TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22 - Punta del Este, Uruguay

Dick gets up at 7:10AM and finds the sun just peeking over the horizon when he opens the drapes. We found out that the reason for the one hour time difference between Uruguay and Argentina/Brazil is the fact that Uruguay goes on Daylight Savings Time and the other two do not. Actually, the time changes back to regular time in Uruguay this coming Sunday at 2AM.

We have a short (3 ½ hours) tour this morning. We are to meet in the theater at 8:45AM so we figure we have time to get a dining room breakfast first. The usual breakfast staff in our preferred section of the dining room is not in evidence and there are all new faces. These must be some of the new staff that have been coming on board since last Friday in Buenos Aires. We have a female waiter take our order along with that of a man at a table by himself near us, but only after we have been sitting waiting for nearly 10 minutes! Our analysis of the reason for why it takes forever to get a bowl of oatmeal and an order of blueberry pancakes is that she confused Carolyn’s order with that of the man at the other table. He had ordered Eggs Benedict. So, she seems to have sat on Dick’s oatmeal while waiting for Carolyn’s Eggs Benedict, which she had not ordered. Why she didn’t try to deliver the pancakes, while they were still hot, to the other gentleman and get the confusion worked out earlier is a mystery. Anyway, Dick’s too runny oatmeal and Carolyn’s incorrect order arrive. Eggs are rejected and pancakes appear immediately, at room temperature. We do not have time to do more than grumble, eat and head for the theater. We are off to a good start!

As we are at anchor, we get our tender tickets and wait, and wait and wait! Finally, they announce that a local, 200 passenger tender has broken down and they are lowering the ship’s lifeboat/tenders. We finally get off and endure the 20 minute, slow as a snail, ride across the harbor to the dock. It is low tide and Carolyn needs a firm hand on her posterior to make it up and over to the lip of the dock.

We find our bus and discover that we have the mother of the mother/daughter tour guide team from last Thursday in Montevideo. Fortunately, she seems less pushy today and she is not a problem. The tour is less than wonderful as to its content.

We drive along the Atlantic shore side and see a sculpture of mermaids made from trash found in the ocean

and Playa Brava, the famous hand/mano sculpture in the sand on the beach and then we do a driving tour of the ritzy residential area of Punta del Este.

We drive over "The Hanging Bridge" at a slow pace the first time. This bridge undulates like a roller coaster.

Once across, we act like tourists and get off the bus for a "Japanese Photo Stop." This is a very nice area.

Driving back over the bridge, the driver takes it at a much faster clip and we get a good roll going. The driver claimes that he has vertigo and will need to close his eyes going across!

Punta del Este is very high end and they even have an area named Beverly Hills where each lot is a full block and the lots may not be subdivided. We stop at the Ralli Museum of modern art. It is a case of "pearls before swine" or artists in need of psychological care; take your choice. Modern art in general does not do anything for us.

From here we drive to Casapueblo, the free style home of an artist named Carlos PaezVilaro.

His son was one of the men in the Andean plane crash back in the early 1970's who survived by cannibalism. The son is now a prominent public relations person in Montevideo. The home is nine stories and spills down the side of a peninsula that overlooks a pretty expanse of sea. It would be a great place for a dinner party with cocktails on any one of numerous terraces.

But, today there are way too many tour buses and tourists. We dip our toe in to get a brief feel for the house and escape back outside.

The tour only allowed 30 minutes and with the extent of the crowd you could not begin to see the house in that amount of time. From the place where the bus is parked, we can see our ship across the bay along with the other two that are in today.

Back on the bus, we return to the dock

and catch a tender back to the ship; another slow, hot ride if you are stuck in the front of the enclosed cabin. It is almost 2PM, so we grab something from the buffet and head to the room. After working on the blog and resting awhile we head back to town. Before we leave the tender, about 4PM, Dick checks with the officer in charge about the timing of the last tender and confirms it will be at 5:30PM...hold that thought!

We wander around the beautiful harbor area, checking out the fish market

and the fishing boats.

There is a small colony of sea lions around the fish market living the "Life of Riley" off the fish cleaning waste. It was fun to watch the the birds and the sea lion fight over the fish scraps!

We then wander along the piers lined with millions of dollars worth of boats....life is good here.

It is now about 4:30PM and we do the less than 10 minute walk back over to the tender dock arriving about 4:40PM, over an hour before the last tender, according to every thing we have been told! It turns out the Captain has decided to run only one more tender and we will have to wait until all guests currently off the ship are ready to go back...this is a first in all our nearly 30 years of cruising. There are several really upset people who just missed the last tender and we are none too happy either! The Captain wants to sail early! So, we have to stand around (they have taken the waiting area with chairs and water down) until 5:15PM when everyone shows up.

We finally get on board, get cleaned up and head to the Horizon Lounge about 6:15PM. They are playing bingo in the lounge..this is a first in 40 days of cruising and the noise is very annoying to say the least.

We have reservations at Signatures tonight, so we check the menu while having our cocktails and see that it is the the one we really like; the one we had the very first night on the Mariner. The second time we ate in Signatures the menu was terrible and didn’t change again until they started the Dinner and a Show. We had canceled our third reservation because of the menu, but we did really enjoy the Dinner and a Show menu which ran though our stay in Buenos Aires.

We made reservations in Buenos Aires for tonight and, having checked the menu, imagine our surprise when we sat down in Signatures and looked at our menu and it was the awful one! Well, we are not shy when we are paying, so we told the waiter we were leaving and explained the problem to the hostess. She said, "Well, the menu changed today" (this is the third day of this segment and this is now the menu for the rest of the cruise). She also "informed’ us that the menus throughout the ship were changed to show the new menu at 6PM tonight! Sorry, not so! She then sent someone to fix the problem in the lounge and we went to Compass Rose and had a very good meal and excellent service from our favorite waiter, Adnanl!

Needless to say Regent mostly blew it today!