A bitter sweet good bye to another successful ship reunion

Me and her at the Bellingrath Gardens

So, when we last left off I was writing a blog post at 5 a.m. after a middle of the night false fire alarm brought the entire USS Cogswell reunion to the lobby while hotel management worked out how to reset the alarm and restart the elevators.

(Note to self: When staying in an older hotel always ask to be housed on the lowest possible floor).

After the short night we headed back downstairs to catch an 8 a.m. bus to Bellingrath Gardens.

As I boarded the bus I shook my head and pronounced loudly, “you guys will never believe the weird dream I had last night.” Almost in unison, they responded that I was not dreaming.

Joan stopping to smell the roses

As it turned out we accidentally left two couples behind at the hotel as they accidentally slept in and had to catch up with us at the gardens in their personal car.

The gardens were beautiful, but the weather was a little on the unpleasantly warm side with plenty of humidity. Joan’s knee was bothering her a lot, but she declined my offer to borrow one of the garden’s wheelchairs to help her around. She’s a trouper.

It took about 15 minutes to walk the paths to the Bellingrath home, which is a beautiful home that was one the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bellingrath. He made his fortune in the early part of the 1900s by purchasing the first Coca-Cola franchise in the Mobile, Alabama area.

At the beginning he did his own bottling, driving and delivering and built the business into a multi-million dollar empire in a short time.

One of the many pretty flowers

The home started out as a small camping retreat for Mr. Bellingrath to take him away from the pressures of work at the suggestion of his doctor. The small camp cabin turned into a beautiful two-story impeccably furnished home. The couple had no children and when Mr. Bellingrath died (nine years after his wife died) he left the home and gardens as a memorial to his wife and for the public to enjoy.

Mrs. Bellingrath collected Boehm Porcelain from around the world and the extensive collection is displayed throughout the home.  No photos are allowed inside the home, but you can check out the pictures of the home and gardens by following this link.

Another cruise ship

Following the home tour we watched a short film on the house and then boarded a river boat for an enjoyable 45-minute cruise on the Fowl River which runs next to the Bellingrath property.

Joan and I took a long route back to the front gate and walked the boardwalk that takes you through the bayou gardens. We were looking for wildlife, but saw only one fish.

With the heat and humidity rising we took frequent breaks but got back to the main entrance and gift shop in time to cool down in the air conditioning before boarding our bus back to the hotel.

We arrived back about 3:30 p.m. and headed to our room to freshen up for the official reunion photo session and then the formal  banquet.

Another beautiful spot in the gardens

My shipmates and spouses gathered on the mezzanine floor for the photo session and then we sat down to a wonderful dinner and a Mystery Dinner Theater presentation “Murder on the Carnivore Cruise.”

The title of the play was pretty appropriate considering Joan and I just got back from our own Carnival Cruise.

The cast was funny, but I missed figuring out the murderers were by a country mile. It was a fun night, but everyone was pretty exhausted from the early morning wake up and the room cleared fairly quickly following dinner.

Joan and the bamboo tunnel

In the morning we said our farewells to my shipmates and started the long trek home about 8:30 a.m. from Mobile. More and more shipmates from my time on the ship have been coming to the reunions which makes it very nice for me as I have gotten reacquainted with a number of guys I was friends with at a critical time in my life.

George, who is the association secretary, has done a great job of collecting memorabilia (including the ship’s flag from our 66-67 cruise that I saved for 40 some years before donating to the association). Each reunion brings more and more memorabilia from the cruises and George has done a great job of assembling photo books from nearly every era of the ship’s history.

Sadly, this reunion was the first where none of the World War II sailors aboard the Cogswell were able to attend. They were sorely missed.

Storm clouds on the way home

A few miles outside Mobile we drove over a long series of bridges that traverse several rivers. It was an interesting road project, one like we had never seen before.

With storms crossing the country we found ourselves driving through several squalls. Traffic was slight and we breezed through Alabama and Tennessee and when I realized we were approaching Louisville just about rush hour we decided to stop and have dinner at a Texas Roadhouse Restaurant just outside Louisville to let traffic clear out before finishing our trip.

We finished dinner a little after 7 p.m. and breezed through Louisville landing in Clarksville, Indiana about 7:30 p.m.

One sad fact we noted that the further we got north the higher the gasoline prices. We topped off in Alabama for $3.11 a gallon. By the time we got to Indiana it was more than $4 a gallon and it got worse as we drove into Michigan.

We had some nice weather on the trip

We heard they are blaming some refinery fire. I have this picture in my mind of the oil company executives sitting around their conference room laughing and pulling notes out of a hat to come up with an explanation of why they are going to gouge us this time.

"Hey, let's pull out the old standy excuse that we had a refinery fire. That always gets 'em," the executive says. It would be more refreshing if they just said they want to fleece us. At least that would be honest.

The Best Western was nice and we got a good night’s sleep before the final leg on Thursday.

More rain followed us home to Lapeer but we arrived about 4 p.m.

More reunion photos

Joan and the bonnet at Bellingrath Gardens

A shipmate of mine and his wife at Bellingrath Gardens

More of the gardens

One of the many beautiful flowers in the green house

Joan in the greenhouse

More greenhouse plants

A greenhouse grasshopper

One of the beautiful walks in the gardens

Part of the gardens outside the house

Inside the boat on the river cruise

A small portion of the Bellingrath home we toured

Joan on the Bayou Boardwalk

The scenery from the Bayou Boardwalk

Heading home and into the rain

A 'real' hotel wake up call, and a couple good tours

Our reunion's 3:19 a.m. wake up call at the hotel

It’s hard to start a post about a fun day you had on Monday, when a false fire alarm in the hotel woke you up and caused you to walk down six flights of stairs at 3:19 a.m. on Tuesday.

We are staying at the Admiral Semmes Hotel in Mobile, Alabama for our Navy reunion. At 3:19 a.m. (About two hours and 20 minutes ago as I write this) a loud alarm and woman’s voice came on in the dark in our bedroom announcing, “Attention, attention, an emergency has been reported in the hotel, you are to evacuate the hotel immediately. Use the stairs, do not use the elevators.” This continually repeated.

My first reaction was to look out the window and seeing very little action outside ignoring the whole thing. But we thought better of it and got dressed and walked down six flights of stairs (which is not easy for Joan with her bad knee). We did take a couple minutes to get dressed first.

Aboard the USS Alabama



The stairway took us to a back exit of the hotel, out through the pool area and onto an outdoor sidewalk where we found many of my Navy reunion folks.

As we walked to the front of the hotel a Mobile fire truck was driving off. False alarm. Unfortunately, the man working the front desk had no idea how to reset the alarm and make the elevators work again. We decided trying to walk up the six flights of stairs with Joan’s knee might result in an actual emergency so we waited in the lobby, with a lot of other elderly folks, for more than an hour for the security guy to arrive at the hotel and reset everything.

The most distressing part of the whole adventure was hearing the desk clerk tell someone, “it happens all the time.”

So the incident did raise a few obvious questions. One, if it happens all the time, why don’t you fix it? Two, if it happens all the time, why at least don’t you know how to reset it? And most confusing of all is that if you have a hotel with hundreds of rooms on 10 floors why are 80 guests scattered from Floor 6 to Floor 10 and not being housed on lower floors?

Joan and me on the USS Alabama

Tonight, on the last night of the reunion, we are supposed to have a “Mystery Dinner Theater” event. Trying to lighten the mood downstairs while we waited for security to fix the alarm I said: “Maybe this was part of the set up for tonight’s murder mystery.”

One of my crusty old shipmates responded quickly, “If that’s true, then someone is definitely going to die.”



I took a few photos of us all standing around in our mixture of night clothes and other hastily assembled garments.  We finally got back to our rooms about 5:15 a.m. and knowing I would never get back to sleep started writing this post.

Another of our guys mentioned to the clerk that perhaps some accommodation should be made to take tonight’s stay off our bill.

“I’ll talk to the manager,” he said.

“Well, talk to them REAL good,” my shipmate said back.



Lunch in the wardroom

Generally people were in pretty good humor about the whole thing, but we’ll see how much sleeping goes on today as we drive on our tour bus around town.

OK, back to yesterday.

We left the hotel at 8:30 a.m. headed for Battleship Park where we spent several hours touring the USS Alabama Battleship, which is now a museum ship. After getting our fill of touring the ship we had a catered dinner aboard in the ship’s Wardroom, which is where the officers ate when it was an active Naval vessel.

Usually officers eat on fine china, but they served the dinners on the divided metal trays more common to the crew’s mess on a Navy ship. Those of us who were enlisted men offered to show our officer members how to eat off the metal trays.



A cannon demonstration at Ft. Gaines

Following the battleship tour our bus took us to Ft. Gaines on Dauphine Island. The fort, which was first built and occupied in 1819 was part of the Confederate defense of Mobile Bay during the Civil War. It was also an integral part of the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864. This was the famous battle in which Admiral Farragut uttered the words, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

In those days torpedoes referred to underwater mines, one of which had just blown up one of the ships in the Admiral’s fleet.

The park’s ranger fired off a musket and a small cannon for us (loud noises always amuse sailors) we spent some time visiting the various rooms and museums on the site.

On the way back to the hotel we got a tour of downtown Mobile, including driving near the site of the annual football “Senior Bowl.”

We went to dinner in the hotel and then spent a few hours in the hospitality room visiting with old friends. I’m collecting stories for our next newsletter so it was gold mining for me. Joan went back to the room a couple hours earlier than I did, probably after we had retold the same stories four or five times. I will say that some of the stories are ripening with age.

We went to sleep about 10:30 p.m. and then at 3:19 a.m., well that brings us back to where we began.

Caribbean Cruise post - Part II

Heading into Cozumel on Friday

It’s Monday morning (early) and I’m up and getting ready to head out on my Navy reunion tour bus here in Mobile, Alabama in a couple hours. Joan is still sleeping so I thought I’d finish up the cruise post and give you a couple photos to look at.

In backwards order we arrived back in New Orleans on the Carnival Conquest early Sunday morning and were docked by the time we got up from bed. During the night during one of my several bathroom breaks I was up and peeked out the port to see the passing Louisiana towns along the Mississippi River.

As I mentioned previously it takes about 6-7 hours to cruise up the river to New Orleans. Kind of cool to get up in the night and have that as your scenery.

The huge and beautiful Carnival Magin

Reveille was early as we had to be out of our stateroom by 8:30 a.m. So we got cleaned up and had breakfast in the main dining room about 7:30 a.m. and came back to our room, finished our packing (our main suitcases were picked up for shore delivery Saturday night) and headed to the lounge to wait for our debarkation number (26) to be called.

It’s always fun to walk by the guest service desk on the last morning of the cruise and hear people arguing about their large onboard bill. “I don’t remember ordering three Mimosas at the bar last night?”

“If you would like to see your signature on the charge slips we will be happy to provide it for you,” the nice receptionist said.

Almost at the dock

They had a video playing of our cruise on the big screen and it was nearly two hours before we were called to leave the ship. It takes a while to debark 3,000 people one-at-a-time. We were in no hurry as our next adventure didn’t start until 5 p.m. in Mobile, Alabama which is only a two-hour drive from New Orleans.

Finally we checked off the ship, collected our luggage and headed to our roof top parking spot where we loaded our luggage (mostly full of dirty clothes) into the Tahoe and headed to Mobile.

We arrived in Mobile a little after 1 p.m. and checked into the Admiral Semmes Hotel, which is a beautiful and classic old establishment. Some of my shipmates were already here and we sat in the hospitality room and visited until the start of the business meeting at 1700 hours (5 p.m.).

I met a former Cogswell sailor that I served with who was attending his first reunion and later we went out to dinner with him and his wife. All in all a wonderful start to the reunion. By the way he’s aged a lot, glad I didn’t.

During our earlier sitting, we washed some clothes in the hotel laundry so we now have enough clean clothes to make it home to Michigan on Thursday.

Joan heading to her Salsa and Salsa class

On Saturday, our last full day on the cruise I took the “Behind The Fun” tour which is an inside look at the ship. Joan would prefer to have her fingernails pulled out one by one than see all the inner workings of a cruise ship so I went alone.

We toured the engine control room, the backstage of the theater, the crew’s living area, the food storage areas, the various galleys on the ship and my favorite, a tour of the bridge. Because of security concerns we had to go through a metal detector and surrender any cameras and cellphones before the start of the tour so I have no personal photos of the adventure. The ship did take a photo of us on the bow (not accessible to passengers normally and with the Captain on the bridge, but I’ll have to scan them and put them up when I get home.)

It was a great tour, lasted more than three hours and they gave me a free hat, so what a great day.

We again ate in the main dining room for dinner and then went back to our stateroom to complete our major packing as your luggage had to be picked up between 8-11 p.m. outside your stateroom door.

Joan tiene mucho Margaritas

We went to the family friendly comedy show in the Degas Lounge and then went back to get some sleep.

On Friday we went into Cozumel, but only Joan really went ashore. She signed up for a “Salsa and Salsa” class where she learned out to make varieties of salsa, learned some salsa dance moves and how to make a Margarita. I think she drank a few too, judging from the photo. The tour included “All you could drink Margaritas, and I think Joan drank all she could.

Joan was back early and glad of it as when sailing time came the line up to get back on the ship was down and around the end of the pier. They will leave you behind if you are not back on when it is time for the ship to leave, but I think everyone made it back.

We had to take on a pilot for the short trip in and out of Cozumel, but the pilot was only onboard for about 10 minutes each way. I took a picture of the “Piloto” boat, which means Pilot in Spanish and it is posted in a separate post below with some more cruise photos.

Joan said she is ready to whip up some mean salsa from our vegetable garden with the knowledge she picked up during her shore excursion.

This is a little abbreviated as we have to get ready to head out on a city tour here in Mobile. I will write more reflections on the tour and Navy reunion later.

More photos from our cruise

Another towel animal

This is the "Piloto" boat

Approaching Cozumel

Royal Caribbean's "Freedom of the Seas" (not the one that burned)

Approaching the dock next to the mammoth Carnival Magic ship

The line up for the late arriving "Magic" cruisers

The "Magic" sails into the sunset

If you look closely behind the long line waiting to get on the ship you will see the "Piloto" boat

A huge line waiting to get back on board from Cozumel

Everyone's aboard and we are gone

One more towel animal