The Voyage Home

Last day of the cruise, and we are sailing back to Miami.  As always there is a lot of entertainment to choose from. We started off by checking at the guest services desk to see if they had any info about the rescheduling of our Karl Urban photo session but they told us to come back later.

The "shore leave" bar

Most of the entertainment on this cruise is either about Star Trek itself, or it stars one of the actors from the show.  But Trekkies are obviously the kind of people who would be interested in space exploration and so some of the "guest stars" aboard are here to give scientific talks.  Sadly, there had been so much going on in the early part of the cruise that I'd missed the earlier ones, but this morning we managed to fit in 2 of these presentations.  First, a talk about the future of space exploration by the astronaut Rick Seafross. Fascinating fact, Elon Musk's company, SpaceX, is launching the Falcon Heavy in 2018, which can launch twice as much payload as any previous launcher.  Typically, Elon Musk will be using it as an opportunity for publicity by launching a Tesla car into orbit.
Then we attended an interesting, and quite funny, talk with Phil Plait the astronomer about the chances of an asteroid or comet hitting the earth and what we can do about it. Hint: Don't do anything like what they did in "Armageddon".

Tried the guest services desk again, but they still had no update on the photo session. "We'll make an announcement over the speakers" they said.  So off we went to the pool deck to listen out for it.  Lots of entertainment on the pool deck of course, including a Deep Space 9 Q&A with 7 of the actors from that series and "Oh My!" with George Takei.  But time was getting on - and I'd still heard no announcement, so I went down to the guest services desk again - only
to find that Karl Urban was there and the photo session was already nearly over.  So I dashed back up to the pool deck and grabbed a rather wet Bridie who had recently been in the pool and we double timed it back to deck 7 and managed to get our photo done just before the session wrapped up.  Instead of us being all dressed up in our Star Trek finest, I'm in a ratty old t-shirt and a pair of shorts and Bridie's in a pool cover up with wet hair, but at least we got the photo done in the end.

There was another full evening's entertainment including a fascinating talk about the planet Vulcan (yes - some French astronomer announced he'd found this planet between Mercury and the sun), a show called BFF with Robert Picardo and his friend and singer Jordan Bennett, and a late night Q&A with Karl Urban.  He had some great stories about Leonard Nimoy.

As a parting shot I'd have to say that this cruise was a lot more fun and had much more going on than any of the normal cruises I've been on.  Despite going directly from one event to the next all the time we were aboard ship, there were so many things I didn't get to do.  I'm sorry I missed out  on many of the scientific talks,  I didn't get to see Armin Shimmerman doing Shakespeare.  We missed to many of the competitions including the tribble toss, the Cmdr Riker chair mounting competition and the Search for Spock scavenger hunt. We couldn't get on the Klingon Pub Krawl with Gowron because it was fully booked, and had to give the Gorn's Gong show a miss because there was not even standing room in 13 Forward when we turned up for it.  I missed the showing of George Takei's movie "Allegiance", and I would have loved to have taken part in some of the competitions like the Utopia Planetia ship building (ships had to be able to traverse the pool carrying 6 bottles of beer). One of the make up artists from the shows was on board and Bridie really wanted to get made up as an Andorian - but there just wasn't enough time.

Finally, I want to give special props to Entertainment Cruise Productions for making such an effort to transform the ship into a truly Trekkie environment.  It would have been easy to just say that having the actors on board made it a Star Trek cruise, and leave it at that.  Instead, they had made the effort to rebrand the restaurants and bars (Klingon Karnivoria, Sandrines, 13 Forward, etc) and make various other  alterations around the ship, including flying the flag of the Federation from the ship mast, having a special cocktails (I tried a romulan ale, a raktajino and some Klingon blood wine).  Even the elevators were turned into Turbo lifts.    I had a great time, and I'd recommend this to any Trekkies out there.