G woke me up this morning telling me I had to get dressed and go up to the Horizon Court Buffet. The Golden Princess was in a thick fog, and was blowing its fog horn. Now, fog is a phenomenon we don’t see all that often, so that alone is exciting, but we’ve only heard a fog horn on a ship once before, on the Island Princess in Alaska. While it did clear a bit as the day went on and the sun burned off some of the fog, it returned by evening, accompanied by a very cool thunder and lightning show and heavy rain.
We ate breakfast in the busy Buffet, and shared a table with a very nice family from Perth, grandparents and daughter and her husband (who was a Marine from Savannah, Georgia but has totally lost any Southern accent he must have once had) and their darling son. We have met the friendliest people on these cruises! Afterward, I walked on the Promenade Deck and returned to the cabin late morning and settled in to watch the first two episodes of Season 2 of The Crown.
Happy, happy, joy, joy! Thank you, Hobart, for offering free, high speed WiFi in the Hobart cruise terminal.
After that, the day got even lazier. We never did eat lunch. I fell asleep and we both napped until after 3pm, when we watched Monday Night Football (I think Matt Ryan is my current favorite QB) and the Falcons win over the Buccaneers (please, anyone but Jameis Winston!). Then it was time for a clean up and tonight’s Captain Circle party where we were honored to be this cruises’s most traveled passengers (the top three were roughly 1000, 700 and 600 days). Dinner was fantastic (of course): smoked salmon, a salad, and grilled sole and scallops. Cruise ship dinners will never again be this good.
We went to the 7:45pm production show Let Us Entertain You in the Princess Theater. It’s very sweet...the first row is filled with little girls all wanting to be dancers, and they watch the shows, mesmerized by the dancers and the costumes. We swung through the Buffet for ice cream (G) and popcorn (me) and are back in the cabin watching videos from my iPad shown on the cabin TV.
Tomorrow is a different kind of day. We are at sea in the morning and will arrive in Phillip Island, Australia around noon, departing at 11pm. While Phillip Island has several tourist sites, its primary claim to fame is its Penguin Parade, the fairy penguins that come ashore by the hundreds every evening at sunset after spending the day feeding and socializing at sea. These fairy penguins are close relatives of the blue penguins we saw in Akaroa.
I have been crazy about penguins for years, ever since I saw them at the Punta Tombo Penguin Rookery in Patagonia, Argentina in 2002. In fact, when G and I discussed the things we absolutely had to do this season, for me, watching the Penguin Parade on Phillip Island was a close second only to holding a koala in Brisbane. But I didn’t want to just see the penguins; I wanted an up close experience with them. Therefore, I booked a VIP excursion through Viator to actually sit on the beach with night vision goggles as the penguins passed within feet of us.
G was unimpressed by the night vision goggles aspect, saying he’d had plenty of that in the military, and was a bit incredulous that I wanted to sit on a wet, cold, stinky, dark beach waiting for penguins to pass by, but, after My Summer of No Fun, he was willing to go along with my plan. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until we were in southern New Zealand in late November and noticed how very late the sun was setting that we realized that doing this excursion on our own might not have been our best decision. We have to be back at the tender pier tomorrow night by 10pm; sunset isn’t until 8:45pm and the beach is a 30 minute drive from the tender pier. This is going to be very, very tight. For the first time in our cruising career (because we work hard at this!), our ‘seldom early, never late’ reputation might be at stake.
Oh well. I’ve already checked. Phillip Island is a 2 hour 7 minute, $231 Uber ride from Station Pier, Melbourne, where the Golden Princess will arrive at 6am the next day. I’ll let you know how this one gets resolved, but, if you don’t hear from me tomorrow night, you might know why.
Pray for us. ;-)