Unlock the Past’s 3rd History & Genealogy Cruise – Geneacruising Part 2

I know this Part 2 blog is way overdue, but what can I say? I’ve been playing catchup with work ever since I’ve been back, so that has been priority for me for the past couple of weeks. So continue where I left off was Wednesday as we had arrived at Noumea.

I know my first post said was dated “TO” Thursday 14th, but rereading it, I really didn’t even tell you about Noumea, so I’ve gone back a day to tell you about that.

Wednesday 13 February 2013 to Thursday 14 February 2013

So Wednesday was a ‘shore day’ as we docked at Noumea pretty early, and had a welcome from the traditional dancers with drums and dancing. Now I have been to Noumea once before on a cruise, and that one we docked right out the front of the main town area, so I was rather interested to see that we had actually docked at a freight yard a little way from the city centre, and shipping containers was not what I expected to see when I got out of bed that morning. Anyway no doubt we were there beacuse this boat is so much bigger and probably couldn’t dock at the regular port. Now as I’d done a bus tour of Noumea previously I didn’t book any tours this time. So just caught a bus from the cruise ship to the city and wandered around for a few hours.

Noumea which is in New Caledonia is a French colony, and I was reminded of this as we walked around listening to people – not to mention seeing all the French signs as well.

So what’s to see in Noumea that’s within walking distance? Well we saw the local markets, the gardens, the Apple iStore, and the French Patisserie. That was enough for me.

 

As people were meant to be back on the ship by 3.30pm, ready for the ship to leave at 4pm, we had to talks  on at 4pm. That was a choice of Shauna Hicks’ Ancestors in Church: Using Church Publications, or Jill Ball’s A Genealogist’s Toybox: Gadgets and Tech Toys. I went to the latter one, and Jill discussed how Cameras, Computers, Phones, Printers, Recording Devices, Scanners, Storage Devices, Tablets, Miscellaneous extras and the Smallest Device (a library card) are ALL useful and should be in a genealogists toybox.

Now 4pm came and went and our ship didn’t leave port. 5pm came with an announcement that they’d discovered an electrical fault in the engine, so we’d be staying in Noumea for another 24 hours, and as a result we wouldn’t be going on to Fiji. This infuriated many on board as you can imagine, but it also came just after hearing news about the other big cruise ship that did get stuck in the middle of the ocean without power for days. So for the most part, people we ok-ish about it. And as for our geneacruisers – yes it would have been great to Fiji, but not at the risk of being stuck somewhere.

So that meant that Thursday was another ‘short day’at Noumea. people could come and go, on and off the ship as they pleased.As I’d done my shore thing the day before, I was quite happy to stay aboard and have a very quiet day. It did mean that we had to swap what was going to be the Fiji ‘shore day’ for this day – so it didn’t conflict with a stack of talks.And that worked fine.

Everybody seemed to really enjoy to downtime day – it was a nice to give our heads a break from talks, and our feet a break from walking. So 4pm came, and all went well, and that was the beginning of our slooooooow trip back to Sydney, Australia.

Stay tuned for Part 3 soon …

Related Posts:
Unlock the Past’s 3rd History & Genealogy Cruise – Geneacruising Part 1
Unlock the Past’s 3rd History & Genealogy Cruise – Geneacruising Part 3
Unlock the Past’s 3rd History & Genealogy Cruise – The Geneabloggers