Strike!!!!!

Thursday, 9/23/10

Right...it’s Thursday and we docked in La Rochelle, France. For all the good docking did for us. There was a strike today by France’s eight major unions, fighting a plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Hard to find sympathy from the crowd on board. There was the thought last night that the ship would be allowed to proceed as planned, but upon arrival, the Captain was told that no one could leave the dock. Normally we would have had clearance from the local authorities to allow passengers off by 7:30am.

At 9:15 am the Captain announced that an agreement had been reached for the gates to be opened and that he had a signed paper saying that the gates would stay open all day for us. Three of the six ship’s excursions for the morning were going to be cancelled, but did go back on. Our tour was an afternoon tour and was not affected. When we did get off, we found that the striking dockworkers thought it was a fine idea to burn a very large truck tire near the entrance to the pier. It emitted a very large stinking black cloud of pollution.

We haven’t talked about the weather, but it has been nice, comfortable, every day. The temps have mostly been in the high 60’s and low 70’s with no rain. But, today it was warm and muggy!

Our tour was described as a river cruise. While we had a great day, we laugh at the term ‘river cruise’. We took an hour long bus ride to a cute little town, Coulon, and then got onto flat bottomed boats that seat eight people. The river paddler and guide, who spoke limited English, then pushed off and we traveled for an hour through what can best be described as a swamp. The Brits called it a marsh. It reminded us of what we imagine the bayous of Louisiana to be like. Rotted trees at the edges, brown muddy water that had no current to it. The area was originally under seawater and was reclaimed centuries ago and is now rich farmland. Flat, flat, flat. A few cows and surprisingly, no mosquitoes or other bugs. One interesting thing happened and that was that the guide stopped the boat in a shallow area, used his paddle to muck up the bottom and then lit the ensuing methane gasses on the top of the water. The flame encircled the plastic boat, just for a few seconds.

This morning, the Captain announced that he will leave on time, 5pm, even though we were late disembarking. It is a high speed run up to St Peter Port, Guernsey, and he wants to arrive there on time. Late this afternoon, he announced in a grumpy voice that one of our tour busses was delayed in traffic in town and the police were helping and we would be leaving late. Princess guarantees that if you are on a Princess tour, you won’t be left behind. We don’t know if it was due to the 2pm nationwide striker demonstration or just rush hour, but we didn’t leave until 6:15pm.

Colleen and John