Friday 8th September-A Norwegian Cruise starting with a visit to Costco

After  a good nights sleep and  a breakfast in the Hotel we had some time to kill and had decided that as we would need to purchase some fuel for the journey home, where better to buy this but at the fuel station at Costco Gateshead which is not far from the departure port.

A welcome aboard drink

So we headed of to the store and filled up the car and then did a walk around the store for a while before leaving for the Port of Newcastle upon Tyne where we arrived at around 12.30. We had pre-booked our car parking space and this was quite well organised and the porters came to collect our luggage from the back of the car and take it direct to ship and we would only see them later outside the cabin door.
We had to wait for about 45 minutes before boarding and we went directly to the cabin which was of a reasonable size and the good thing was it had a walk-in shower rather than a shower in a batch which we don't like when the seas are little rough.

Having changed we went to the bar for a pre-dinner drink or two on our prepaid drinks plan and then went up to the restaurant for out 20.30 table booking only to find that the table for two that had been requested could not be honoured, according to the head waiter, Head office always offer more tables for two that we have and it not our fault, This annoyed me even more when the staff start blaming each other and so I asked the see the Maitre D only was told he was busy, this made Noel even more annoyed. The food however was good but the service was extremely slow to the point where we had to ask for water after 15/20 minutes and how about some and wine and bread. Not good Mr Fred Olsen and his shipping company
So finally we settled for a table of four with the other two guests being an American guy and his daughter who were quite nice really, he was a retried engineer and his daughter was studying to be a nurse. They were also upset that after a very long flight from San Francisco to Portland, then wait for the flight to Amsterdam and then wait for the flight to Newcastle apparently took about 30 hours to find that the cabin they had requested with two single beds was in fact set up as a double. They were even more annoyed when they said they could not change it till tomorrow!!! not good.
First impressions of the ship is that it rather old, 1988 actually and the new paint does not fully cover the rust and broken bits whilst the upholstery in our Superior Suite, they called it, looked a bit mucky. Oh well let s see how we get on