Northeast Passage Part 2
Dinner turned out to be quite nice and no waiter had to lay down his life in defense of the reputation of Crystal Cruise Lines. I had a cigar to celebrate arrival on board and a fine meal and because Mary lost track of me for an hour.
Day 2
We arrived in Newport, RI, the smallest state in the Union. I believe, and a cursory check with any competent atlas would almost certainly confirm, that the county of San Diego in California is bigger than all of Rhode Island.
Newport requires that we tender in, which is basically getting on one of the lifeboats. They are really smallish ferries and take a short trip from the ship to a dock. This is done in smaller ports that don't have a wharf big enough to dock the larger ships. Actually, the Crystal Symphony is not a large ship by any means - not like the Brobdignagian ships that Carnival has taken to launching recently.
Tendering isn't usually one of our favorite things, since on most cruise lines you have descend into the bowels of the ship where they dock the tenders and wait till your group is called and then board, and then on the way back you have to wait on the docks till a tender arrives and see if there's enough room to board on this one or whether you have to wait for the next one. It always seems like a little one hour tour on land takes three or four hours once you tote up all the time waiting and stuff. On Crystal we walked out of the elevator (which had signs inside indicating what deck one departs from - something no other cruise ship we've ever been on has been able to figure out) and just sauntered right on to the first tender. On our return we found that there was a short (3 minutes - oh, the horror!) wait and while we waited, in order to stave off either heat prostation or extreme biting cold, they served us ice water and hot boullion. With Tabasco or Worchestershire sauce as you desire, milord. I find that my tolerance for this type of pampering is surprisingly high.
Enough comparisions with other less fortunate cruise lines and on to Newport. It's small, it's cute (these often go together like kittens and hot peppers - though that's a story better left untold), and one can go through town in around 5 minutes, at least by my watch. Outside this vast metropolis can be found the Mansions (always capitalized). Shortly before the turn of the last century, not the 20th but the one before it, the Larry Ellisons of the period constructed vast summer palaces to which they could escape from pre-air conditioned New York. We decided to start with The Breakers, a little summer cottage that the Vanderbilts constructed to while away the endless days of summer. According to the tour guide this meant basically the months of July and August. One estimate of the cost of the mansion in current dollars is 350 million dollars. Yes, for a place to visit for around two months a year.
The Newport Mansions were the means available at the time for showing the other filthy rich how big one's stash was. Today, the ultrawealthy buy sports teams or yachts bigger than World War II cruisers. At least the silly rich of today can sell the old yachts to the slightly less rich once they get tired of the current one and order a newer, bigger one. This wasn't the case with the summer Mansions in Newport. Not infrequently, the subsequent generations weren't quite as proficient as their ancestors at making money, though they were much more talented at spending it. After a while, they found the costs of maintaining these white elephants a little too steep. It also became more and more difficult to find a staff of domestic servants that would work for a dollar a day
, a lamentable situation. Ah, the good old days, well good if you weren't the hired help that is.Anyway, we toured this monstrosity (The Breakers) and it really did strike us as the height of conspicuous excess. Mind you, this is in light of the fact that we had just spent a night in Trump's hotel, so we should have been somewhat inoculated to gaudy and over-the-top excess by the time we arrived at The Breakers. It's an enormous place that housed the family and a staff of 50 or so when the Vanderbilts escaped from the heat, and more importantly, the smell of New York during the summer. In Soviet terms, it was a building that could house probably around 1000 workers of the Revolution, that is if we Americans had ever risen up against the capitalist oppressors.
The decor in all of the rooms, but especially a couple of rooms designed and built by a French interior designer, were pretty hideous in a manner only the late Victorian, or early Edwardian period could attain. While I found the exterior design of the house interesting, it really isn't pleasing or harmonious with its surroundings. It's just this immense pile of stone perched on a cliff overlooking the sea. There are few trees nearby to break up the lines of the building, which, of course, is the point (because everyone has to see how big and expensive it was), but still.
Anyway, after what seemed like a couple of hours wandering around this monument to vanity, we both decided that we had pretty much seen enough. Interesting as the historical period was, most of what we observed wasn't all that interesting from either an architectural or design viewpoint, and we decided to skip the other two mansions we originally thought we might check out, since it seemed like it would just be more of the same. Lunch beckoned and we thought we'd go back and see what culinary delights they had to offer us on the ship.
Interestingly, the first full day on board was a formal night so I had to get all decked out in a dinner jacket. Not a tuxedo. Mary recently gave me a book on men's fashion, not I'm sure, as any sort of indictment on my personal fashion sense, at least that's what she keeps telling me. While perusing the fashion tome I discovered that the cogscienti find the term 'Tuxedo' an affront and insist that the proper term is dinner jacket. All kinds of interesting information like this can be found in the book and I now take every opportunity to declaim my new found knowledge on the subject as often as possible. I think in a another couple of weeks Mary will find the book, take it to the back yard and burn it in order to stop me. In any case, I actually like getting dressed up in a dinner jacket because it's the closest I'll ever get to being James Bond, even in my fevered imagination. To be honest there's hardly anyone who doesn't look better in a dinner jacket. I'd propose that we bring back the habit of dressing for dinner but it'd probably look silly at McDonalds.
Dinner was excellent. There was a Captains' cocktail party before hand that had free champage or cocktails, and a prohibition on shaking hands with the officers so we don't give them nasty diseases. We thought we saw more people dancing at this one cocktail party then in all the cruises we've taken to date. Combined. People were shaking it, baby!
Wait staff in the main dining room seems to be primarily Eastern European. Mary likes them because they habitually look rather lugubrious but if you work at it, like asking about their families or goats back at home they light up and look like they're only facing gallstone surgery today rather then having to sell their goats to meet the tax bill. Well, okay, prehaps some exaggeration,but Mary does like to get them excited and animated because it's really an amazing transformation.
Day 3
Our third day at sea saw us not actually at sea but moored to a wharf in Boston.. We really didn't do too much research on what to do and decided against any tours, instead relying on our steely nerves and appetite for danger to navigate the wilds of downtown Boston. One of the three or four maps we picked up from the ship gave us directions to the Freedom Trail and we decided to give that a whirl first. And thus was our day in Boston taken care of - following the Freedom Trail and touring all the museums and sites along the way is a fairly full day.
We did the Old Statehouse, the slightly less old Statehouse, churches, graveyards, maybe an old stable thrown in there somewhere. A Ye Old Bookstore, sidewalks where American patriots or bystanders were foully murdered or accidently shot by rampaging, cruel redcoats or frightened young soldiers - all of which did happen. We really enjoyed our walks along those storied streets that I still remember so well from History lessons in school. I'm pretty sure that it's all portrayed somewhat differently in school today, but I still have a fondness for history with a lot less ambiguity.
We also had access to one of the inumerable trolley companies that traverse Boston to the delight of tourists and I'm sure the bane of Bostonian commuters. The weirdest ones are of course, the Duck tours which utilize DUKW's from WWII vintage. I have no idea where they managed to get so many of them but they are ubiquitous. DUKW's for the uninitiated are amphibious trucks developed for the Army during WWII, and why someone thought they were a particularily good idea as tourist transportation is probably a really good story.We were not so fortunate as to have large antique ampibious trucks as our mode of transportation, just busses with outer bodies that look like trolley cars. Our selection of the 'right' trolley company was based on the fact that we were using Boston Go cards that Mary had purchased before we left on the trip. These cards got us a two day pass on the trolley company of their choice, entrance to most of the museums in Boston, discounts on books at Ye Old Bookstores, discounts on meals at Ye Old Pubs, and even entrance to the Mansions in Newport the previous day. All in all, a pretty good value if you're going to spend a couple of days or more in the Boston area.
So after checking out all the colonial, historical, and touristy stuff available in downtown Boston we decided to return to the ship, not least because the next game of the National League pennant race, starring the Boston Red Sox was due to start soon and we wanted to get off the streets before the natives started hunting down the non-Sox fans.
