The first post of each season:

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Day 115: Finally...a day off!

We had moved our clocks ahead an hour last night, and maybe that's the reason we just couldn't get going this morning...but then what would be our excuse for the rest of the day?  For whatever reason, we were just wiped out today, and despite the fact that this was probably our prettiest Princess Cays day of the winter to date, we just could not muster up the energy to pack up snorkel gear and beach towels and make our way to the island.

We made it to breakfast, though, just before the DaVinci Dining Room closed at 9am and both ordered just fresh fruit and oatmeal, so as not to hold up the galley crew. While the tender service to the island of Eleuthera had already begun, we kept stalling, saying we'd do a load of laundry before heading over ourselves. 

Doing that load of laundry was slightly more difficult than it needed to be, because the token machine in the passenger laundry room was broken. I quickly ran back to the cabin to get G to either 1.) stay in the laundry room with the clothes in the washing machine, or 2.) run down to the Passenger Services Desk to get tokens, and I would do the other. He chose the sitting and watching job, so I went down to Deck 6 and waited while one clerk helped two passengers and the other four clerks stood at the counter staring into their computer screens and generally not noticing me at all. It took 14 minutes before I was able to leave the PSD with two tokens and return to the Riviera Deck laundry room. 

I started the washing machine and returned with G to our cabin where we immediately became engrossed in a movie on TV called The Walk, released late last year about Philippe Petit's 1974 high wire walk between the two World Trade Center towers. We rock-paper-scissored to decide who had to return to the laundry room to move the clothes into a dryer (there's no DVR on the Emerald Princess TVs), and, by the time I returned with dried and folded clothes, Phillipe Petit was stepping out onto the wire. Shoot!

This, of course, required that I finish watching the movie and then watch as it started again from the beginning.  And that is how the day got seriously away from us. At 1:15pm, we finally went up to get some pizza (I love the pizza calabraze, the specialty pizza of the day) and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon in a hot tub and pool. 

We were showered and dressed for dinner by 4pm, choosing to watch from Skywalkers as the Emerald Princess sailed south from Eleuthera along the length of Cat Island in the Bahamas. It was herbed goat cheese night in the PES Lounge, so, naturally, I had to have a Breeza Marina, but was once again irritated when the drink order I placed at 5pm wasn't delivered until 5:20pm. This is ridiculous, and has me swearing off any more drink orders up there. We heard in the hot tub today from others who have purchased the unlimited drink package and can't get a drink, and I've written it up in my post cruise surveys, too. 

Dinner went a long, long way to unruffling my ruffled feathers. It was Italian night, and, after I finished the Breeza Marina I didn't have time to drink in Skywalkers, Darko (not that one) brought me my bottle of Bordeaux and headwaiter Francesco was making penne arrabiata in the dining room and life was very good. I teased Francesco (from Italy) when we walked past him to our table, asking if he knew anything about making arrabiata. Francesco's arrabiata is what made me fall in love with arrabiata years ago on the Emerald Princess, and he said that just one taste would jog my memory. ;-)

We had a decision to make after dinner...attend the 8:15pm performance of production show I Got the Music (which you know we love), or be lazy and just go up to the Calypso Pool to watch the Pro Bowl on MUTS. Now, as far as football goes, the Pro Bowl is pretty much the bottom of the barrel, but, somehow, we decided to spend our evening as the lazy slugs we'd been all day. Of course, there were plenty of loungers to choose from (plenty), but we were up there early enough to catch the tail end of the sunset anyway.



Tomorrow's sea day brings with it a couple of commitments for us; instead, we turned today into our 'relaxing day at sea'. 

A picture is worth 1000 words (especially 'cause I'm not mentioning nothing). We could be watching this non-game Pro Bowl in the comfort of our cabin, but need to keep our fannies in shape for hours of lounge chair sitting next Sunday. 

:-)