CRUISE VIGNETTES 22 , Enna G

A NIGHT IN A HOTEL
Just to be different, we spent one night in the Intercontinental Hotel, a very nice place indeed. My brother Jesse, a Naval Officer on a destroyer, visited Saipan on a ship a few years earlier, but he didn’t get to stay in this hotel. His ship was the destroyer, USS Roe, and he was in the US Navy during the worst of the WW II battles in the South Pacific.

We both found a lot of Japanese on the beach at Saipan, but the ones we saw were honeymoon couples from Tokyo, staying at the Intercontinental. The Japanese are still here, but under different circumstances than my brother had seen all those years ago.

ANCHOR CHAIR, FINALLY
Saipan is where I finally found a huge pile of anchor chain, and found someone who would cut a 20 foot length of the chain. It was not far from the ship, so I dragged it to the ship, and they used the crane to lift it aboard, and stow it away for us. After we got it home, we moved this chain from here to there for several years, then decided to find someone to cut a couple of links for display. Not knowing what to do with the rest of it, I noticed a rather expensive restaurant with a nautical theme, and stopped to see the manager. He liked the chain enough to give us two nights on “him” at this restaurant. Even at that price, the meal wasn’t worth it, and that restaurant is now out of business.

PROBLEMS WITH THE SHIP
After a few days, since no one could make needed repairs to the ship, they had a man fly out from San Francisco to see if he could fix it. This man, the Captain, and the Chief Engineer all seemed to think it was going to take a week or two to get it fixed, so we decided to leave the ship and fly home. We weren’t in any particular hurry, but we were planning to fly to Europe in April or May, and we needed to get ready for that trip. The amount refunded for the days not used on the ship, would more than pay for the plane ticket.

We went into town to make arrangements to fly Continental Airlines to Guam, just a few miles away, then thousands of miles to Hawaii by Pan Am Airways, then more thousands by Pan Am to San Francisco where our car was garaged. As you might guess, we had no more than returned to the ship when they announced that the problem was fixed. Well, we thought of this and we thought of that, and by hindsight we made the wrong decision, and continued with our plans to fly home. We left a lot of our clothes, and the anchor chain on the ship, and told them we would meet them in San Francisco, a couple of weeks from now.