We're on Holland America Line's Veendam doing two journeys back-to-back - a seven day 'New Years' celebration followed by a 14 day journey from Pacific to Atlantic via the Panama Canal.
Veendam (pronounced Fanedam) is like many of HALs ships named after a Dutch city. She is 57000 gross tonnes - which has nothing to do with how much she weighs - and carries around 1400 passengers when approaching capacity, although this can go up as rooms designated doubles can often accommodate third (and even fourth) persons, heaven forbid!
Whilst this size may well have previously been considered mid-sized, these days the cruise industry is expanding its waistline faster than it's passengers. A ship like Veendam, carrying less than 2000 might be more realistically be called small, whilst 2000-3500 is medium, simply to accommodate the leviathans that can carry 5500 passengers, now that's large. Just to further expand this line of thought, let's say less than 1000 is boutique.
Veendam was launched in 1996 so whilst she's not old, she is not really "state" and there's not too much gadgetry available, although poor quality and expensive internet via Wi-Fi is nowadays pretty much all over.
We really like this size ship and have been on her several times, and others in the fleet that are similar.
Our cruise is from San Diego to the Riviera, back to San Diego, and then south to the Panama Canal before heading up through the Caribbean Sea to Tampa, with roughly equal port days and sea days. The second leg is known as a repositioning cruise as the ship moves to her next season in the Caribbean where it will roam for three months.
This is my first attempt at blogging so I'm probably breaking loads of rules. Tense is certainly an issue but maybe I will get some constructive comments from those in the know?
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