Today was more than bouncy. Today was rough. And wet and windy and cold. In our favor, I had been mistaken about moving clocks ahead an hour overnight; however, that still lies ahead either New Year’s Eve or the night after. Japan and South Korea are an hour ahead of where we currently are, but then we’ll move clocks back an hour before we disembark in Shanghai.
At some time during the night, G turned on ESPN and the Florida v. Michigan game. Luckily, I slept through most of that nightmare, but was awake for the Clemson v. Notre Dame game. And that set the stage for the first part of our day. I got coffee and pastries from the Horizon Court Buffet and brought them back to G, and then when pizza opened at 11am got that for him too. Honestly, those couple hundred feet from our cabin to the buffet and pizza bar were as far as I wanted to walk. It was that bad.
But, were we at home, we would be cozying away hours and days watching football, so it felt very familiar to do the same on the Sapphire Princess today. Plus, we were still dragging from our long day yesterday. We have not both been well at the same time since we re-boarded the Sapphire on November 28th in Singapore. It’s a lucky thing that we haven’t run fevers, because our temperature has been taken as we disembark the ship in several of these ports (by a heat sensitive camera-type thing). As it is, it’s only stopped me in one port (Singapore), but I’m convinced we’re both going to finish this season on life support. These well-timed sea day are saving us.
The Bowl games ended early afternoon our time, and we napped and watched movies until it was time to get ready for dinner. My Fitbit, when synced, told me I got 2 hours and 2 minutes of sleep the night before last and less than an hour last night…but had done nearly an hour of exercise in my sleep. Like I said, it’s been rough, and although we are sleeping, we really aren’t getting good rest. Luckily, that’s what sea day afternoons are for.
We went to dinner in the Vivaldi Dining Room; having missed it last night and eaten sparingly all day, we were hungry (the erratic bouncing of the Sapphire Princess made us tired but not seasick). I have really been enjoying some of the local cuisine food options on the menu, some of which are vegan and others that are adapted for me. We celebrated my birthday tonight with a pack of waiters and headwaters Nazzario and Felix singing me Happy Birthday. I blew out the candle on my cake, and Joffrey whisked it away because it had dairy…but brought me an extra scoop of passion fruit sorbet as reparation.
Captain Ravera made a ship-wide announcement during dinner that silenced the Vivaldi Dining Room in an instant. We knew when we heard the bing bong bing that precedes announcements that something was up. Apparently this winter monsoon is causing us to slow down to half-speed, delaying our arrival in Keelung, the port for Taipei, tomorrow morning. We are currently in the narrow Taiwan Strait which is acting as a funnel, and we are facing wind gusts up to 75 knots (over 85 mph!) and 22 foot swells. As rough as it is, Captain Ravera said it would be much worse if he kept normal speed, but that he will try to make up time if things improve overnight.
It is so rough that production show Do You Wanna Dance was cancelled tonight, and a musical show of some sort is being substituted. We chose to return to our cabin instead, and are increasingly grateful for the VOD TV in our cabin. We are supposed to meet for our shore excursion at 7:50am tomorrow, and we really still need to show up then, if only to be told when to return based on our revised arrival time. The weather forecast calls for an all-day rain tomorrow, with a high around 60. Oh joy.
And finally, I forgot to mention that our cabin steward Homer from the Philippines had the entire day off yesterday in Hong Kong. He was celebrating 25 years with Princess Cruises. 25 years! We were so excited for him, and couldn’t wait to hear all about it today. Apparently he found some good Filipino food and didn’t return to the ship until after dark. I love when nice things happen to good people!