CRUISE VIGNETTES 11, Golden Odyssey

ACAPULCO
The next day we docked at Acapulco, our second visit to that city. The bay and the surrounding countryside are beautiful, and the hotels are exceptionally impressive, but we can’t imagine any volunteers spending a vacation in Acapulco. The poor people and the way they live, is just too sad for us. Our three or four nights in this resort (two trips), we have eaten and slept aboard the ship, and just visited the city during the daytime.

As mentioned earlier, the Acapulco Princess Hotel, 10 or 15 miles down the coast, is about the most beautiful hotel we have seen anywhere. With other passengers sharing the taxi, we visited there again. It’s really beautiful, but the living conditions nearby, takes away all the beauty of the place.

Now we reversed the parade we saw in Aruba, and rode a bus to the airport for our flight home, while the next group were on a bus, on their way from the plane to the ship. The “Golden Odyssey,” spent the summer going from Aruba to Acapulco, back and forth through the Panama Canal. The chartered airplane hauled passenger to and from both ends of the trip.

Since President Carter was giving the Canal to the Panamanians, there were plenty of people wanting to sail this waterway, before that happened.

THE SHIP, GOLDEN ODYSSEY
Oh, by the way. The ship, the food, the service, the stateroom, and the people on the “Golden Odyssey” were all excellent, as good as we have ever had on any ship. As you may well imagine, we could/would never eat this much of such good food, anywhere except on a cruise ship, and that made deck walking necessary.

On most ships, this one included, people would walk around and around the deck, for their exercise. But this time, I found an alternative to the “round and round” stuff. Near each end of the ship, a seven-story staircase permitted a loop of up one set of stairs, walk the deck to the other set of stairs, then down, then back to the other stairs, etc., etc.