Thursday, Friday and Saturday - Sea Days All

The sea days all look pretty much the same. Once we got out of the rain and fog and the one nice day in St John’s we entered the North Atlantic and found storms. The weather has been awful – dingy gray and cloudy with rain on and off all the time. We’ve been tracking thru a storm all three days, the seas have been rough with 15-22 foot waves, and the wind has been gale force numbers 7-9 in whatever scale they used to measure wind. There was even a snowstorm at sea on Thursday, for about an hour. No noticeable accumulation on the ocean however. The barf bags were put out on Thursday morning and remain available. Remarkably, I’ve not been affected. I was a little queasy on Thursday, but took a Bonine and it went away. The captain has been turning the ship with the wind in the daytime to minimize the rolling effect but everyone still looks drunk when they walk.

The activities on this ship are not great, especially since nothing can be done outdoors. There are trivia, scategories, pictionary , charades and a couple of bridge games going throughout the day, but we aren’t interested in these. The movies have been good titles, Slumdog Millionaire, The Changeling, Benjamin Button and 7 Pounds but the ones I haven’t seen play at stupid times. They are repeated next day on the TV, so I did watch most of the Changeling today. The cooking demos have only been done by the ship staff – no guest chef and although I’d like to see them, they were always scheduled for the same time as something else I was doing so I haven’t gotten to any of them.

The floral arrangements on the ship are really beautiful and very creative – we asked at the front desk if we could get a tour of the floral department and they were able to arrange it. We met Eddy the floral designer and went to the cold room in the subterranean part of the ship. It was very interesting and we enjoyed chatting with him. Yesterday, he gave a flower arranging demo in the theater/culinary arts studio and we enjoyed that too.

Yesterday we were invited to the Captain’s Brunch for returning passengers. It was at 11am in the dining room and the dress requirement was that stupid ‘smart casual’ – so far I’ve determined that that is wide open to interpretation except that it means no jeans – but most everything else is acceptable. We duded ourselves up and went to the worst lunch menu I’ve ever seen. There were no brunch items and very limited choices on the courses. They didn’t encourage lingering, since the regular lunch in that dining room started at noon. The captain said about 8 words then turned the microphone over to the cruise director and the guy whose job it is to get you to sign up for more cruises. They’ve suspended handshaking on board, and instead recommend elbow bumping. Boy does this ever look stupid.

Tonight’s entertainment is a combination of the magician, the oboeist and the singer. Maybe in short bursts they’ll be OK. I have heard varying reports on the oboeist – one raved about how good she was and the other raved about how bad. No matter – I’m not sorry we missed her.

Of course there are the obligatory port talks but for some reason, the woman who did the first 2 days of them (and was interesting) left the ship in Halifax and has been replaced with a dorky guy who’s not so interesting. He spends as much time talking about himself as he does the ports. The requisite ‘educational’ speaker is a man who is very knowledgeable about the birds of the North and South Atlantic. Boring!

We continue to make our daily and nightly donations in the casino – I’m keeping mine small and Bob hits a winner and collects some bills every once in a while. The machines in there are old, although they suck bills in, they spit coins out. There are no voucher printers or ways to save the credits you have for another time as is done on other ships. Other than nickels, all other coins are tokens that have to be exchanged for bills. The casino is small but there are a decent number of 1 cent, 2 cent and 5 cent machines. I haven’t even done bingo yet – it’s up to $25 for a 3 pack of cards, but at our dinner table, we are talking about doing a syndicate for the last snowball bingo when the prize is 3 grand and just splitting it if any of us win.

During the night last night I got up with a sick stomach – not seasick – more like food poisoning and the symptoms lasted most of the morning. I’ve stayed in bed all day today, drinking water and once I started to feel hungry – I hit the snack bag and ate a small can of Pringles. I’m better now and have had my shower and plan to go to the dining room for dinner but will need to watch what I eat. I’ve been eating mostly the seafood choices, but tonite I think it will be plain soup and maybe the ever present grilled or roasted chicken breast.

I’ve also been trying some of the cold soups on board – they had an apple vichyssoise that was wonderful and a peach almond cream soup that was also good. Last night I tried the blackberry bramble soup with a dollop of lime sorbet. I took one spoonful and was looking for a place to spit it out. They never strained it and the all I got was a mouthful of millions of blackberry seeds floating in the worst tasting lime stuff I’ve ever encountered. YUK! Other wise the food has been generally good with lots of choices. I had some delicious salmon and very good cod. I think my stomach problem may have been related to the seafood cocktail’s I’ve had the last few days – lots of baby shrimp, scallops and mussels. Must be the mussels. No more of them for me!

OK – I’ve got to go get dressed for dinner. See y’all next time. Roberta – Bob wanted me to let you know that he had a Kettle One for you this afternoon. Hope you enjoyed it!

Just got back to the room – went to dinner and ate lightly, had chicken tenders, egg drop soup and some plain pasta tonite and only ate ½ of everything. Went to the casino but the smoke it there was making me feel sick so I went to the internet café and checked email and your blog comments.

Lew & Cheryl – thanks for the Dublin suggestions, we will look forward to going to all of those places.
Rebecca – I knew you could do it! What I don’t understand is why Cheryl is having problems.
Steve & Jane – we will talk to you and hopefully see you before your September cruise. Yes Jane - I have been doing well with all of my bargain purses. The small bucket sportsac is perfect for onboard. The large sportsac is great for getting off the ship – it holds everything and my glitzy gold evening bag is also just perfect and holds everything I want to lug around in the evenings.
Judy & Paul – thanks for checking in.
Sharon – thanks for the champagne & strawberries.
And to the person who thought I cleaned up good – thanks I always appreciate a kind word but I don’t recognize your name, do I know you?

If I missed anybody – I’ll catch up next time. The internet connection doesn’t work well in our cabin (sometimes not at all and you can waste 20+ minutes trying to get connected after log on and still come up with nothing) and it took me awhile to figure it out. So I actually type all of this stuff in MS Word then need to cart the laptop down to the internet café to log on and send it. Sort of the same with the pictures. We load them to the computer, set up a file of those we want to post and have to do uploads in the internet café. All of this is still lots slower than in real life – according to the ship’s internet guru satellite is a very slow connection. According to me – when they charge you a ridiculous amount per minute of connect time, it’s in their best interest for it to be slow.. There will not be any pics of the gray and dreary sea days – it all looks the same. However, we will send more pics once we hit land.

Well I think that tonite is the last change of the clocks and the last hour lost. I sure hope so. I’m tired of losing time and besides, on Monday we start hitting ports everyday and that means getting up early and off the boat. So, I guess I’d better go to sleep now.

I expect to post this to the blog tomorrow morning, but I’ve found that sometimes the internet connections work better late at nite. See you all in blogoland!