<<Again, yawn. Apparently, even the author of the navigational segment in the Patter was tiring of its repetitiveness, as the following historical note was added today:>>
The eastern Pacific Ocean was first sighted by Europeans in the early 16th century when Spanish explorer Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and discovered the great "southern sea" which he named Mar del Sur. The ocean's current name was coined by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan during the Spanish expedition of the world in 1521, as he encountered favorable winds on reaching the ocean. He therefore called it Mar Pacifico in Portuguese, meaning "peaceful sea".
<<I have worked hard to refrain from providing my perspectives on European explorers and Christian missionaries and their many South Sea adventures. But the word "discovered" in the paragraph above should have been in quotation marks way more than the words "southern sea" and "peaceful sea". Just sayin'... >>
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I can tell it's wintertime here without even going outside. While sunrise in Papeete was at 5:30am on January 7, today it occurred just after 6:30am. And sunset is taking place tonight at 6:11pm, 25 minutes earlier than just a few days ago. See...the days are getting shorter (by 90 minutes already!). But the natural result is that we are sleeping a bit later, which is a welcome change. Our weather continues to be bright and sunny, though a little windier. And the air temp has dropped a little, with today's high and low at 83F and 81F respectively. The water temp is now down to 77F; it will be interesting to watch how and when that changes as we travel to California.
With no appetite for breakfast, we ended up sitting on the terrace behind the Panorama Buffet drinking coffee and talking with friends. I finally left to start a load of laundry, delicate items I didn't want to send to the ship's laundry, and then hung things on our clothesline to dry. It's been really dry in our cabin since we left French Polynesia; it's quite a paradox to be surrounded 360 degrees by ocean and have low humidity, but, after ten nights in Papeete, I'm not complaining.
I don't believe I've mentioned that, thinking we'd be spending our winter on the Royal Princess, which lacks the large framed prints on either side wall of its inside cabins that the Emerald Princess has, G purchased, from Home Depot, hooks with really strong magnets attached (or maybe it's more accurate to say they're really strong magnets with hooks attached). They are so strong that we joked about them messing with compasses on jets and ships. They have worked perfectly. We can hang any amount of wet clothing on our clothesline, which is stretched from metal wall to metal wall just in front of our porthole, and it doesn't collapse. Previously, using the suction cups that came with the clothesline stuck to the plastic fronts of the framed prints, that was occasionally an issue.
Laundry was done and hung up by 10am. Now what to do??? While the Pacific Princess is quite comfortable down on Deck 3 midship where our cabin is located, the back and especially the front of the ship is getting bouncier. I guess I would like sea days more if the ship was docked during them ;-), because the jostling has me not sea sick exactly, but definitely sick of the sea. We checked the World Cruise itinerary that this ship is starting on January 23, the day we return to Los Angeles. It has many, many, MANY sea days (out of sheer boredom, I just found the brochure for the cruise and counted 37 port days in 111 days (excluding embark and disembark days) meaning there will be 64 sea days, but their longest stretch of sea days is seven days, from Dubai from Aqaba (Petra) Jordan). Of course, they'll have the excitement of sailing through pirate territory off the east coast of Africa, and I know that World Cruisers live for sea days, but God help 'em. They are better cruisers than I, Gunga Din.
I next started typing this post...by 10:42am I was at this point (I had taken the time to straighten up all our brochures when I was digging out the one for the World Cruise). What a hoot; unlike busy port days where I don't type a single word until 10pm, on our fourth sea day in a row I'm starting to type before I've even done anything. ;-)
From this point on, I didn't set out to do a timetable of events, but it just unfolded that way, as I was doing quite a lot of clock-watching, willing the afternoon to pass quickly.
11:01am: G blasted into our cabin looking for a photo sweepstakes entry card for a BIG!!!!!! Free photo drawing*!!! (*must be present to win) being held right then. We have in this cabin right now a stack of 25 (no exaggeration) photos from Most Traveled Passenger luncheons and awards and Captains Circle parties and photos we received for who knows what reason but apparently G thought we needed more. Or he was just looking for something to do (most likely that).
On an uncharacteristically related side note: apparently, the manager of the photo gallery, Carlos, was interviewed today by Cruise Director David on the Wake Show, the morning show that is broadcast every morning on our cabin TV, and he held up our formal night photo as an example and David said, "Hey, that's that couple who won't go home"! (actually, he said our names, not that we won't go home, but he was most likely thinking that) and, well, it's the fourth sea day in a row and a lot of people saw that segment and it provided a moment of fame for us that will last until we see land, or another ship, or a jet contrail overhead...or the next meal.
11:15am: I turned the TV to the navigational channel. Our course is 355 degrees, nearly due north but ever so slightly northwest. Hilo is 613.3 miles to the North; Papeete is 1642.3 miles to the South. Fascinating.
11:30am: G was still not back. I checked to see if we still had Internet on the ship (we did first thing this morning). Not really. I can't even get the log in page to load. I think we've passed to the dark side.
11:32am: I spent some time before lunch getting the mud from our ATV tour on Moorea nearly a month ago off my sneakers. (I have a feeling that, sometime between Hawaii and Los Angeles, it will be cold enough that I'll be wearing shoes and socks for the first time in a very long time). Washing my makeup brushes. De-clumping my mascara wand. Cleaning up my eye shadow palette. Refolding my underwear. Transferring my Hawaii to-do list to the Awesome Note app on my iPhone. Reaching the conclusion that sea days are dangerous things for a person with OCD tendencies.
12:42pm: G finally returned to the cabin and we made our way to the Club Restaurant for lunch. It was our favorite lunch menu, with breaded mozzarella sticks for G and spaghetti aglio, oleo and peperoncino for me. Oh, and the rest of the bottle of Disano Malbec wine. For a change, we shared a table for eight and had a nice, chatty lunch.
2:02pm: Back in our cabin, G changed into a swimsuit for a hot tub visit while I read the January 2, 2015 Newsweek article on The Bible (highly recommended).
3:19pm: Finished reading, and went up to the jogging track to see how long I'd last walking in the sun and wind. I plugged in my ear buds and listened to an Overdrive audiobook I'd downloaded in Papeete.
4:15pm: Fairly long, as it turned out. I showered and dressed for the evening; meanwhile, G had already done the same.
Jere Ring was playing in the Casino Lounge starting at 5pm tonight (which is like a morning shift for him). We stopped by to listen to him and then went to early dinner late at 5:50pm. The dining room is very empty...I think people have run out of appetites by now. We enjoyed seeing another new menu (seafood stew for me, and watermelon sorbet for dessert), but ate lightly and finished early so we could get to the Pacific Princess show band performing jazz for an hour in the Casino Lounge starting at 7pm. It has just ended, and we are intending to go to the comedian mentalist at 8:30pm, then more live music with Chico and Dawn. They are cramming a lot of entertainment into this tiny ship, and we are enjoying the variety very much.
We returned to our cabin tonight to find immigration information. We have to go through US immigration on the ship in Hilo before the ship can be cleared by the local authorities. Our assigned time is 7:30am, but that won't be hard to get to. We'll be awake from about 5am, hanging off the Promenade Deck with our iPhones in hand trying to get an AT&T signal for the first time in almost three months. Imagine...texting, unlimited Internet and a phone call to Mom with no latency.
I cannot wait. :-)
