Casino Chip of the Day

For those who might have missed it, from this post in another thread, we now know that this Casino Chip of the Day thread doesn't just rank #2 in number of posts -- it also ranks #5 in the "Most Blocked" category.

I think EB blocked it the first week, right after I criticized his posting a chip image that he had found on eBay or somewhere.

Quote: rdw4potus

Ha, well, I do have a ticket in tonight's lotto drawing. So the odds of that working out aren't exactly 0, but assuming that isn't an option is the next best plan a very long cruise?

I haven't been there, but I don't think cruising would be the best way to hit all the gambling establishments. Doc has mentioned a few times that places were missed because of the time and distance required to get back to the dock.

Quote: Doc

The best plan, of course, depends on your objective(s). If you want to enjoy a nice vacation, you really should include cruises on your list of options.

However, if you want to collect a lot of chips in a minimum of time, a cruise is probably not the optimum strategy. Cruises typically spend daytime hours in port and sail port-to-port at night. In a lot of locations, the casinos aren't even open during the hours that you can be ashore.

If you want to see a lot of casinos in the Caribbean islands, averaging more than one or two a day, then my recommendation would be to fly to Aruba, hit all of the casinos over a couple of nights, then get a flight over to Curaçao for one night. It's probably cheaper to return to Aruba for the flight home. You might consider San Juan as another stop on that route. I have never followed that plan myself, but it's certainly plausible that you could get flights and hotels for similar or less cost than taking a cruise.

All three of those places have quite a few casinos, though many of them would not be available to you as a cruise ship passenger because of their operating hours, and all those hours/nights you would spend on the ship will only offer you one chip for your collection.

As I said, "best" depends on your objective.

Are the entry "fees" (if any) at the airport different than those at the port? Did you run into anyone at the casino's that had their hotel stay comped?

Quote: Doc

The best plan, of course, depends on your objective(s).
If you want to see a lot of casinos in the Caribbean islands, averaging more than one or two a day, then my recommendation would be to fly to Aruba, hit all of the casinos over a couple of nights, then get a flight over to Curaçao for one night. It's probably cheaper to return to Aruba for the flight home. You might consider San Juan as another stop on that route. I have never followed that plan myself, but it's certainly plausible that you could get flights and hotels for similar or less cost than taking a cruise.

Things might have changed in the last few years but inter-island flights used to be a real pain and expensive. My brother-in-law lived and worked in Jamaica for several years and his work took him to many of the islands. He usually had to connect through Miami to get anywhere without going to charter flights, which were quite a bit more expensive.

Quote: kenarman

Things might have changed in the last few years but inter-island flights used to be a real pain and expensive.

As I mentioned before, I have never done such a thing myself. To get an idea of the cost for an excursion to Curaçao from Aruba, something like I suggested to rdw4potus, I did a quick search for a random date of going Aruba to Curaçao on Thursday 6/20 and returning on Saturday. On CheapAir.com, I found flights on Dutch Antilles airline for $106 round trip. Of course, that would be in addition to a round trip flight from home to Aruba -- don't know whether you could package them advantageously.

Quote: Ayecarumba

Are the entry "fees" (if any) at the airport different than those at the port? Did you run into anyone at the casino's that had their hotel stay comped?

Since I haven't done it myself, I don't know what the entry and exit fees might be. On cruises, they are bundled onto a category of "Port charges and taxes", and you never know the details for any particular stop. I also don't remember having struck up conversations with others in the port casinos -- generally I'm making a very quick hit, win or lose, to get my souvenir and get back to visiting the other things in port.

Category: Caribbean Islands
City: Palm Beach, Aruba
Casino: Excelsior

The Excelsior Casino is located at the Holiday Inn Resort in the Palm Beach area, on the northwest coast of Aruba. I don't know whether Palm Beach is an official "city" that should be listed in the header of this post or just a beach district on the outskirts of Oranjestad, maybe half a dozen miles from the center of town. There is a whole line of resorts in that area, with some inconsistency in listing their addresses as Oranjestad, Palm Beach, or even Noord.

Before my wife and I visited Aruba on that November 2009 cruise, I had tried to search the web to learn which casinos were likely to have table games operating at times that I could possibly drop by. The info that I found was not totally reliable.

We first walked from our ship to the Crystal Casino, as reported previously, then walked through some shopping areas, buying trinkets along the way, and next stopped at the Seaport Casino to find it closed. I made a return visit later that afternoon and got that souvenir token that, to my surprise, said Alhambra Casino.

In that mid-day interval, we walked to the city bus terminal and caught a ride to the Palm Beach area, where I found two out of three of my target casinos operating their table games, with the Alhambra casino open but table games closed. We got off the bus at the Marriott, played in the casino there, then walked down the beautiful beach to the Holiday Inn to play a little more at the Excelsior Casino before catching the return bus.

When I posted my chip from the Crystal Casino, I mentioned that between the casino and our ship was a restaurant/night club outside of which Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway was last seen by her friends on the night of her much publicized disappearance. That high school post-graduation group was staying at the Holiday Inn Resort where the Excelsior Casino is located. It must have been quite a party, at least before the trouble. The Wikipedia article includes the comments:

Quote: Wikipedia

Police Commissioner Gerold Dompig, who would head the investigation from mid-2005 until 2006, described the behavior of the Mountain Brook students, stating there was "wild partying, a lot of drinking, lots of room switching every night. We know the Holiday Inn told them they weren't welcome next year. Natalee, we know, she drank all day every day. We have statements she started every morning with cocktails—so much drinking that Natalee didn't show up for breakfast two mornings". Two of Holloway's classmates, Liz Cain and Claire Fierman, "agreed that the drinking was kind of excessive".

Sometimes I'm glad I'm too old to go in for such "fun." I'll stick to being a geezer who collects casino chips.

The white ceramic chip shown below was manufactured by Chipco, I believe, though there is no mark specifically saying so. The MOGH catalog agrees with my guess. The logo is an oversized "X" within "Excelsior", with a yellow, extremely-slender female form in some kind of dance or contortion to fit into the X profile. This copy of the logo from the MOGH site is clearer than the one on the chip. There are several lines that appear to be flowing out of the figure's neck, back toward one of her raised arms, and I'm not sure at all what that is supposed to represent – a scarf or hair or what?

Just realized that I forgot to include any history of the casino.

The MOGH catalog says that the Holiday Inn Casino operated in the resort from 1969 to 1972. The catalog displays several chips from that casino, and none of them have the casino name on them, just a Divi-divi tree logo.

From 1972 to 1985, the gaming operated under the King International Casino name. Then, from 1985 to 1999, it was known as the Grand Holiday Casino. I can't explain the discrepancy, but the same resource says that the Excelsior Casino opened in that location in September 1998, apparently some months before the Grand Holiday closed.

The Excelsior was still operating in 2009, and it still is, as best I can determine.

I have no idea about what ownership changes might have accompanied those name changes.

I think I forgot to post this before. And then forgot again when Doc mentioned that I hadn't posted it. And then left town for a few days. Anyway...Here's the Niagara Fallsview side of my Casino Niagara chip.

Better late than never, they say. Perhaps you could add a note to a post you made back near the Fallsview posts, just to link to the post right above here where you finally caught up.

Category: Caribbean Islands
City: Willemsted, Curaçao
Casino: Otrabanda

The MOGH catalog displays an Otrabanda Casino chip just like the one in my collection. It notes that the casino opened in 1991 and closed in 1997, becoming the Casino Awasa.

The building is still the Otrabanda Hotel, and that chronology for the casino makes sense, except that I didn't visit Curaçao until 2009 and got this souvenir chip on that visit. I think I have already acknowledged a couple of things: (1) that some of the casinos in the islands don't seem to care much whose chip they are using, particularly at the $1 level, and (2) that I don't have a completely clear recollection of how/where I picked up some of my chips that day.

I think my best guess on how I got this chip is that when I played in the Casino Awasa they must have been using the Awasa chips, like I posted a week ago, along with some old (obsolete?) Otrabanda Casino chips. If that were the case, I would not be surprised if I did pocket one of each type. However, it seems odd that a casino would be using a mix of such different $1 chips on any one table, and I'm fairly sure that I didn't table hop in my brief visit to that casino.

This white chip with the silver coin inlay, red inner ring, and four red edge "inserts" is made of plastic, so naturally the MOGH catalog says it is from Bud Jones. I cannot identify the source myself, but I think the plastic portion looks like a design offered by Matsui. Unfortunately, Matsui currently only offers the coin inserts with much more elaborate designs in the plastic part of the chip, and I have no way of knowing what kind of coin-insert chips they offered twenty years ago when the Otrabanda Casino was in operation.



I thought I would bore you with another of my photos showing a street clock. This is one of the ones I saw in Curaçao. It is a sundial, with an almost vertical face, a horizontal (I think) south-pointing shadow post, and a particularly interesting feature of its dial layout. Ordinarily, I would expect the noon position on such a dial to be directly at the bottom, however, you can see the post's shadow pointing almost directly at the "XII" marked slightly off-center on the dial.

I have a guess why the XII position isn't at the bottom of the dial – anyone care to offer their opinion to see whether it agrees with the one I developed?

Category: Caribbean Islands
City: Frigate Bay, St. Kitts and Nevis
Casino: Royal Beach

OK, so no guesses about the sundial face layout from Curaçao? Let's try another place five or six hundred miles away across the Caribbean, and I'll tell a tale or two to go along with my chip.

The Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis is a country composed of those two adjacent islands of the Lesser Antilles. From there, the U.S. and British Virgin Islands are roughly 150 miles to the northwest, while Montserrat and Guadeloupe are 50 and 100 miles respectively to the southeast, with Antigua and Barbuda about 50 miles to the east. Short summary: St. Kitts and Nevis are two tropical resort islands surrounded by a bunch of other tropical resort islands.

Frigate Bay is an inlet of water near the southeastern end of St. Kitts. It is an extension of Basseterre Bay, on the Caribbean Sea side of the island. I have not been able to locate a town/city of Frigate Bay on the map, but the Royal Beach Casino web site lists their address as "Frigate Bay Road, Frigate Bay, St. Kitts and Nevis." The main part of the resort is two or three miles outside of Basseterre and actually is on the Atlantic side of the island, though there is not much separation of the Atlantic from the Caribbean at that point.

I mentioned in a previous post that when my wife and I made that cruise of the southern Caribbean in 2009, I exploited my contacts ahead of time and arranged for personal tours of the islands at our first two stops. I hadn't really planned it that way; I had just made contact with some folks to ask what I should try to see/do on the only day of my life that I anticipated I would be on those islands.

The second stop of the cruise out of San Juan was Basseterre, St. Kitts. I knew that a high school classmate of mine lived at least part time on the neighboring island of Nevis, so I sent him email to ask his advice on what I should do during an 8-hour stop in Basseterre. I just have to quote his reply:

Quote: Classmate

So good to hear from you. And what great news to hear that you are coming to St. Kitts and Nevis.

There really isn't much of great interest in St. Kitts as far as I am concerned. It is the larger of our two island federation, and with twice the population it has twice the crime and noise and congestion. If you must be there, I would recommend a tour of Brimstone Hill, a colonial-era fortification built by the English for defense of the island, followed by a lunch at Otley's Plantation Inn.

You can also feed your gambling addiction at the Marriott Hotel's casino. They will be happy to take your money, but be warned that it is a different order of sleazy from Las Vegas (I don't gamble, myself).

But I wouldn't do any of that if I were you. Eight hours gives you much more than enough time to have me pick you up at the port, bring you over to Nevis on the ferry, and give you a tour of a real gem of an island.

He went on to boast extensively about the charms of his island. I got the feeling there might be a lot of good-natured rivalry between the two. When our ship arrived, he was waiting for us on the dock in Basseterre and was the perfect host. He got us to Nevis by the passenger ferry, drove us around the small island, fixed us a fine lunch at his lovely estate, took us back to St. Kitts by the vehicle ferry and drove us all around the larger island, including a stop at the casino. I wish I had friends like that to impose on everywhere I go. ;-)

On the down side, over lunch he told us a tale of woe that he had experienced in that paradise. It seems he discovered in the attic of his house a non-working .22 rifle that had been left behind by the previous owner. He looked into the possibility of repairing the rifle. When the authorities discovered that, they confiscated the rifle and his passport and threw him into the local prison. Apparently they have extremely strict laws there regarding firearms, and to own one without a license for it is a serious offense.

He had previously passed their background checks and had a license for another firearm, but they wouldn't tolerate the fact that he had discovered a non-working relic and kept it without reporting it. At the time of our visit, he was awaiting a hearing on his appeal of his conviction. Eventually, he was able to leave the island and isn't likely to return. I'm not sure of his current legal status there.

The MOGH catalog's directory for St. Kitts lists six casinos, but four of them do not have any chips shown. Two of those are described as "Slots only, locals place, not for tourists." Sounds a bit like a not-too-subtle warning. A third is listed as part of a place called the "St. Kitts Attraction" and has a no-cash-value token shown with an image of a slot machine. I don't know what that's about. The fourth has no info or images at all.

The other two places in St. Kitts appear to be different-era editions of the same casino, a part of what is now the St. Kitts Marriott Royal Beach Resort and Spa, though there is not complete clarity so far as I can tell.

The MOGH page for the Royal St. Kitts Casino lists that it was open from 1977 to 2010 as part of the Royal St. Kitts Hotel and Casino. In contrast, The Royal Beach Casino at the same address on Frigate Bay Road has no listed opening date. None of the chips shown, with the exception of a single hot-stamped chip, includes "Beach" as part of the casino name as presented on the chip.

Note that my visit there was in 2009, when MOGH says it was still the Royal St. Kitts Casino, but my notes say I went to the Royal Beach Casino and MOGH shows a chip like mine on the page for the Royal Beach Casino. I'm not sure what to think of that, and I don't know when the hotel adopted the Marriott name.

The casino's web site says they have 353 slot machines from penny slots to $50 machines and 31 table games including blackjack, craps, roulette, various pokers, and many more with limits from $10 to $5,000. When I was there at mid-afternoon on a Wednesday in November 2009, the craps table was closed, so I played $10 blackjack and won $60 plus a souvenir chip.

The chip is a white RHC Paulson with two triangular edge inserts in orange and an orange center inlay. UV light reveals a hidden, off-center, Paulson logo.



Closing off this overly-long post, I have two more of my travel photos. Continuing a recent photo theme that I hope you can tolerate, I am providing a shot of another street clock. This one sits on a large and elaborate base that serves as the center of a clockwise traffic circle known as The Circus, in downtown Basseterre.


Today's second travel photo shows the St. Kitts Marriott Royal Beach Resort, as seen while approaching on the road from the vehicle ferry port at the southeastern tip of the island. The resort is that group of pink-roofed buildings just to the right of the center of the photo. Just closer than that is a tract of employee residences, and even closer are a couple of condo developments that I think are completely separate from the Marriott property.

I love your friends reply. How could you turn him down.

Category: Caribbean Islands
City: Willemstad, Curaçao
Casino: San Marco

When my wife and I debarked our ship in Curaçao, we walked along the Sint Ana Bay waterfront in Otrabanda to the Queen Emma Pontoon Bridge. It was "open", i.e., closed to pedestrian traffic to let boats pass, so we rode the ponchi over to the Punda section of the city.

We walked a circuitous loop of that district, stopping in some of the shops and passing the Mikve Israel Emanuel Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in continuous use anywhere in the western hemisphere. We walked along the waterfront of a long inlet from Sint Ana Bay that extends well into Punda. The maps refer to that water as "Waaigat", but I have no idea what that means, and Google Translate was no help.

Along the Waaigat waterfront, they have a floating market, mostly fruits and vegetables. There is a whole line of docked boats, each having a small stand on the wharf, under a series of canvas awnings. I didn't shop there, but my impression was that the boats themselves are not for the customers to board. The floating parts are like the warehouse and office of each business, with the points of sale being the stands on the wharf.


From the floating market, we walked down a small crowded street to the San Marco Hotel and Casino. CasinoCity.com says that the San Marco Hotel has 82 rooms and that the casino has 223 gaming machines and five table and poker games. I played at one of the two blackjack tables and managed to win $20 (woo hoo!). This was the only chip I was able to collect in Punda – there is another casino in the area that I had hoped to get a chip from, since it was listed as opening at 2:00 p.m., but that turned out to mean only their machines.

This photo of my souvenir chip has a color shift. In reality, the base chip is mostly pink, rather than so orange, and the edge inserts and other molded markings are purple. The casino name and denomination in the center are hot stamped in black. The hot stamp markings were worn off essentially every chip in play. I picked out one on which the casino name was mostly legible, and I told the dealer and supervisor that I was taking it to add to my chip collection.

After I left the table but before I left the casino, the supervisor approached me and offered to exchange a better chip (this one) for my collection. I don't know whether she had found it in the rack or had retrieved it from some place. I thought that was a very nice gesture from a pit supervisor to a ten-minute player who was walking away with one of their chips.

I am almost certain that this plastic chip is from Bud Jones, because I think that split diamond is one of their old trademarks. This version is called the Right-on-Top diamond, with the mirror image being the Left-on-Top diamond. I don't think I have a Left-on-Top diamond on any of the chips in my collection, but I have seen images of several posted as examples.

The MOGH catalog describes the edge inserts on this chip as "3 sxs PU". I can figure out that this means that there are 3 sets of inserts and that they are purple – I have seen other chips listed as "3 sxs BL" and "3 sxs RD" when the inserts are blue or red. However, I don't know what the "sxs" means. I suspect the first "s" means "split", but I'm not sure. Does anyone know or have suggestions?



As a final image from the Punda district of Curaçao, I am posting yet another street clock. Contrast this clock with the sundial street clock I posted a couple of days ago. That sundial is just half a block away from this clock.


I think this clock is supposed to look like one of the high-end Breitling wristwatches. I don't know which model, since I'm not familiar with them – I think the entire product line is way out of my price range. The ones I found on Amazon.com run from about $3,000 to $10,000. However, I did find a web site that offers "Breitling replica watches" in the range of $100 to $150 with the Breitling logo and name clearly in place. I didn't realize that knockoff vendors advertised so openly, admitting to their infringements.

I like that some of the international casinos don't go by the standard of "all $1 chips are white or blue or white-ish or blue-ish." Nice to see something bright for a change.

If you go back to the Nevada section of this thread, you can see that quite a few of the "whites" have a different principal color. There are quite a few that are blue, gray, or brown. That's what I feel makes my display of $1 chips less "boring" than one of another denomination. A red chip or a green chip may look prettier than a white chip, but I think a display of hundreds of red $5 chips would not be as interesting as a display of hundreds of diverse-colored $1 chips.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, some jurisdictions legislate the color of chips for each denomination, so that every casino in that state has $1 chips that are white.

Category: Caribbean Islands
City: Palm Beach, Aruba
Casino: Stellaris

The Aruba Marriott is located in the strip of resorts on Palm Beach in northwest Aruba. I have noted previously that I am not sure whether Palm Beach is a town/city or just a beach area on the outskirts of Oranjestad.

My wife and I got off the city bus from downtown at the Marriott, and I played at the Stellaris Casino there. I broke even at a short blackjack session, before we walked out to the beach and down to the Holiday Inn and the Excelsior Casino.

Several times recently I have criticized the MOGH catalog's identification of chip manufacturers, saying that they seem to believe every plastic chip is made by Bud Jones. They make the same Bud Jones identification for today's chip, and I think it has to be the most outrageous error I have seen in quite a while.

This off-white plastic chip is definitely from Bourgogne et Grasset (B&G) – it even has the BG logo at about the 2:00 position on the center inlay. How can MOGH miss something that obvious? And yes, the logo is clearly visible on the chip posted in the MOGH catalog. I think that catalog misidentifies several other Stellaris chips as coming from Bud Jones, since several that they show appear to be designs offered by Matsui.

This Stellaris chip is the same design as those I have posted previously from the Rainbow Casino and the Niagara Fallsview Casino (and Casino Niagara). This time the dozen small edge inserts are dark blue, and the center inlay has a glitter surface.

Quote: Doc

Category: Caribbean Islands
City: Willemstad, Curaçao
Casino: San Marco

The MOGH catalog describes the edge inserts on this chip as "3 sxs PU". I can figure out that this means that there are 3 sets of inserts and that they are purple – I have seen other chips listed as "3 sxs BL" and "3 sxs RD" when the inserts are blue or red. However, I don't know what the "sxs" means. I suspect the first "s" means "split", but I'm not sure. Does anyone know or have suggestions?

My guess is "sets with space(s)".

Doc, do the street clocks all keep good time? I suppose the sundial is the most consistent, but the few public clocks we have in my neighborhood are often not working or displaying the wrong time (most commonly related to DST adjustments).

Quote: Ayecarumba

Doc, do the street clocks all keep good time?

That's an interesting question, and of course I have a long, boring response.

I really do have some basis for going back now and evaluating how accurately the various clocks were displaying the time. Since May 2000, I have been using digital cameras exclusively, and they record the time each photo was taken. For several years, I tried to adjust the time setting on the camera to the local time, but I kept forgetting to do that when I traveled -- some photos recorded local time and some recorded my home time (Eastern). I also had trouble remembering to change the camera for daylight savings time. Then in September 2006, I decided to set my camera on Universal Time (UTC or formerly GMT) and leave it at that setting regardless of where I traveled and what the season was.

All of my photos from the Caribbean Islands are from places that are in the UTC -4 time zone and do not use daylight savings time. Thus, the clocks should ideally show times 4 hours earlier than what my camera recorded with the images. Here are some of the data I can present:

Aruba street clock I posted here.
Clock shows 9:14
Photo file says 4:26 pm UTC or 12:26 pm local time.
Conclusion: Not a very useful street clock.

Aruba street clock I mentioned but did not post.
Clock shows 12:20
Photo file says 4:28 pm UCT or 12:28 pm local time.
Conclusion: Eight minutes different, and my camera clock could have been off a little.

Curaçao Breitling street clock that I posted here.
Clock shows 11:22
Photo file says 3:23 pm UTC or 11:23 am local time.
Conclusion: Pretty dang good.

Curaçao sundial that I posted here.
Clock shows a little before noon.
Photo file says 3:38 pm UTC or 11:38 am local time.
Conclusion: Not bad, I'd say. Almost as accurate as I can read the sundial.

St. Kitts traffic circle clock that I posted here.
Clock shows 3:48.
Photo file says 7:47 pm UTC or 3:47 pm local time.
Conclusion: Can't complain about that at all.

St. Kitts Sands resort street clock that I didn't post.
Clock shows 6:17 pm.
Photo file says 7:44 pm UTC or 3:47 pm local time.
Conclusion: Better to remove the clock from public view.

St. Croix, Eliza James-McBean Clock Tower that I didn't post.
Clock shows 3:33.
Photo file says 6:50 pm UTC or 2:50 pm local time.
Conclusion: Don't count on Eliza.

I have some other street clock photos from before I set my cameras on UTC, though I haven't posted any of them. Here is how those clocks seem to have been performing.

Steam clock from Gastown district of Vancouver (PDT) on 9/16/2004.
Clock shows 4:58.
Photo file says 7:59 pm, probably EDT, or 4:59 pm local time.
Conclusion: Rather impressive, for a clock driven by steam power.

Street clock in Pioneer Square, Seattle, Washington (PDT) on 5/11/2005.
Clock shows 2:47.
Photo file says 2:44 pm, likely adjusted to Pacific time.
Conclusion: Close enough to be useful to a passer by.

Jessop & Sons street clock in Horton Plaza, San Diego, Californina (PDT) on 5/5/2005.
Clock shows 10:52.
Photo file says 1:53 pm, apparently Eastern time, or 10:53 am local time.
Conclusion: Not too shabby for a street clock first installed in 1907 and moved to Horton Plaza much later.


I guess a local just needs to learn which clocks can be relied upon. Or just check your wrist or cell phone. My interests in these clocks are primarily in their aesthetics and the novelty of public timepieces, but I really do think they should show the true local time.

Category: Caribbean Islands
City: Lucaya, Bahamas
Casino: Treasure Bay

Grand Bahama is the fourth largest and northernmost of the islands in the Bahamas. It is the closest of the Bahamas to the U.S., lying less than 60 miles off the coast of Florida. The largest city on the island is Freeport, a free trade zone established in 1955 and the resulting industrial complex, which has a significant port for both freight traffic and cruise ships.

When I first visited the Bahamas in 1976 on a four-night cruise, the primary tourist area was a block of resorts surrounding a shopping area known as the International Bazaar, and the area development included a casino. I didn't play in that casino and that was long before I knew I was collecting chips. I did keep one from the ship, and I'll be posting that soon.

Based on info at the MOGH catalog, I think that casino by the bazaar had a series of names from the 1960s to the 21st century: International Hotel Casino, El Casino, Princess Hotel Casino, Bahamia Casino, and Royal Oasis Casino. MOGH says that the Royal Oasis used Bahamia chips when they first opened, and that the casino was destroyed by a hurricane before their own chips arrived.

The island suffered damages from several hurricanes, and when I visited the area just over a year ago, I learned that neither the casino nor any of those resorts had ever been rebuilt. New tourist development was moved a few miles down the road for a fresh start. I read today that the International Bazaar has recovered, finally, but primarily as a shopping area for locals.

Lucaya is a suburb of Freeport established in 1962, with its economy firmly focused on tourism. It has a marina, a tourist shopping district, and several clusters of new resort hotels, all about four miles from the International Bazaar area. One of those clusters includes the Our Lucaya Resort. Isle of Capri Casinos operated a casino in that resort from 2003 to November 2009, when they sold it to Treasure Bay Gaming and Resorts, the Biloxi-based company that conducts most of their business in the islands. They have operated this casino since 2009 under the Treasure Bay name.

CasinoCity.com says that Treasure Bay in Lucaya has 20,000 sq. ft. of gaming space, 218 gaming machines, and 25 table games, including Baccarat, blackjack, Caribbean Stud Poker, craps, and roulette. When I visited the casino at noontime on a Wednesday in April 2012, the craps table was closed, and I got the impression that it only operated on weekends. Instead, I played blackjack and broke even.

The chip shown below is a white RHC Paulson hat and cane chip with four edge inserts, two each in olive and black. The MOGH catalog indicates that this chip was issued in 2009 when the casino changed ownership and name. The tan center inlay has the casino name in a script font and the Our Lucaya resort name in plain text. There is what appears to be a primitive graphic of a compass. UV light reveals the repeated hidden phrase "Our Lucaya Treasure Bay." Now what have we seen oh so many times with this kind of hidden image? Can everyone find it this time?

Quote: Doc

I guess a local just needs to learn which clocks can be relied upon. Or just check your wrist or cell phone.

Locals know better than to rely on street clocks :)

As to the rest, I'd be stunned if there isn't an app that connects your cell phone or tablet to the output from an atomic clock. You can't get more accurate than that.

Category: Caribbean Islands
City: Cupecoy Bay, Sint Maarten
Casino: Treasure Island

Today I am posting the last of my Casino Chip of the Day souvenirs from the Caribbean Islands. By tomorrow, I will have to decide between the few remaining categories I have to offer for this thread.

The island of Saint Martin is roughly 100 miles almost due east of the Virgin Islands, 50 miles almost straight north of St. Kitts and Nevis, and less than 10 miles of open water south of Anguilla. It is divided roughly 60/40 between France and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The larger French portion to the north is known as Saint-Martin, while the smaller Dutch portion is known as Sint Maarten. The history of the island also includes both Spanish and British control.

Although there was a treaty in 1648 between the French and the Dutch to divide the island, there are several folklore tales about how the division was established. One of them is related on the Wikipedia page about the island, in the section called "Border division", and I heard a slightly different version when my wife, our younger son, and I visited both sides of the island during a cruise ship stop in 1997. My retelling of that story might be entertaining, but it would be much too long for this post.

With a treaty having set the division in 1648, you would think that most common maps would have it identified correctly by now. Perhaps most do, but the Google Maps presentation of the island has it completely wrong.

(Edit 10/29/13: It appears that Google has finally fixed their mapping error discussed below!)

Check it out for yourself – just go to Google Maps and search for Saint Martin. You will see that the folks at Google try to suggest that the border is a straight, east-west line at about latitude 18° 3' north. Not at all the truth.

Now take a look at this map from Wiki, which gives a better indication of the dividing line. Doesn't look much like what Google claims, does it? I expected to find that irregular line followed some sort of terrain features, but that doesn't seem to be the case either.

Google's cartographic error is of relevance to today's post because the Treasure Island Casino was located on the Dutch side of the island, but Google Maps shows that spot as being in the French territory. Didn't I read something a couple of years ago about a Google Maps error almost starting a border war in Central America?

If you check that Wiki map of the island and look to the western extreme of Sint Maarten, you will see the community of Cupecoy, where the local casino used to be called the Treasure Island. If you check the Google Map, you can find the casino now identified as the Atlantis World Casino, with the border falsely drawn farther south, as if the casino is in Saint-Martin. That false border location actually cuts across a golf course there, suggesting that players would cross the border several times during a round. Can you imagine the border patrol nightmare if that were really the situation?

Perhaps this is as appropriate a time as any to mention that Cupecoy is home to the beautiful Cupecoy Beach, just across the street and down the cliff from the casino. Though I have never been there, I understand that the beach is famous for its clothing-optional policy.

The MOGH catalog displays a token just like the one shown below, including the 1986 mint date. They note that the Treasure Island Casino closed in 1986, becoming the Atlantis World Casino. I guess the place changed names shortly after this token was introduced. I cannot find a mintmark on the token to indicate the manufacturer, but the token's design definitely fits the Treasure Island name. There is a sailing ship on one side and a parrot and booty chest on the other, straight out of the tale from Robert Louis Stevenson.



If you waded all the way through that discussion, perhaps you picked up a few items: (1) The Treasure Island Casino closed in 1986. (2) My visit to Saint-Martin/Sint Maartin was in 1997. Perhaps I should add the comments that I have only been to the island once in my life and did not visit any casinos while there. Notice any discrepancies for my having this souvenir token?

I received this token in Curaçao, and my notes say I got it at the Paradise Casino in Otrabanda. I have admitted to some problems in remembering coherent details of my casino visits and chip collecting that day, but I think my notes are mostly correct on that point. When I posted my chip from the Americana Casino, I stated that the Americana had become the Paradise Plaza in 2008, a year before my visit.

This is the best I can surmise at this late date: When I visited Curaçao in November 2009 and played at the Paradise Plaza Casino, their $1 denomination casino currency was a mix of some obsolete Treasure Island tokens from Sint Maartin (no idea why) and some similarly old and obsolete Americana chips left from their own predecessor establishment there in Curaçao. I left the place with one of each type as a double souvenir of my visit. Yep, I think I would have done that, especially if they didn't have any Paradise Plaza $1 chips at all for my collection. Then, perhaps just to add to my future confusion, I failed to write the word "Plaza" in my notes, just listing the place as the Paradise Casino.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Maybe.

Quote: Doc

Category: Caribbean Islands
City: Lucaya, Bahamas
Casino: Treasure Bay

UV light reveals the repeated hidden phrase "Our Lucaya Treasure Bay."

It's nice to have a hidden UV "error" search again. It seems like it has been quite a while...

Why is it referred to as "Our" Lucaya? Is it meant to indicate possession, or is it a Dutch term?

Quote: Doc

...several clusters of new resort hotels.... One of those clusters includes the Our Lucaya Resort.

Quote: Ayecarumba

Why is it referred to as "Our" Lucaya? Is it meant to indicate possession, or is it a Dutch term?

I think it is the possessive and is intended to indicate a pride in the way they present the Lucaya experience.

I guess I do need to revise my statements from yesterday. Perhaps "Our Lucaya" is a reference to the cluster of resort hotels rather than one in particular. The cluster includes at least the Radisson at Our Lucaya Beach, the Grand Lucayan, Port Lucaya Resort & Yacht Club, and Pelican Bay at Lucaya. They throw around that "Our Lucaya" phrase to describe the resorts, the shopping village, and the casino, and I misinterpreted something I read as indicating that the name of one of the places was Our Lucaya Resort.

deleted

Quote: Ibeatyouraces

The main attraction on St. Martin is the airport.

I'm guessing you are referring to the up-close-and-personal viewing of aircraft landing at (and maybe taking off from) Princess Juliana Airport in Sint Maartin.

Quote: Doc

I'm guessing you are referring to the up-close-and-personal viewing of aircraft landing at (and maybe taking off from) Princess Juliana Airport in Sint Maartin.

I'd go there just to see that and take pictures. They let big jumbo jets land there, too :)

Category: Cruise Ships
Cruise Line: Carnival
Ship: Fantasy

Today we begin a new category for this thread, and it is the first non-geographic category. Each time that I have played in any of the casinos in this category, it has been in motion from one geographic location to another.

Today's post is quite long, because I have quite a bit of supporting info I want to post about cruising, cruise lines, and shipboard casinos, in addition to info about ships from the same line as the source of today's chip but for which I will not be posting chips.

My wife and I have taken fourteen cruises to date, starting in 1976 and continuing through 2012. I suspect there will be more. These cruises have been for durations from four nights to twenty-one. We have been on thirteen ships from six cruise lines, and we have both favorites and least favorites among those lines.

On our second cruise back in 1977, my mother joined us for her first such experience – my father stayed at home, having no interest in trying such a thing. My mother liked it so much that she convinced him to take her (begrudgingly) on another. He discovered that he too liked it so much that they went on several more. It was almost the perfect vacation trip for him in retirement, though he hadn't been able to anticipate anything of interest there for him until he experienced it for himself. Mom and Dad even got some of their friends to cruise with them. After my father died, my mother went on a couple more cruises with friends who had also become widowed.

On two of our cruises in the 1990s, our younger son joined us. He was a teenager at the time. He had a blast both with the entertainment in the piano lounge and also hanging out with some of the other youngsters. Cruising can be fun for everyone from kids to teenagers to geezers. You just have to match the people to the right cruise experience.

Our first cruise in 1976 provided my first casino experience ever (other than a slot machine in a pre-interstate-highway tourist trap on the Georgia-Florida border when I was definitely under-aged.) I have since played in the casino on every cruise ship we have sailed. When we first started cruising, the casinos were operated as concessions on board, renting space from the cruise line. Some of the ships still operate on-board concessions like that, typically retail shops. However, every shipboard casino that I have played in for the past couple of decades appears to be operated by the cruise line itself. Although ship casinos seem to be a minor element of the on-board entertainment, I guess they couldn't see any need to let the profit go to someone else.

On a whim, I kept a souvenir chip from that first ship's casino, and I will be posting that in a few days. I wasn't a collector then, so I missed out on keeping chips from some of the ships I have sailed. I only have eight chips to post in this category.

Chips from casinos on cruise ships are sometimes referred to as "Wet Chips", with no derogatory implications. In some cases, there are complications in designating the casino the chip is from, though so far it has not become nearly so convoluted for me as were some of the casinos on the Caribbean islands.

The most common problem is when a cruise line uses the same chips in the casinos on multiple ships. Today's Casino Chip of the Day is an example of just such a complication. That multi-casino use is most commonly done for the $1 denomination that I collect, with ship-specific chips being used for the larger value chips.

Today's chip is from the Carnival Cruise Line, which has received so much bad press in the last year or three, and deservedly so. I obtained this chip while on the Carnival Fantasy in May 2006, on a five-night cruise from Port Canaveral, Florida to Grand Turk (Turks and Caicos), Half Moon Cay (Bahamas), and Nassau. When I give an itinerary like that, I mean that the ship went back to Port Canaveral to complete the loop. I'll try to be clear for each cruise that wasn't a round trip.

The souvenir chip from the casino on the Fantasy does not mention the ship or the name of the cruise line at all. It is a blue SCV Paulson hat and cane chip with a center inlay that just gives the Carnival logo, a drawing of a generic ship, the corporate slogan The "Fun Ships", and the denomination. UV light reveals the hidden Paulson logo, this time one of those uncommon ones with the cane extending both well above and below the hat.



We had originally booked that cruise on the Sensation, but that ship had encountered some mechanical difficulties and could not maintain adequate speed to cover that route. Carnival switched itineraries between the Fantasy and the sister ship Sensation, which was fine with us because we had already sailed on the Sensation twice.

I'll try to provide a little history of each ship, if I know it, but I doubt that I'll try to describe the ship's features at all. For example, the Fantasy was originally constructed for Carnival and first sailed in 1990.

I saw the exact same chip design in play on the Carnival Ecstasy when we sailed on that ship in April 2012. That five-night cruise went from Port Canaveral, Florida to Key West, Nassau, and Freeport. I have a little more background info on the Ecstasy than I did for the Fantasy.

The ship was constructed and first sailed for Carnival in 1991. On July 20, 1998, a fire started in the main laundry where welding ignited accumulated lint. The fire lasted several hours, and the vehicle lost propulsion. Fourteen crewmembers and eight passengers suffered minor injuries, and one passenger experienced what was classified as a serious injury related to a pre-existing condition. On April 21, 2010 while returning to Galveston, the ship made an emergency turn to avoid a drifting buoy. The ship listed an estimated 25 to 30 degrees, causing substantial damage to shops and dining areas.

Perhaps this is an appropriate place to note the somewhat contradictory opinion my wife and I have of Carnival Cruise Lines. To begin with, we have sailed on Carnival more than any other cruise line – six cruises so far, which is double the number for the second-place line in our cruise history. Here are the other Carnival cruises we have sailed; I don't have souvenir chips from the casinos on any of these ships, though I think they were all using ship-specific $1 chips when I played there.

Mardi Gras in May/June 1977 with my mother, sailing for seven nights from Miami to Nassau, San Juan, and St. Thomas. The ship, which first sailed as the Empress of Canada in April 1961 for the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company, was beached for salvage in December 2003 after sailing under the name Apollon while chartered by Direct Cruises from Epirotiki Lines of Greece.

Carnivale in June 1982, for seven nights from Miami to Samana, San Juan, and St. Thomas. The ship, which first sailed as the Empress of Britain in 1956 for the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company, last sailed as the Topaz under charter by Peace Boat from Topaz International. The ship was retired in 2008, and while anchored on 6/15/08, she was struck by the tanker Champion Brali, severing her bow, and the ship was beached for salvage in late summer 2008.

Sensation in April 1994 with our son, sailing for seven nights from Miami to Nassau, San Juan, and St. Thomas. The ship was constructed for Carnival and first sailed in 1993.

Sensation in July 1997 again with our son, sailing for seven nights from Miami to San Juan, St. Thomas, and St. Martin.

In spite of our having been on their ships for six cruises, Carnival is our least favorite line.

How can that be? If we dislike it so much, why do we keep getting on their ships? For the same reasons that so many other people do. They have a lot of ships; they sail to most any place you might want to cruise, and their prices are dirt cheap compared to most of the other lines. Unfortunately, low fares have resulted in declining quality of the cruising experience on their ships. It's the old story of you get what you pay for, if you are very lucky.

It occurred to me that I have the opportunity -- justified, appreciated, or otherwise -- to continue posting some travel photos as part of this category of casino chips. The main difficulty for cruisers wanting to take photos of their ship in its entirety is that while they are aboard, they can't see the whole ship at the same time, and when they are ashore, there is usually either something obstructing the view or no place to stand where you can fit the entire ship in the field of view. It's a bit like trying to find a spot from which to photograph the entire city block that you are on.

The cruise lines, of course have a significant use for photos of their ships for advertising, so they can justify aerial photography that is beyond my means.

In most cases, I have been able to get at least a partial photo of the ship. So that is what I will post along with the chips.

Since today's chip came from the Carnival Fantasy, I'll start with that ship. Remember that I have not figured out a way to place italic characters within a spoiler button label, so I'm still waiting for input on that formatting issue.



As I said before, I saw the same chip design in play on the Ecstacy, so I'll offer a couple of images of that ship, too.

Quote: Doc

Category: Caribbean Islands
City: Lucaya, Bahamas
Casino: Treasure Bay
The chip shown below is a white RHC Paulson hat and cane chip with four edge inserts, two each in olive and black. The MOGH catalog indicates that this chip was issued in 2009 when the casino changed ownership and name. The tan center inlay has the casino name in a script font and the Our Lucaya resort name in plain text. There is what appears to be a primitive graphic of a compass. UV light reveals the repeated hidden phrase "Our Lucaya Treasure Bay." Now what have we seen oh so many times with this kind of hidden image? Can everyone find it this time?

It also continues the trend I brought up earlier of the error being between 3 and 6 o'clock.

Yes, they almost all are in very nearly the same position.

I was on the Sensation in 2011 Thanksgiving weekend for a 3 day bahamas cruise and was not too impressed. It's an old ship after all. But it was the mix of people as well that put me off. I was told to try a bigger and nicer ship before writing off cruising for good. Anyway, my chip collecting history being short I never kept one from the Sensation. Or the Atlantis in Nassau... Maybe I'll get one from Carnival someday but definitely will not go on the Sensation again.

The Sensation first sailed in 1993 (don't have the exact date of the first cruise), so it was about one year old when we sailed on it in 1994 and four when we sailed on it again in 1997. In 2011 when you cruised, it was 18 years old, so some aging should be expected. However, it had undergone a significant drydocking and retrofit in early 2009, so I would have thought it would have been in pretty good shape in 2011.

In contrast, when we sailed on Carnival's Mardi Gras and Carnivale, they were 16 and 26 years old respectively, so they were significantly behind the times when it came to cruise ship designs.

There are a couple of cruise ship features that I think characterize the design themes that have become popular in the last couple of decades. In the early 1990s, the multi-story atrium was all the rage, and the Sensation was one of those ships. The idea of having a six or seven-story room in the center of the ship gave a bit of the feeling of the huge hotels that decades earlier had adopted styling with 20-something story atria.

Such a design was a major structural challenge for a ship builder, but it gave cruisers something they had never before seen at sea. Before, most ships had small, crowded spaces, with a two-story performance auditorium or lobby area being a special feature.

Then about the turn of the millennium, cruise lines figured out a way to entice passengers to pay for "premium" staterooms. Before then, most cruisers chose between an inside cabin (no view of the sea from your room) or an outside cabin, sometimes called an ocean-view stateroom, which might mean a porthole or even a full window for those on the higher decks. A very few luxury stateroom offered balconies, where those that were willing to pay through the nose could actually get fresh air while in their own private space.

Ships built in the late 1990s offered a few more of these balcony-equipped cabins, often referred to as veranda staterooms, and they were quite popular though priced higher. The cruise lines saw an opportunity and jumped on the band wagon, building ships with balconies on almost every outside cabin that wasn't getting washed by the waves.

If you go to a cruise port and look at six or eight ships, you can fairly easily pick out the ones from the '90s with the high atria and the ones from the 21st century with their exterior walls covered with balconies. The Fantasy and Ecstasy images I posted yesterday don't show the sides of the ship very well, but there aren't many balconies. A little later today I will post an image of another ship, and it will have quite a few of them.

I say it is just "fairly easy" to pick out the decade of the ship, because some are sailing in disguise. Veranda staterooms became so popular that cruise lines returned many of those 1990s ships to the shipyard to have balconies appended to many of the ocean view rooms. That was one of the modifications made to the Sensation when it was retrofitted in 2009.


You said, "But it was the mix of people as well that put me off."

There was a story on the news just yesterday about a guy that was headed to Florida to take his girlfriend and her kids on a cruise. He was short on cash, so he stopped in to knock off a bank on his way to the port. He was quickly captured.

To have a good experience, you should try to avoid cruises that tend to attract the crowd that might think that way. The cut-rate prices being offered by Carnival attract a fair number of passengers who leave the impression that they would consider a Motel6 to be a fine resort. Such passengers often exhibit behaviors on board that detract from the experience for others. Certainly not everyone on board is like that, but there are enough of them that you will notice. This is in addition to the various problems that cost cutting leads to in operation of the ships.

As I said yesterday, we have sailed most often on Carnival because of its pricing and the options it offers, but it is still our least-favorite cruise line.
Cruising on a bigger ship may or may not give you a nicer experience. If you want to experience something different from what you got on the Sensation, I suggest that you try a nicer cruise line before you give up on cruising.

Category: Cruise Ships
Cruise Line: Celebrity
Ship: Century

My wife and I have taken three cruises with Celebrity Cruise Lines, i.e., the second-place line in frequency of our cruising, and my wife has declared it to be her favorite of the six lines we have been on. I like it too, though there are a couple of others we have tried that I think are quite nice.

Two of those cruises on Celebrity were repositioning cruises – one way trips as the ship moves to a different region, usually with a change of season. Such was the cruise we took on the Celebrity Century in December 2008. The ship was constructed for Celebrity and first sailed in 1995. It had been cruising the Mediterranean Sea for the summer and fall of 2008, but it was relocating to the Caribbean for the winter.

We sailed trans-Atlantic on the Century for 14 nights from Spain (Barcelona then Cartagena), to Gibraltar, Morocco (Casablanca then Agadir), the Canary Islands (Lanzarote then La Palma), and finally debarked in Miami. The first seven days we departed seven different ports, then the next seven straight days we were at sea. During that extended period of westward travel on the open water, we set our clocks back an hour most every night. They liked to refer to that as a free hour of cruising. Eastbound crossings have shorter days, and we have never tried one of those.

The repositioning of the ship was to avoid the unpleasant-for-cruising winter weather, but it seemed to have arrived a bit early. Perhaps having the ship wait until December to make the move was the problem – many ships reposition from the Med to the Caribbean or South America in October or November.

We didn't hit particularly cold weather, but there was a drizzle that lasted from Barcelona to the Canary Islands, clearing up consistently only after we finally headed south and west across the ocean. In Cartagena, the weather was so bad that we didn't even go ashore.

When we visited Casablanca, we did see Rick's American Café, but we understand that is the creation of a fan of the Bogart film rather than the inspiration for the film. Our primary outing in Casablanca was a tour of The Great Mosque Hassan II, built from 1980 to 1983 and named for the then king of the country. It is a very modern facility with a retractable roof on a prayer hall that will hold 25,000 worshipers and a courtyard that accommodates 80,000 more.

The image of The Great Mosque below shows that it is not just in the Moroccan desert, but it is surrounded on three sides by the Atlantic Ocean. It overhands the sea, with a view through a floor area to the sea bed. I think that configuration is a reference to some passage in the Koran, but I have never read that text. This is one of two mosque photos that I have displayed at my home. The other is of the Great Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha in the Citadel of Cairo, which is about 150 years older.


Oh, yes, I'm supposed to be talking about casinos and chips. There really is a casino in Casablanca (not Rick's) and a few more in Agadir, but I didn't make it to any of them. On that cruise, I only played in the casino on board the Century, and I did not keep track of my gaming results at all. Two of our tablemates at dinner were from England, and one evening I introduced them to the game of craps. I don't think they ever understood it, but they did have some fun.

My souvenir chip identifies the cruise line but, once again, does not say the name of the ship, although the larger denominations did. They had a couple of different $1 chips in play, and I decided to keep one that showed the map of Europe on one face. This trans-Atlantic cruise was the first one we had taken that involved ports in Europe.

Look closely, and you can see that not only is there a $1 denomiation mark on that face, but there is also a € mark on the eastern part of the map. I have no idea what that is about -- surely they don't use the same chip for gambling in euros -- nor do I know the meaning of the graphic on the other side. To me, it looks more like a Native American design.

The chip was manufactured by Chipco, and I'm fairly sure I have seen it on their web site. I was not able to get their site to load last night and still am not this morning, so I can't verify that this chip is shown there.



Here are a couple of photos of the Celebrity Century in port.

In my previous post, I talked about veranda staterooms becoming so popular in the early 21st century that many earlier ships were retrofitted to add balconies. The Century is just such a ship. It first sailed in 1995, but it was returned to the shipyard for retrofit in April 2006, two and a half years before we sailed on it. They added 314 new verandas and 14 suites, bringing the design as close as they could to that of ships that entered service a decade later than this one.





I just noticed on the Wikipedia page that even the ship's name was retrofitted in 2006. Before that trip back to drydock, Celebrity called their ship the Century, and afterward it became the Celebrity Century. That's just according to Wikipedia, and I think it's a trivial matter anyway, so I don't think I'm going to revise the way I present ships' names in this thread.

Category: Cruise Ships
Cruise Line: Celebrity
Ship: Millennium

How many of you folks have difficulty remembering how many times the letters L and N each appear in Milenium/Millenium/Milennium/Millennium? That was perhaps the second biggest challenge for me at the turn of the century. Correct answer: two of each. The bigger challenge was my having to tolerate all of the paranoia floating around about the Y2K bug wiping out all of our computer systems.

My wife and I sailed on the Celebrity Millennium for eleven nights in the southern Caribbean (yet another word that gives me some spelling difficulties – how many times should R and B appear?). Many of the chips that I posted from the islands in the past few weeks were gathered during that cruise. Our itinerary took us from San Juan, Puerto Rico to St. Croix, St. Kitts, Dominica, St. Lucia, Barbados, Grenada, Curaçao, Aruba, and back to San Juan, PR.

The Millennium was originally constructed for Celebrity, first sailing in 2000, and this southern Caribbean cruise is the only round-trip cruise we have taken on Celebrity..

In the past few days I have mentioned that Carnival Cruise Lines is now our least-favorite line and that my wife has declared that Celebrity is her favorite line. There is, however, a surprising connection between Celebrity and the word "bad," and it relates to the worst cruise we ever had on the very worst ship, and it wasn't one from Carnival.

Almost two weeks ago, when I posted my chip from the Carnaval Casino in Curaçao, I posted a photo of the Millennium and asked a trivia question about the meaning and origin of the "X" logo that appears on the sails of all of the Celebrity ships. Ayecarumba looked up the answer and posted it behind a spoiler button. Here is a little more background.

John D. Chandris was the founder of a Greek freight shipping company. His sons continued in the shipping business, but they also extended into the passenger line business. Anthony Chandris formed Chandris Line in 1959 to support the migrant transit trade between Europe and Australia. His brother Dimitri formed Chandris Cruises in 1960 to run Mediterranean cruises. The two companies later merged and based their business on second-hand ships and the purchasing of a couple of other cruise lines.

Chandris Cruises definitely operated a lower-tier of cruise experience. In March 1987, my wife and I took a five-night cruise on their ship the Galileo from Miami, to Key West, Cancun, Cozumel, and return to Miami. It was by far our worst cruise experience ever. The ship was a dump, the entertainment terrible, and the spring-break college crowd was out of control with both their drunkenness and the nightly trysts, loud squabbles, and broken-hearted sob sessions going on in the passageways, disturbing any passenger who might be over the age of 22 and reasonably sober, particularly if they were trying to get some sleep.

The ship first sailed as the Galileo Galilei in April 1963. It was last sailing under the name Sun Vista for Sun Cruises when an engine room fire on May 20, 1999 caused her to sink early the following day off Malaysia. I could comment "Good riddance," but I don't know the details on any losses, plus it would have been better for the steel to have been salvaged rather than sunk.

Chandris Cruises saw a business opportunity when Holland America purchased the upper-tier Homes Lines and withdrew its ships from serving Bermuda. Chandris sought the prized contracts with the government of Bermuda, but they were rebuffed, because the government wanted their ports served by more upscale lines.

Consultants advised Chandris that the company had already established a low-end reputation, and even if they upgraded ships and service, that reputation would likely stick. Instead, in 1988 they formed a new cruise line named Celebrity Cruises, focused on providing a premium cruise experience. They got the contracts with Bermuda and continued to expand their upscale cruise service.

In the 1990s, Chandris Cruises was being shut down, and, to the best I can find, only one ferry has not been scrapped. However, Celebrity Cruises maintains a logo of "X", which is really the Greek letter Chi and stands for the Chandris name as it is spelled in the Greek alphabet.

In 1997, the Chandris family sold their interest in Celebrity Cruises to Royal Caribbean International. The combined corporation is now Royal Caribbean Cruises, but the two lines continue to market their products cooperatively under the separate names.

In contrast to yesterday's Casino Chip of the Day, the $1 Celebrity chip from the Millennium has the ship's name on it, along with different, very ornate scrollwork patterns on each side. This is another blue ceramic chip from Chipco. I still can't get the Chipco web site to load, so I don't know what's going on there. I'm really not sure which of my Celebrity chips it was that I saw on the Chipco site.




I'll repost the photo of the Millennium I provided with my chip from the Carnaval Casino, and I'll provide another one here, too.





By the way, I checked a little further, and it seems that in 2007-2008, all of the Celebrity ships were renamed to append the line's name to the start of the ship's name, so it's really Celebrity Cruises' Celebrity Millennium, but I'm too lazy to edit my past work or change my momentum for future posts.

Chipco's materials and manufacturing processes allow them to add text to the edge of the chip. Sometimes it is just the denomination, but occasionally, it is a casino name and or slogan.

For the Celebrity chips, is one side intended to be the obverse, (heads), and the other the reverse, ("tails")?

Perhaps so, but I don't know which is which. I just labeled my image files for the Century and Millennium chips with "a" and "b" indicators for the two sides. I assigned those based on whim. The edges of these two chips do not have any text, just simple bars that extend from one face to the other.

Category: Cruise Ships
Cruise Line: Celebrity
Ship: Summit

When I retired in August 2004, my wife wanted to go on a cruise to Alaska. Unfortunately, I had waited too late in the season to book such a cruise. I wondered what the ships did when it got too cold for their itinerary, and that's when I discovered repositioning cruises.

For that fall's trip, we picked out a ship that had spent the summer cruising to Alaska, and when it completed its last cruise of the season, we boarded it in Vancouver for a cruise to Hawaii. I'll be posting a chip from that ship soon, but I wanted to discuss repositioning cruises a little more now.

When a ship is sailing a repeating route, there is efficiency in marketing – with a number of dates available for the same itinerary, the fancy brochures, detailed web sites, email and snail mail solicitation can all be used to find passengers to fill the space available. When a ship is moving to a different region, there is just one trip to reposition it, and extensive marketing support for just the single date may not be justified.

The line still wants to generate what revenue they can, so they frequently attract passengers with discounted fares, making the cruises much cheaper per day than the standard routes. That's a factor that attracted my attention quickly, and my wife and I have been on several repositioning cruises since that one from Vancouver to Hawaii in October 2004. The following spring we took our cruise to Alaska.

The Summit was constructed for Celebrity and first sailed in 2001. The ship spent the winter of 2004-05 cruising in the Caribbean. In the spring it offered a single, two-week repositioning cruise through the Panama Canal, from Fort Lauderdale to San Diego. That was immediately followed by another two-week repositioning cruise from San Diego to Alaska and back to Vancouver. Then the ship spent the summer repeating a loop between Vancouver and Alaska.

As a random daily comment about a ship's history, how about this: in 2006 the Summit arrived in Seward, AK with a humpback whale dead on its bow.

We booked the second part of that May 2005 repositioning of the Summit (and yes, that was before the name was changed to Celebrity Cruises' Celebrity Summit), and our itinerary took us from San Diego to Catalina Island, San Francisco, Seattle, Victoria, Hubbard Glacier (just close enough to watch the ice calving into the sea, not going ashore), Juneau, Skagway, Sitka, Ketchikan, and Vancouver. We met a couple on board who took the entire repositioning trip, sailing on the Summit from Fort Lauderdale through the canal to San Diego and on to Alaska and Vancouver.

Of course, I have a number of travel photos from that cruise. During discussions of my post for my chip from the Golden Gate casino in Las Vegas, I posted a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge that I took from the deck of the Summit as we left San Francisco Bay. I have a number more from Alaska that I like, but I will try to restrain my posting urges just a little.

The Summit chip shown below is another blue ceramic chip from Chipco, and their web site still isn't working. Perhaps the wording on this one, contrasted to yesterday's chip, reflects that I got the chip before Celebrity started revising their ships' names.



Finally, here are a couple of photos of the ship. These last few days I have been trying to provide a mix of photos: one that provides a good view of the ship and a second to offer a scenic shot that includes the ship. Nope, couldn't restrain those urges very long.

What is the "castle and crown" supposed to represent? Is there a "Dungeons and Dragons" theme on the ship?

Quote: Ayecarumba

What is the "castle and crown" supposed to represent? Is there a "Dungeons and Dragons" theme on the ship?

There is no such theme that I recall. The MOGH catalog page for chips from the Summit has all but one chip showing either a castle or a knight in armor on horseback. The exception shows an old sailing ship.

Quote: Doc

Category: Cruise Ships
Cruise Line: Celebrity
Ship: Summit

As a random daily comment about a ship's history, how about this: in 2006 the Summit arrived in Seward, AK with a humpback whale dead on its bow.

Apparently, the ocean is not as big as I thought, as this seems to happen regularly. This article mentions that a Princess cruise ship in Alaska had multiple incidents of dead whales getting stuck on their bow.

Is there something about the ships that encourages the whales to cross paths with them? All are designed with a "bulbous bow", an appendage designed to reduce the energy needed to move the ship forward at cruising speed. Unfortunately, it also forms a whale sized shelf onto which the marine behemoths lodge themselves.

Quote: Ayecarumba

Is there something about the ships that encourages the whales to cross paths with them?

I really have no idea. While riding in smaller ships, I have seen dolphins ride the bow wake like a surfer on a wave. It looks as if they are doing it just for the fun of the ride. Perhaps whales do the same thing with larger ships, and it only takes a small mistake or a reckless "teenager" to get into the wrong position. I really don't know.

Quote: Ayecarumba

Apparently, the ocean is not as big as I thought....

I suppose every family has tales they tell about something a child did or said, and the tale gets repeated over and over for years, no matter how much the "child" gets annoyed with it. One that involved me as a child happened on my very first visit to the ocean at the age of 3 or 4 with my parents and grandparents. They had been telling me for days how big the ocean was, and when we finally got to the beach, looking at the water extending to the horizon, they asked me what I thought of it. Apparently my answer was, "Well, I sure thought it was bigger than that!" No one had any idea how to respond to that comment. At least that's the way I heard the story told for a couple of decades.

Quote: Doc

I suppose every family has tales they tell about something a child did or said, and the tale gets repeated over and over for years, no matter how much the "child" gets annoyed with it. One that involved me as a child happened on my very first visit to the ocean at the age of 3 or 4 with my parents and grandparents. They had been telling me for days how big the ocean was, and when we finally got to the beach, looking at the water extending to the horizon, they asked me what I thought of it. Apparently my answer was, "Well, I sure thought it was bigger than that!" ....

Hehe... Funny, my wife said the same thing on our wedding night.... Bah dum dum!

Category: Cruise Ships
Cruise Line: Holland America
Ship: Noordam

While my wife has definitely settled on Celebrity Cruises as her favorite line, and I like it a lot, I also like a couple of others, including Holland America. Perhaps my favorable opinion of the line is distorted by the fantastic itineraries we have followed on our two cruises with that line.

Our second trip with Holland America was just last fall, when we sailed on the Noordam, which had entered service in 2006. It took us a couple of false starts to get our cruise planned. In the beginning, we had in mind a 14-day repositioning cruise across the Atlantic. That cruise began in Rome – really in Rome's port city of Civitavecchia – and ended in Fort Lauderdale.

As we were booking that cruise and planning our flight to Rome, we thought, "What the heck, if we're going to Rome, then we should go a few days early and see the city before boarding the ship." We had never before been to Rome. So we started planning a 3-day, pre-cruise adventure, and know what we discovered? Three days in Rome would cost us just about as much as another full week on the cruise ship!

Willing to spend a few extra dollars but not willing to get less than optimal value for our money, we changed our plans to a 21-day cruise, with a week circling the western Mediterranean followed by the trans-Atlantic sailing. Our attitude was to just forget staying in Rome if it's going to be that expensive!

Our itinerary took us from Civitavecchia up the Italian coast to Livorno (offering excursion options to either Pisa or Florence), then over to Monaco, next to Barcelona, then Cagliari (Sardinia), Palermo (Sicily), and back to Civitavecchia. Quite a first week! Then we headed back to Spain, with stops in Alicante, Malaga, and Cadiz, followed by Funchal on the Portuguese island of Madeira, before heading across the pond to Fort Lauderdale.

I could fill up this thread for the next week with my photos from that cruise, but I won't. Oh, what the heck – here's just one. Does anyone recognize where this cathedral is located? Have you ever seen this view of it? I hadn't.



Holland America was founded as the Netherlands-America Steamship Company in 1873, though Wiki says the first sailing from Rotterdam to New York was in 1872. In 1989, the company became a subsidiary of Carnival Corporation, which also owns AIDA Cruises, Carnival Cruise Lines, Costa Cruises, Cunard Line, Ibero Cruises, P&O Cruises, Princess Cruises, and Seabourn Cruise Line. Yes, Carnival Corporation is a big company, and (according to Wiki) they control a 49.2% share of the total worldwide cruise market.

In spite of one corporation owning that many brands, the individual lines tend to operate somewhat autonomously. However, several of our fellow passengers with whom we shared our dining table had sailed previously on multiple cruises with Holland America. We agreed that the service and general experience on the ship were very good but just a step down from what we all remembered from previous Holland America cruises. Our speculation was that the cost-cutting corporate mentality from Carnival Cruise Lines was creeping across the boundaries and leading to deterioration at Holland America.

I don't think I played anything but craps in the casino on the Noordam, though I did play blackjack at some casinos in ports. I had more winning sessions than losing sessions, but overall I lost about $850 over those three weeks. No, I was not playing some kind of Martingale strategy.

The Noordam chip shown below is a blue RHC Paulson chip with an oversized center inlay. On one side, the inlay shows a photograph of a Holland America ship, but I'm rather confident that it is not the Noordam. The name on the side of the bow – white lettering on the black (dark blue?) background – is much too long to be that name. Contrast it to what is shown in the first photo of the ship at the bottom of this post.

The other side of the chip shows the name of the cruise line above a compass design. I think the background image is a harbor map, but I'm not really sure.



For my sorta-daily images of the ship associated with the chip, I again have two to offer today. Again, one is focused on the ship (check the length of the name on the bow) and the other on a general scene that includes the ship.





So here's a little challenge that may only be possible for folks whose browsers allow them to zoom in on that last photo. I'm going to give directions to point you to a couple of spots in that photo: Just to the left of the stern of the Noordam is a pier extending from the opposite shore of the harbor, with maybe a dozen smaller ships docked against it. Where that pier reaches shore, right on the point of the land, there is a light-colored building with one black face. That is the Auditorium Rainier III, home of the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra.

Just to the left of that building is another one that has a large number of windows and a lot of trees growing on its roof. Look just barely beyond the left end of that growth of trees, even with the upper level of the trees – there is a slightly darker gray building with a greenish copper verdigris structure on its roof. That building is the famous Casino Monte-Carlo, and if you squint you can see its side entrance. Some day soon, perhaps I'll post a full-size view of the main entrance, which is to the left.

Did you get to spend anytime in Rome Doc? I think that Rome is definately worth several days to few the incredible history of the Roman Empire. Having said that I am in no position to speak of budget considerations for anybody else, especially considering my week in Rome and Naples was a free incentive trip.

If you didn't get too spend much time in Rome I would definately put it on your bucket list. The only other city that I have really been almost overwhelmed by a sense of history was London, particularly Westminster Abbey and the crypts of all the kings from the history books.

Quote: Doc

I could fill up this thread for the next week with my photos from that cruise, but I won't. Oh, what the heck – here's just one. Does anyone recognize where this cathedral is located? Have you ever seen this view of it? I hadn't.

Las Vegas, of course. That's where old European monuments are badly recreated, no? That tower isn't even standing straight! :P

Quote: kenarman

Did you get to spend anytime in Rome Doc?

We did not spend any nights in Rome and only saw it briefly. Just as was the case with our trans-Atlantic cruise on the Celebrity Century starting in Barcelona, our flight from the U.S. arrived in Europe early in the morning -- far too early for them to want us to show up at the cruise port. Like most passengers in both instances, we had arranged with the cruise line for transfer from the airport to the cruise port. They loaded us onto a bus and gave us a limited tour of the city, mostly to use up time along the way. We rode by a lot of the famous sites in Rome, but the only place we were able to get out and go inside was the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Wall.

A week later, when the ship returned to Civitavecchia, we could have taken one of a few excursions into Rome for the day, but they were outrageously priced compared to tours in other cities and involved a lot of time riding to and fro. Civitavecchia is a fair distance from the center of Rome. We definitely missed out on seeing a lot of nice things in Rome, but instead we got to see Livorno, Pisa, Monaco, Barcelona, Cagliari, and Palermo. It seemed like a fair swap to us.

Quote: Nareed

Las Vegas, of course. That's where old European monuments are badly recreated, no? That tower isn't even standing straight! :P

With regard to recreating European monuments in Las Vegas, I think I have mentioned before that the one time my brother and his lady friend were in Las Vegas, he commented that it was their second hotel room in a row from which they could look out the window and see the Eiffel tower.

As for the tower in my "Mystery Cathedral" photo not being straight, I did take this alternate photo while I was on the scene. Does it not look straight enough to you? It's all a matter of relativity and perspective.

I think the image on the chip is the Noordam. The shades, decks and smokestack all appear to be the same. What does the "M.S." in "M.S. Noordam" stand for?

All of the Holland America ships in the Vista Class are essentially identical. You would have to look at the name printed on the hull to tell the difference. From a distance, all of the Holland America ships look a lot alike, even those of very different sizes.

The "MS" in the name means "Motor Ship", as contrasted with SS for Steam Ship, or TSS for Turbine Steam Ship. There is a list of a bunch of these abbreviations shown at this site.

I think that "Motor Ship" suggests that the fired engines drive electrical generators, which in turn power electric motors that turn the propulsion screws. I could be mistaken, because I don't really have any background in marine engineering.

Category: Cruise Ships
Cruise Line: Holland America
Ship: Zuiderdam

The two cruises that my wife and I have taken on Holland America Lines ships were both repositioning cruises, and each lasted for 21 nights – the two longest cruises that we have ever been on. Our first HAL cruise was on the Zuiderdam in September/October 2007, shortly before we moved from Georgia to North Carolina. The ship was coming off a summer season of cruises to Alaska and was repositioning for Caribbean cruises in the winter.

Our itinerary took us first from Vancouver to Seattle, Los Angeles, and six ports on the west coast of Mexico – Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, Manzanillo, Acapulco, Santa Cruz Huatulco, and Puerto Chiapas. Then we visited Puerto Caldera in Costa Rica, sailed through Golfo Dulce, and transited the Panama Canal. Once we reached the Caribbean Sea, we made port only in Cartagena, Columbia before heading to Florida and stops in Key West and Ft. Lauderdale. The ship, the staff, and the on-board experience were great, but after 21 days I was quite ready to go home.

By the way, in relation to the "M.S." prefix that Ayecarumba asked about, "dam" is the Dutch suffix used on passenger ships, while "dijk" or "dyk" is the suffix on cargo vessels. Without the suffix, today's ship would be named Zuider, meaning "South," while the trimmed name for yesterday's ship would be Noor, meaning "North." The two ships are in Holland America's Vista Class and have the sister ships Oosterdam and Westerdam. Any guesses as to how the sans-suffix versions of those names are translated? The Zuiderdam was the first ship of the Vista Class and entered service in 2002.

No need for me to put a new travel snapshot from our Zuiderdam cruise in the middle of this post. In a thread on this forum where folks were discussing photography about a year and a half ago, I posted a photo that I had taken in Acapulco while cruising on the Zuiderdam. I noted then that I don't very often edit my photos after clicking the shutter, other than cropping, but I said that the one from Acapulco was a paste-up to convey info that I could not show otherwise in a still photo. I noted that it could have been improved if I only knew how to use PhotoShop, and Mosca provided the very kind service of working up an edited/corrected version of my image file.

We took that cruise before I kept records of my gaming sessions, but my recollection is that I played low-stakes limit Texas holdem one evening early in the cruise when they didn't have the craps table open and otherwise stuck strictly with my favorite game.

One side of this Zuiderdam chip is quite similar to the one shown yesterday for the Noordam – it is a blue RHC Paulson chip with an oversized center inlay that shows a "generic" Holland America ship, this time in a different orientation. From this view, I don't think even an expert on Holland America ships could tell one of the Vista Class ships from another, and the ship on this chip might not even be in the Vista Class. This side of the chip also gives the names of the line and the ship, plus the denomination. This side has a faint Paulson logo revealed by UV light, although there was no such hidden image on yesterday's chip. The other side of the chip is quite different from yesterday's. It has an image of a dolphin, I think, though that might be some variety of whale. I really don't know much at all about marine mammals.



Continuing my established pattern, we have two photos of the ship associated with this chip, one featuring the ship itself and the other a city overview in which the ship is barely visible.