Mr. Steinhoff’s Answer

Mr. Steinhoff asks “How much is the Owner’s Suite?”

For a three-day cruise, an Owner’s Suite costs about the same as a Balcony Suite on a seven-day cruise. That is about $1,000 per person.

Why would you want one for three days when you can cruise for seven days for the same price?

Let me count the ways.

First, do you like standing in line?

When you have an Owner’s Suite, you don’t stand in line for anything. That includes getting on the ship, getting off the ship, or getting anything you want when you are on the ship.

Second, do you like space? The Owner’s suite has a balcony bigger than my living room. The suite itself is as good as any hotel room I have ever seen.

Most times I have cruised, there wasn’t space to put the junk you bought, much less the stuff you brought. The Owner’s Suite has enough space for most everything you own, even if you didn’t bring it, and everything you bought.

How about cool? The Owner’s Suite has a hot tub on the balcony. It is your own private hot tub. Isn’t that cool? Or hot?

How about service? The Owner’s Suite comes with a Butler and a Consierge. The Butler brings you anything you want. The Consierge makes sure you get whatever you want in terms of restaurant reservations, shore excursions, whatever. And you don’t have to worry about standing in line. You want it, you got it.

At about 5 p.m. every day they bring you hors deuvers. There is a chilled bottle of champagne in your suite when you arrive.

For breakfast and lunch, you have a private dining room with premium food for which you are not charged.

You are constantly invited to private functions, like the cocktail party where you meet the Captian and major officers. Then there are the ones where you get free booze for considering another cruise.

You are escorted everywhere, if you want to be. The best seats for the shows are yours.

I leave it up to you. Have you ever been treated like this?

Akavit

I’m going on a week long cruise tomorrow. This is going to be my 10th or 11th or 12th cruise – I simply can’t remember. You can give me a break. I started cruising 30 years ago.

I have learned some things along the way, however. So I am going to remind myself of them in hopes that this is a more successful cruise than the last dozen or so.

I hereby resolve that:

I won’t think the mandatory lifeboat drill is draining half an hour out of my cruise time. It shows me who the passengers in my area are, where to assemble in an emergency, and, if I watch, how they react. I am a certifited SCUBA diver and I have filled up a log book with dives. I don’t like to dive with people who don’t take the buddy rule seriously. I don’t like anyone who doesn’t take safety seriously. Should anything happen on the cruise, I want to know as much about the safety procedures as I can because I know most people will know nothing. Should anything happen, I’ll probably be helping the crew.

I won’t try to drink Akavit with the officers. This shit is 40 percent alcohol. They are used to it. It is made in Scandinavia and it is Latin for “water of life.” If you grew up on 3.2 beer, this shit is “water of death.” I have no idea how they survive drinking this stuff, much less how they run the ship.

I will not try to eat everything in the galley in the first three days of the trip. I’ve tried this before. Actually, you can’t help but try. When was the last time you had hot and cold running free food? Only an a cruise. The only hope you have is that the third day is a day at sea and it is rough. Then you learn how 95-pound runway models eat. Or actually do the opposite.

I will not go to the spa. This is a place where you pay $250 for a gorgeous oriental girl to rub hot rocks on your skin for an hour. Now, assuming you are sane, how much would you really pay anyone to rub hot rocks on your skin? If you don’t know, I’ll be happy to rub hot rocks on your skin for $100 an hour. I’ll do it all day long. I’ll make about four times as much as I did when I was programming computers. I’m not a gorgeous oriental girl, so you get $150 an hour off.

I will go into the casino, but only because they have designed the ship so that is the only way you can get from the front to the back when it rains. Whenever this is necessary, I advise you to leave your wallet in your cabin. Enough said?

I will not go into the casino late at night.

I swear I will not.

Not even if it has the last bar open.

And I’ll put money on that.

Dream Come True

The Owner's Suite on the Norwegian Sky.

I have been a cruising fan for 20 years. My first cruise was a week long trip on the SS Norway, formerly the SS France, at the time the longest cruise ship ever built at 1,035 feet. It was a trans-Atlantic ship before being rebuilt for the Carribbean trade.

Those were the days of two seatings for dinner and at least two nights where my off-the-rack suit was outed by the tuxes of other passengers.

I still remember the people at my table, including the 20-something plumber from Philadelphia who immediately convinced our table server that he needed two of everything and regailed us with stories about drinking with the crew and actually waking up one morning under the pool table in the crew quarters.

I’ve been on ships owned by all of the cruise lines that operate out of Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

I’ve had cabins so low in the ship that you were lulled to sleep by the engines. I’ve had cabins on older ships where you could hear conversations in the neighboring cabin. I’ve had cabins with balconies and I will advise you never to have anything less.

Last weekend, I put up the money and got what I have dreamed about ever since that first cruise – the Owners Suite. For the price of a week long cruise, I got the Owner’s Suite on the Norwegian Sky for three whole days. I invited my friend Bev to go along.

There was a person to walk us on to the ship. He took us to our room two hours early to drop our bags. Then he escorted us to a private dining room for an exclusive lunch – only others who booked Owner’s Suites or Penthouses were allowed.

When we returned to our cabin, there was complimentary champaigne and chocolate-covered strawberries. They stocked our private bar with three bottles of booze that we picked. We had a private hot tub on a bow-facing balcony that was easily as big as my living room.

Then there was the cocktail party where we met the Master of the ship. That is above the Captain, who was officially titled the Staff Captain, according to the org chart posted on Deck 6. He actually seemed offended when we stood to meet him. No one else did, but I figured it best to stand when meeting someone who can either marry you or hang you, not that there was call to do either.

Our concierge, Virginia, called us each evening to see if we wanted to book one of the specialty restaurants. There are monitors around the ship to show which ones are filling up. I finally realized that, if you are in an Owner’s Suite, it doesn’t matter. You go wherever you want to go.

When we went to the show, Virginia met us and escorted us to our special seating.

We had a butler named Jeffery who overdid everything. We had an expresso machine in the cabin. And a computer, of course. The bed had memory-foam.

The morning we left, we had breakfast again in the exclusive restaurant and Virginia escorted us around the lines to disembark.

Did it live up to my dreams?

You betcha.

Would I do it again?

Sure, but wait till you see the next generation of ships. They will make us nostalgic about the “small” ships like the Norwegian Sky that are larger than the SS Norway.

Kick the tires and light the fires

Don Ramon is opening on Clematis Street.

I pumped up the tires and took out my baby recumbent today for the first time since laying off cycling at the start of the summer from hell. The weather was cool, comfortable, and extremely welcomed after the hottest summer I can remember.

The Palm Beach Lake Trail has lost none of its charm since last I rode it. It still is a car free ride through manicured foliage past homes nobody I know can afford. Christmas lights were going up on the house just east of the docks at the north end of the trail. There are either new buoys in the inlet, or old ones I don’t remember that have been repainted.

John F. Kennedy’s presidential yacht, the Honey Fitz, is no longer docked at the first pier north of the Flagler Memorial Bridge and there are only a handful of yachts along the trail until you reach the Sailfish Club.

On the way home, I saw the signs saying a new Don Ramon’s is going in at Clematis and Olive and will feature a 24-hour window. This is good news since Don Ramon’s is an old favorite for lots of former Palm Beach Post people. And a 24-hour window means you can feed very late at night if you can muster an armed guard to get you there.

So there you have it. The 2009-2010 bicycle season for me is now officially open. Note that I start it well before New Year’s Day so I won’t have to give anything away on this one. I won’t project a mileage figure for the season. I’ll also limit the math to 1/10ths of a mile instead of 1/100ths because my bicycle computers are off by as much as half a mile over a 12 mile course and I don’t want to do a Steinhoff with GPS machines and software. And I’ll tell you my route.

Good luck to all of you and remember, it is all about the ride.

Ride report:

#	Date	Route	Miles	Total
1	Nov. 17	Palm Beach Lake Trail	11.5	11.5
2	Nov. 18	Palm Beach Lake Trail	11.4	22.9

End of Contest

By viral request, that is all of you, I am ending the contest.

There is no way I can make 3,000 miles a year on a bicycle in South Florida. The summer is just too long and too hot.

The winner is Jan Norris.

Not only did she come closest to picking the day, but she also is the only one of you who needs lights.

I must say that I am disappointed. I thought I could make it.

But Norris was right. I couldn’t take the heat. Global warming and age, you know.

A couple of years ago I rode during the summer. I actually commuted to The Post from 10 miles out. A lot.

This year I just couldn’t do it.

Lazy is a word that comes to mind, but it isn’t that. Ask Steinhoff how many miles he put on this summer and he will measure it in light years but only because he rode his computer a gazillion times around the world and his bike around Lake Worth only a couple of times.

I didn’t expect to complete 3,000 miles and win the contest. I just didn’t think the summer would be so crushing. And, as far as I can tell, summer was over only a week or so ago.

I could still finish, but I would have to ride four hours a day for the rest of the year. That isn’t going to happen.

Instead, I’m going on a cruise. There will be bicycle simulators in the gym, which I will ignore. There will be Moet beside the hot tub and Rum Runners at the pool bar.

I’ll pump the tires and light the fires when I get back.

I’ll order Jan’s lights next week.

Thank you all for your interest, your comments, and your fly reports. And thank you mostly for being my friends.

Serendipity

Last weekend I went to Disney to meet my friend Beverly and some of her friends for diner. The next morning I went to the Magic Kingdom to check it out.

Some things don’t change, like the moon’s cycle around the earth, which is on display tonight.

I was surprised to find that the Magic Kingdom hasn’t changed either, except that Space Mountain is down for a rebuild.

Everything I saw was pretty much what I saw 15 years ago and, truth be told, 40 years ago when I went there for the first time.

I rode the “Small World” ride and it was exactly the same. I guess the magic still works for a seven-year-old.

New magic doesn’t alwasy work. I shot some stuff with my new Panasonic Lumix camera with its famed Leica lens and most of it came out blurred. I can’t explain it. Maybe some ice cream on the lens. I’ll have to look.

But I shot this protrait of Bev at a Halloween party and it reminds me of the stuff DDD used to shoot – that’s David Douglas Duncan to you – except he shot in black and white.

It is the artificial intelligence’s fault that it focused on someone behind her, but it is serendipity that rendered her softly as it should have.

I lost some nice shots, but I got this one, which is worth all the rest.