Day 126: Dominica

Prepared Wednesday evening, March 5th

First, before I forget to mention this, it was astonishing to me how quickly last night's blog post, containing no photos, was published. Twenty or so seconds and it was done. Compare that to Aruba evening, when publishing the post with 18 photos took more than 10 minutes.  The contractors who were stringing wire around the ship are now gone, so what we have is what we have. I can't say that I notice a huge difference between before and after. I was hoping for the pipeline to be expanded considerably, and I don't believe it has been.

So, on to today...

It was nearly 9am before we awoke this morning. Well...we were up late last night, attending the 10:15pm performance of Disco:  Blame it on the Boogie. THAT was a lot of fun, and the cast, while remaining professional, turned it into a big party. I'm glad we were there. 

We returned to our cabin just as the 11pm showing of Gravity was beginning on Channel 37, so, for once, we watched it from start to finish. Luckily, it's only about 90 minutes long, so by 1am we were finally falling asleep. I remember hearing the Emerald Princess dock this morning (scheduled arrival was 7am), but quickly fell back asleep after it was secured to its berth. Thus, we missed breakfast in the dining room altogether, and had a quick breakfast in the Horizon Court Buffet (and I'll spare you an editorial on that).  In fact, we were so late to breakfast that we dined with several of the old cast of dancers. Yep, we're keeping dancers' hours today. 

The weather in Dominica today was partly cloudy, most sunny and HOT. Without even seeing a calendar, we can tell it's March; the weather is getting noticeably warmer. We like it. (Something tells me we're going to suffer when we get home!). I spent part of the day as planned, sipping coconut rum and cruising the net. No sooner had we left all that luscious free wifi at Starbucks on Aruba than an iOS update was released, and I wanted to get that downloaded. G popped on and off the ship, walking around the waterfront, but I pretty much stayed put once I was set up and internetting. 

My right eye is better. In fact, the swelling is almost gone, though the sclera hasn't fully recovered.  I received an email from a blog reader asking if I had glasses. No; my vision isn't correctable with glasses, only with hard contacts. Frankly, I'm loving this "no reading glasses" thing, and the dizziness is abating a bit, too. 

We were on the Promenade Deck for sailaway at 4pm.  Dominica was looking her best today, in the sun, though we did catch a couple of rainbows as we cruised north up the western coast. 

We stayed on the Promenade Deck until we ran out of island to look at, then went to Dinner with Darko. Komang is a bit under the weather and so we had a different assistant waiter tonight, Sergii from the Ukraine, and we had a chance for a brief discussion with him about the situation there. Just as with the cyclone in the Philippines last fall, to watch the news on TV is one thing; to spend our days with people whose lives are so immediately impacted is quite another. 

This cruise's Most Traveled Passengers party was held at 7:30pm in the Adagio Lounge (cutoff was lowest of the winter:  360 or so days), so we finished out our evening there. Entertainment choices, should we have chosen to avail ourselves of them, were Bobby Brooks Wilson in the Princess Theater and Country Western night in Club Fusion.

Tomorrow, in St. Thomas, I'm quite determined to get to a beach. Or at least do something to remind myself that I am on a cruise in the Caribbean. While I've enjoyed my reading and listening to audiobooks these past couple of days, I am ready to dig my toes into some soft, white sand.