Day 16: At Sea

It suddenly occurred to me this morning that I have only walked on land for three days since September 25. People who don’t cruise couldn’t even imagine that sort of vacation could be enjoyable but when the Princess Patter is as chock-a-block with activities as ours has been, it helps a lot. Still, I’ll be ready to step on terra firma tomorrow, even if it’s just to make a trip to  Walmart.

G’s phone dingled a notification at 5:45am, waking us both up. That’s going to start happening more often as we cruise west. My alarm went off at 6am, so it wasn’t a tragedy. No sloshing sound; I donned another long sleeved swim suit and went out to the Terrace pool which was still netted over for just a few more minutes, enough time to grab a cup of coffee from the Horizon Court. It was getting light behind the ship, although sunrise wasn’t going to be for another 30 minutes. Thankfully (!!!) the Terrace Pool water temp wasn’t frigid, and was actually fairly comfortable this morning. However, the water level is still high, which changes up my workout quite a bit. An hour later my exercise was all behind me for another day. 

You know the routine (because it really hasn’t changed since we boarded):  shower, breakfast, Eric Philips’ last enrichment lecture, on skiing to the South Pole (you know I wouldn’t miss that one). In fact, this is my current read, not that I’ve had a lot of time to read. 

Next up was was a very light lunch in the Horizon Court, then ukulele in Sabatini’s. I had run into Hawaiian ambassador Kamaki last evening around the ship and asked him what I needed to work on to catch up after I missed yesterday’s class (due to our luncheon). He not only filled me in but then before class today sat beside me and had me demonstrate the chords I missed. What a kind man!

Speaking of kind men, I wrote a thank you note to Captain Ravera after yesterday’s luncheon. It’s something I always do after MTG, write a note thanking the officer who is seated at our table. Last cruise when I did this, I got a very nice typed letter in return. Today, Steward Robert delivered an envelope with an ifficial seal, containing a handwritten note on a sheet of heavy vellum embossed paper. This one is definitely going home with us. 

What a kind man!  A class act. 

We crashed this afternoon. G slept, but I, naturally, didn’t. Still, I went into the evening feeling refreshed and rested, which is no small feat, considering my early pool time. 

We went to two shows this evening, first comedian Sid Davis in the Princess Theater (he’s really good!), then down to the Vista-less Lounge for vocalist Dan Middleditch doing classic rock. We thought we’d love that but didn’t last too long. One reality of this older ship, despite its excellent condition, is that its technical systems (audio and visual) are old. The speaker quality in the Vista-less Lounge is not the best. That is a notable difference compared to the Star Princess where those systems are all state of the art. 

We made a pass through the Horizon Court for watermelon (no surprise there), maybe not the best choice just before bed, but enjoyable all the same. 

Clocks go back another hour overnight. That means a long night’s sleep. 

Life is good. :-)

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.