from the rising sun. There was another smaller ship arriving in port after us, and it was waiting outside the harbor while we tied up at the pier. We were docking right next to the town, so it is a short walk from the ship into town.
We went to the buffet for breakfast, anticipating it would be crowded with passengers trying to get an early start on our first port day. However, we were surprised that the buffet was not really that full, and we had no problems getting a table.
Regal Princess in Ponta Delgada
We do not have a lot of plans for today, other than attending Mass at the Catholic Church, which is just a few blocks from where we were docked. We are only in port from 7:00 AM until 2:00 PM, but the all aboard time is 1:30 PM.
After breakfast, we loaded up our backpacks and were off of the ship at about 8:30 AM. We walked into the town, and it appeared that there had been some sort of celebration last night. We could not tell what the event was, be we saw some young couples who had obviously been celebrating all night, and had not yet gone home. We also saw one area that had been used for an outside bar, there were plastic cups strewn all over the ground within the temporary fences of the bar area.
We sort of took the long route to the church, had we not gone into the town, and just walked along the waterfront, we would have made it there a lot quicker. The Catholic Church is in the main square of the town of Ponta Delgada. There is also an archway in the main square that is graphically used on many of the items in the stores, sort of the town icon. Normally, it is quite the photo opportunity, but today there was a large temporary stage and tent right in front of it, obviously part of the celebration from last night.
The weather here is very fickle, while it was clear and sunny in the early morning as we arrived, it was now foggy and overcast. This is typical here, and often causes problems with some of the tours that go into the mountains to see the sights there. Many times, it is just too foggy to see the lakes and volcanic caldera that are the main tourist sights.
São Sebastião Catholic Church in Ponta Delgado
Since Mass was not until 10:00 AM, we had to sit and wait for over an hour. Of course, since it was both early and a Sunday, only a couple of coffee shops were even open yet. By about 9:30 AM, the sun started to peak through the cloud/fog, with clearing skies over the ocean and some of the coast, but still very foggy up in the mountains.
We went into the church for Mass at about 9:45 AM, and it was pretty crowded with both locals, and visitors from our ship, and the other cruise ship in port.
Mass was nice, but almost entirely in Portuguese since the Azores are part of Portugal. They did read the gospel in both English and Portuguese, which was nice.
Inside of the São Sebastião Church
After Mass, we took some photos inside the church, and then headed out to wander around the town. By this time, some of the stores were open, but it was obvious that many were going to remain closed for the day.
We headed back to the pier about 11:30 AM since we were getting a little hungry. When we got near the ship, we found a long line had already formed for passengers to get through security and back onto the ship. We were not quite sure why there were lines, which was not a normal occurrence, and not something we had ever seen on the cruises we took on the Royal Princess last October, the same size ship as the Regal Princess.
Ponta Delgada Harbor
Although the line looked very long, we were back on board in about 25 minutes. Of course, everyone in line was talking about the lines and having to wait in them. It appeared that there were a lot of buses dropping off large tour groups, and that seemed to cause some of the long line issues. With the limited time we had in port today, everyone was getting back at the same time from the tours. The line really never got much shorter, we could still see the long lines even later from onboard the ship, and we were late leaving as a result of the amount of time it took to get everyone back on the ship.
Leaving Ponta Delgado
We ate lunch and then went to the stern of the ship to watch our departure. This area is known for whale watching, and we saw several whale watching tour boats head out of the port in search of the whales. I do not think this is the best season for seeing any of the whales, but that seemed to be the hope of many of the passengers who were lining the rails while we departed. Of course, we were ready with camera gear and binoculars just in case.
It was starting to get cloudy again as we departed, and once the ship started moving it was quite cool. We did not see any whales, but did see a sea turtle and a large fish, possibly a shark, swim by the ship as we sailed along the coast. Unfortunately, we did not have our camera out so we have no photo.
We headed inside to the Crooners Bar to visit with the staff there. We have a 6:30 PM dinner reservation tonight in the steakhouse, the Crown Grill, so we headed back to the room to get ready. Of course, we went by the Vines Wine Bar to have a glass of wine before dinner.
Dinner at the Crown Grill
Dinner was nice, it was busy at the Crown Grill, but the service seemed much better than in Sabatini’s two nights ago. I had lobster and a Filet Mignon and Stephanie had Chilean Sea Bass.
Both were really good. We ordered dessert, but the waiters brought us a small birthday cake and sang happy birthday to us. We had informed the reservation staff that we were celebrating our birthdays at this dinner when we made the reservations several days ago, but we had both forgotten we had told them. We also had the regular desserts we had ordered, so we were quite full when we left.
Birthday Cake at Crown Grill
After dinner, we headed to Crooners for a nightcap, and visited with the staff and several other “regulars” that we see there every night. We did not stay out too late, we were getting sleepy from getting up early today, and the big dinner we had at the Crown Grill.
We headed back to the cabin and started to watch the Matt Damon movie about him being trapped on Mars on our TV. They do have a good selection of current movies on their On Demand system. However, we were too tired to watch the entire movie, and fell asleep. The TV system does remember where you paused the movie, so we will try and finish it another night.
Stephanie and Friends at Crooner’s Bar
We do apologize for all of the typos in the posts, we have been in a hurry to get them out, and there is a new spell check/autocorrect within WordPress, the software we use for the posts. It automatically changes misspelled words to something it thinks is close, and often times puts in completely different words that the ones that were typed incorrectly, just like texting on phones. That makes it even harder to find incorrect words since there is no indication or underlining for spelling errors, they are not misspelled, just not the intended words.
It will be much cooler as we sail to Cherbourg, France over the next two days, so we should have time to add some more photos to the posts and to the photo albums.
The Azores seem like a good place to visit, but is rather far from the US. It is very pretty. Would have liked to be up in the mountains, but during clearer weather. Have a good time. Am enjoying your blog. Having dinner with Lorine & gang tonite. Love, Mom
Patty had a good time on the trip and thoroughly enjoyed the 2 excursions. One was up to the Mayan ruins and the other was to the underground caverns, both of which Paul would not have had the ability to do.