April 22, 2012
For the last 3 ½ months Bayonne, NJ has been my home port. As our Turnaround port it is also one that I don’t get to experience much, since that is one of the busiest days of each cruise for me. So my exposure to Bayonne has been limited to what I can see from the ship, the Tent, which is where we pick up our new crew, or the Teardrop Memorial next to the dock. But on this last trip into Bayonne I needed to explore just a little bit beyond in order to get some shopping done before we crossed the Atlantic to Europe.
In general we had experienced excellent weather each time we were in NY Harbor. Yes, we experienced the cold of winter, but we had pretty much avoided precipitation. Wouldn’t you know it that on the day that I needed to venture into the city we should awake to gray and rainy skies. My shopping trip was predicated on our ability to get our new hires processed quickly. We had become far more efficient at this task and sure enough by 11:45am we had completed our duties. This gave me a solid two hours to go into town and get back in time to kick off the 2:30pm training. The focus of this shopping trip was on some personal necessity and comfort items as well as trying to buy three laser pointers to be used by various departments in giving presentations. Just before I left the Captain found out that I was heading out and asked me to pick up the largest bottle of orange flavored Listerine I could find. Under that direction this trip no longer was discretionary, but was now mandatory!
When I left home for this contract I had packed my pea coat believing I would need it sometime during our port days in NY. On this last day in NY Harbor I would finally need to use it. With coat on and umbrella in hand I left the ship for the first time in Bayonne in civilian clothes. I headed to the waiting area for the crew bus stop that runs every 20 minutes into the shopping area. Little did I know that at the other end of this bus was civilization as I used to know it. When the only view you have of Bayonne, NJ is the cruise ship dock, you really have no sense that there is a real city there with people and their traditional needs. The port is very isolating in that way. After driving down a couple of major boulevards we encountered a suburban shopping area. If I had been dropped their blindfolded I could easily have mistaken it for Colorado Springs or even Sacramento, CA. For someone who hadn’t seen a diversity of shopping options in almost four months it bordered on a religious experience. The crew bus conveniently stops right in front of the Super Walmart which was perfect for my needs.
Although I continued to be surprised at how hard it was to find laser pointers. When I was in St. Maarten I had checked every electronics store to try to find these elusive gadgets and had only discovered one in one shop, and it had more features and functions on it than we would ever use. I’m sure if programmed properly that device would have allowed you to run your entire household remotely! After much searching of the Walmart in Bayonne I did finally find exactly one option that met my needs, a simple device to advance slides in a PowerPoint presentation and to allow you to highlight the screen with a laser light. Remember that I needed three of them? Well they had exactly three left! I cleaned them out. With the business part of the shopping done I filled out my set of necessities for my crossing to Europe. And I was extremely pleased to find a very large bottle of orange flavored Listerine for my Captain.
Two reward myself for the successful excursion, I crossed the parking lot to the Qdoba for lunch, having not seen one of these stores during my entire contract. It felt so ‘normal’ to have a couple shopping bags on a chair and to be eating a burrito and drinking a diet coke and for a few minutes to feel I had blended back into civilian life. But this was still a work day and I needed to head back to the ship. Timing was perfect and as I crossed the parking lot one of our crew buses returned allowing me to return quickly to the ship. In less than two hours from my departure time I was back in uniform having not missed a beat of Turnaround Day.
That small taste of normalcy was very important to me, for with our Atlantic crossing starting that evening and nothing but Europe in front of us for the next seven months, things familiar would soon be in very short supply. But normal and familiar are not the two elements that you expect to find on and adventure.
And the adventure continues . . .
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