Day 15: At Sea

Today was a very good sea day. Though Captain Ravera told us it had been rather windy and rough until about 3am, we had slept through it all and didn’t even know. From the time we woke up, the day was a bit warmer, sunny and less windy. 

As it should be. After all, it’s Day 4 of 5 sea days going to Hawaii. 😉

Last night’s early bedtime and extra hour of sleep clearly served me well.  I awoke bright eyed and bushy tailed and, based on the fact that we weren’t hearing any sloshing from the Terrace Pool in our cabin, headed out that aft door to do my water workout. 

Sunrise off the Terrace Deck

I hadn’t yet mentioned that Terrace Pool sloshing, so that might be a surprise. It kind of was to us. I don’t know why we hear that pool when it gets rough. We’re not next to it, or under it, or anything. All we can figure is that the sound of the water is echoing in the ship’s metal frame. It hasn’t been bad, it’s never bothered us (unlike in our sideways cabin along side the Calypso Pool on that rough Hawaii cruise last February). But if we’re awake, we have heard it.  So, this morning, when I heard nothing, I knew it would be a good morning in the Terrace Pool. 

That was followed by breakfast in Sabatini’s (I heard another pronunciation for that restaurant today…saBOTanies 😉) where I ate very lightly. It was MTG luncheon day and, were it not for our Sabatini’s privilege, I would have skipped breakfast altogether.  

The top three most travelled guests this cruise are the same as last cruise, so it was like seeing old friends again at our table. Being from Australia, they were well familiar with some of my favorite ports in what they call “the islands”.  On this itinerary, Dravuni Island, Fiji and Mystery Island, Vanuatu top the list, but places like Champagne Bay, Vanuatu and Isle of Pines, New Caledonia are on everyone’s favorites list (including Captain Ravera’s).  I love the South Pacific!  It was another hugely enjoyable lunch. Captain Ravera is such a class act. 

Ahi tuna starter

Steak tartar starter

Filet mignon. No halibut pic, because everyone at our table got this

Chocolate mousse dessert

Chocolates as a second dessert!

I took the time to put together thank you notes and tip envelopes for this cruise, not as a bribe (seriously!) but because I know the crew does a lot of shopping in the Hawaii ports as time permits. As I will be doing too!

We weren’t hungry at dinner but I still had a salmon cake and kale salad. And I had a Hawaiian pudding from the dessert menu, because I had no idea what it was. It turned out to be a coconut milk pudding and I could have consumed a mixing bowl of that. Soooo yummy!

Hawaiian hauipia pudding

As I had hoped, vocalist Mark Kopitzke returned tonight with a different show.  He has a wonderful voice and is a polished performer, but when he came out wearing a white dinner jacket, I was on high alert for FS songs, so I wasn’t surprised by Fly Me to the Moon, but My Way toward the end sent me up to the Lido Deck to get two chairs for tonight’s Dancing Though the Decades deck party. With party band Southwave’s great music, we had a fun time and even danced a bit. I protected my knees but it was still a two extra strength Tylenol night. 

And finally, a sea day sidebar…I was reminded of something tonight during Mark Kopitzke’s show when he sang Secret Agent Man.  I was a young kid when that song came out, in 1966, and truly believed the name of the song was Secret Asian Man and couldn’t figure out why this Asian man had to be kept secret. Hey, that was long before the internet, and Googling lyrics wasn’t a thing. And I couldn’t have read them if it was. 

I won’t even get into the Our Father prayer and how I thought the line was “Harold be thy name”.

Strange the things we remember 60 years later. 😉

Day 14: At Sea

At times today, these five sea days started to feel a little long. Like, “maybe I should fly home from Hawaii on our return Crown cruise” long. Luckily, it was, at that moment, time for another enrichment lecture by Australian adventurer Eric Phillips and that made it all feel much better. 

I was actually at the Calypso Pool even before it was uncovered (un-netted) this morning around 6am. So were a couple of lap swimmers, so it was again a case of carving out a corner for myself. The water was rough today. Really rough, but, like yesterday, I appreciated not having wind blowing across my wet ears. 

One of the weirdest (but totally understandable) features of being in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is that there is no difference between high and the low each day. Our temps are slowly ticking upward, 2° on average each day since we left California.

I completed my workout, warmed up in a hot shower, further warmed up by using heat when I blew my hair dry, and met G in Sabatini’s shortly after it opened at 7:30am. And that was when the day took a nasty turn, food-wise. Yesterday, I wasn’t hungry and ate just two meals. Today, I was a bottomless pit, filling my face with everything. So when G suggested I try a breakfast pastry, I ate the whole thing, part of his brioche French toast, a few nibbles off his bacon…and then my usual Greek yogurt and fruit (to keep it healthy). 😆

It was in the aftermath of those poor choices that I started to re-think sea days, and actually checked air fare to cut my return cruise short by five days. Happily, common sense prevailed, but, always trying to keep it real here in this blog, dear readers…’dem’s’ da facts. 

Luckily, Eric Phillips’ presentation today was particularly interesting. He was on a Space X flight last year (Resilience rocket, Fram2 voyage), funded by a Chinese crypto entrepreneur that completed the first polar orbit of earth (they usually are in a path closer to the equator). He talked about the extensive training and medical clearances their team of four people had to go through to be able to not only participate but to actually fly the rocket and conduct experiments. 

It was during that presentation when I recalled something I read once on Cruise Critic, that on board enrichment lectures were not worth the time. Au contraire!  My two most recent cruises have featured Dr. James Engman and Eric Phillips, who could be and most likely are on a professional speaking circuit. 

I was still starving and still cold, so I met G in the Botticelli Dining Room for lunch.  More poor food choices (G ordered the colossal fries and I ate most of them), but lots of tea did go a long way to warming me up. I had thought ahead and took my/ the ship’s ukulele to the lecture and lunch and was able to go directly to today’s ukulele lesson with Hawaiian ambassadors Kamaki and Kaile. Still loving that. Still pretty bad at it. I’m one step above fake strumming (à la G last year). 

And then I returned to the cabin, turned up the heat, put on one of our really warm (I suspect suite) robes and didn’t nap. I have been trying to get my Princess survey email from last cruise to download, and can’t (but G can stream video every night…go figure), so I worked unsuccessfully on that for a while.  I still need to complete that survey, but don’t want to spend time in Hawaii doing that. 

We skipped the Elite Lounge and went directly to dinner with Libres and Sulton. G left before coffee to get our favorite seats for tonight’s Princess Theater entertainment, Elvis tribute artist Dan Middleditch. I searched my blog for his name; I knew we had seen him before. We did, just last January, but I wrote nothing then about his show then. And so I won’t again. 🤭

G made it to the Vista-less Lounge for a performance by the comedian-magician Kyle Marlette. I was afraid of another razor blade act and skipped it but G went, as did many of our fellow guests because there was a huge SRO crowd and G said he was really funny. 

Darn. Maybe next cruise. Oh, wait. There is no next cruise for us on this ship. 

Needing to learn how to take an afternoon nap is still at the top of my to-do list. But it’s hard to be in a pool at 6am and still awake at 9pm without one. 

Day 13: At Sea

I just realized that I didn’t publish this post yesterday. Sorry!

Today was one of those days when it is hard to find time to tell you what I did…because I was so busy doing it. The day started at 6:30am with a pool session. I went to the Calypso Pool today, merely to avoid the wind moving across my wet ears, and quickly realized that pool is used by lap swimmers. But I carved out my little corner at the shallow end of the pool and tried to avoid the swimmers. The water was still bouncy but it was a smidge warmer than the Terrace Pool had been and there was no wind. Finally, a very fit older gentleman showed up, also sporting webbed aqua gloves, and started his workout in a different corner of the pool. Holy hot dog. If he got that body through water workouts, I’m gonna keep doing crunch jacks and rocking horses until I drop dead. 

By the time I showered and got warmed up, I just missed G in Sabatini’s. No matter…every waiter there told me where he was going to be. So sweet!  So when I was finished eating, I caught up with him in the Explorers Lounge awaiting the start of the veterans get together. With no place else I needed to be, I sat in the back and spent some time trying to get back into my emails and blog. Something hiccuped, and my phone was being testy. Nothing I tried worked, but it suddenly fixed itself, and I had a couple hundred emails show up. Luckily, most were junk. 

I was looking forward to enrichment lecturer Eric Phillips’ talk about skiing to the North Pole (something he’s done 15 times!). He was the talk of the ship the rest of the day (even the comedian tonight mentioned him). What an adventurer!  In fact, he supported endurance runner Pat Farmer with the North and South Pole pistons of his pole to pole run. I love this kind of stuff, but with me it’s a case where those who can, do, and those who can’t instead skip a meal on a cruise ship just to hear a lecture about it. That’s as much as I’m willing to sacrifice to breathe the rarified air of a true adventurer.

The lunch menu from the app since I didn’t go

And I really did skip lunch because I wasn’t hungry, but also wanted a little time in the cabin to practice ukulele chord transitions.  That class was held at 1pm and we are moving much more quickly than we did last year.  I’m glad I have a little experience from the HawaiiI cruises or I would never catch up. I am not a natural. 

Hawaiian ambassador Kamaki

And following that I really did have a lie down in the cabin. I didn’t actually sleep, but I rested, hoping that would be enough to see me through the evening. 

Tonight was a formal night, such as that is these days. I was wearing an embroidered silk jacket that’s been on almost as many cruises as I have and a lady in the mid ship elevator lobby commented on it. Nice. And  then she pointed out that she was wearing Effy jewelry this evening and told me to check it out in the store on board. I was, frankly, shocked, annd asked if she was a paid model. She just smiled and said again, be sure to check out the store. What the what is this about?  

The escargot at dinner were the best I’ve ever enjoyed on Princess, and I just happened to run into the executive chef at the entrance to the dining room as I was leaving and told him so. Not the snails, of course, which are always bland, but the garlic butter was so flavorful. I think it was the shallots. 

Tonight’s Princess Theater performance was production show Sweet Soul Music and we went from there directly to the Vista-less Lounge for comedian Syd  Davis. Some of his humor involved growing up Catholic in Dayton, Ohio in the 1960s. I could definitely relate. 

Reserved Premier seating on the Grand Princess

And then it was time for real sleep, that “burying myself in a fluffy comforter” type of sleep. My hour of pool time in the morning chills down my core body temp so much that my date with a warm bed is the best part of every day. 

Day 12: At Sea

Our weather today should not have been a surprise…but it was, given the gloriously hot and sunny day we had yesterday in LA. To its credit, it was mostly sunny, which certainly helped, but it was also quite windy, quite bouncy and fairly chilly (high 60s). I should know by now that 2 to 3 of those 5 sea days between California and Hawaii are typically rough and cool, and often overcast. I guess I’d imagined that, given California’s heat wave, this crossing might have been different.

We went to Sabatini’s when it opened at 7:30am. There is a new wait team in there this cruise, so it felt a little less familiar, but, as always, was a real treat.  I next went to the Terrace Pool never imagining the water would be cool, choppy and higher than it had been yesterday. I should have aborted right there and then but didn’t. I lasted 45 minutes but was chilled through and a little seasick by the end. Tomorrow:  the covered Calypso Pool. 

Warmed up slightly by a hot shower and dressed in the clothing I actually brought for the North Island of New Zealand (yoga pants and an oversized sweatshirt), we went to lunch where I was in search of hot food and a hotter beverage. The chowder was good but I can’t recommend the seafood curry. 

I was so excited to attend the first ukulele session of the cruise at 1pm and even happier that we actually were able to sign out ukuleles. The extra practice on our own is imperative for developing the muscle memory required for chord transitions. And speaking of ukuleles, shout out to reader Karen who sent this recommendation for the perfect ukulele for me. The marriage of two of my favorite things, and I was touched that she was thinking of me and connected the dots!

The evening started with the Elite Lounge and dinner with Libres and Sulton in the Michelangelo Dining Room.   

I had both Hawaiian items and they were both good.

We went to the Princess Theater performance by magician Kyle Marlette (gotta fill these sea days somehow!). Despite sitting in the “just in case”-iest of the “just in case” seats, G lasted the whole show, but I had to bug out when Kyle started swallowing razor blades. I do NOT have the stomach for that. G pointed out afterwards that it was no different than old time wrestling on TV, just an act, a comment that brought back a decades-old memory of running crying from the room when my older brother was watching that on TV. I don’t do well seeing people in pain…even cruise ship magicians. 😆

The Grand Princess show band did a New Orleans jazz set in the Piazza and we finished the evening at the Silent Disco in the Vista-less Lounge (to complete my 60 minutes of daily exercise goal). 

No matter how good the day, I thought, as I climbed into a warm bed, the same thing I’ve thought many times in the past…the best thing in any port is this ship, the best thing on this ship is this cabin and the best thing in this cabin is this bed.

Life is good. :-)