Happy New Year! To quote an old cruise director joke, we stayed up last night until 1, 2, 3…minutes past midnight. ;-) The balloons dropped on the biggest party in the Piazza, we extended a few “Happy New Years!” to our fellow passengers and crew, and were back in the cabin by 12:15am. Actually, there have been years when we didn’t even make it that long. To make up for our lack of excitement last night, we had our own mini-celebration today when the clock struck midnight at home.
Once again, we holed up in our cabin all morning, watching football on TV starting sometime in the middle of the night. (We miss the ability to pause and playback that we have at home, but love the big TV in our cabin. It’s quite a change from watching football on the Pacific Princess!) I made a run to the Horizon Court Buffet for coffee and pastry during a halftime (I can’t even remember which game that was), and was so pleased to see bright sunshine shining through the door at the end of our corridor to the Neptune pool area. But my breath was taken away by the frigid air when I stepped outside. Somehow that change from tropically hot and humid to downright cold seemed to happen quickly, didn’t it? However, though it was still a little windy today, the ship was bouncy, not rough, getting a little bumpier tonight. All last night we had experienced the “hit the wall, rise, shudder and drop” seas we’ve had for a few days, and we are feeling a bit sore as a result.
At 11am I made a pizza run…and still we watched football. There have been some good bowl games this year, and Pick Sixes have made them exciting even when we didn’t care who won. We traded dirty towels for clean with cabin steward Homer, got still another box of Princess sandpaper masquerading as tissues, and told him to skip our linen change today. We sleep on top the duvet cover, not between the sheets, and don’t need to have them changed every three days. Between that and telling him we never need ice, Homer loves us.
The games end for us by early afternoon, and we could have gotten energetic and done something then, but didn’t. That was our time to complete our night’s sleep we gave up to football spectatorship. We didn’t leave the cabin until dinner. We are really enjoying the two couples at the tables for two near us, and have basically become a table for six when it comes to conversations, with the flexibility of tables for two.
We were very excited about tonight’s Princess Theater entertainment, Stevie Wonder tribute act by Gary Walker. We had high expectations- we’ve seen Stevie in concert and love his music- and were not disappointed. It was kind of like watching Motor City, with all that great Motown music. And the Sapphire Princess orchestra was on fire accompanying him. It was some of the best entertainment of the season. Tonight we finally move clocks ahead an hour, just for tomorrow’s port of Busan and Nagasaki, Japan. If it wasn’t for that, and the fact that we have to go through face to face immigration with South Korean officials tomorrow morning, we might go back for Gary’s second show.
Without a lot to report today (but if you’ve been a reader for years, you know how our cruise world stops for football), I want to give a long overdue shout out to BFF (my SIS) Suzan. She and her husband follow our progress closely, and she has received numerous pleas for help from both G and I this season when we simply haven’t had enough internet speed to research or book something. She comes through every time, and texts us the information we need (because texting always works well) and we take it and run with it. I miss you SIS, and wish we could be texting you in real time while we’re watching football (because that’s what we do). Soon…Hawaii and unlimited internet are only five days away…