Yellow Fish cruises: Day 28: At Sea

I promise myself (and you) that this will be very quick tonight. The alarm is set for 4:30am, and, even with the two hours we gained moving clocks to Sydney time from New Zealand, that’s pretty early. But we can’t miss our sail in to Sydney Harbour, truly one of the best in the world any day, but, per Captain Lawes, there will be some special fanfare tomorrow upon our arrival since this will be the Ruby Princess’ maiden visit to Sydney. I can’t wait!

G ordered room service breakfast this morning for the first time all cruise. He enjoys having coffee and cereal delivered to the cabin on occasion; I’m not a huge fan, simply because of the dishes that are left for our steward to clean up. But it did have us staying in the cabin this morning instead of immediately dashing out for breakfast. We sorted through paperwork from this cruise and I took some time to move everything we have on surfaces in the bedroom and bathroom and clean under it; Noel is not allowed to move things to clean, and, with all the stuff we have in the cabin, we don’t leave him a lot to work with.

Wifi speed first thing this morning.

I think it’s awesome, too!

Finally, late morning, we left the cabin to listen to Coffee with the Captain, a Q&A with Captain Lawes in the Piazza. He came on board in Auckland when Captain Wilson had a family emergency, and will be with us next cruise, too. Captain Lawes is a Carnival Cruise Lines corporate captain, kind of a relief captain who also does training for all of the corporate brand ships, including Princess, Holland America, Carnival, etc. He can find himself on any one of 107 ships on short notice. I guess that keeps life interesting.

From there we went directly to lunch in the DaVinci Dining Room. I was looking forward to it; there were three starters that looked so good to me yesterday when I pre-ordered my meals that I had all of them as my lunch. G actually ordered both the lasagna and the chicken tacos, for the same reason. It seemed like all of our favorite things were on this one menu.

Day 28 lunch menu, page 1

Day 28 lunch menu, page 2

Always a favorite: gazpacho

I also had the Swiss chard and turnip puréed soup

Escarole and romaine salad

Following lunch, I went directly to the Princess Theater to get a front row center seat for pianist Jon Darsk’s matinee performance. G joined me after he returned to the cabin to dress warmly enough for the Princess Theater. It is a meat locker in there. As for Jon’s performance...simply stunning. We had the opportunity to chat with him tonight and were very happy to hear he’ll be returning to the Ruby Princess while we’re still on it. He played primarily classical music today, including the Hungarian Rhapsody (Mom, I was instantly reminded of that concert that you, Dad and I attended at the Peristyle 25 years ago), but he also performed a Gershwin melody, of course including Rhapsody in Blue.

We scarcely had time to get cleaned up for our evening. In fact, it was an hour later than I thought it was and we almost missed going to dinner. I guess I forgot I had set my watch and the clock back to Sydney time last night, to eliminate the need to change clocks two nights in a row. It was hard to say goodbye to nearby tablemates who are leaving tomorrow, and I’m not at all certain Homer and Allen will be our waiters for the next cruise. If not, we’ll sure miss them!

Day 28 dinner menu, page 1

Day 28 dinner menu, page 2

Day 28 dessert menu

Surf and surf

(G had turf and turf😉)

There was a 6:30pm Princess Theater performance by vocalist John Stephan, and we skipped coffee and dessert and made it to that show, then returned to the DaVinci Dining Room for coffee and dessert afterward. We don’t do that often, but I really enjoy it when we do. It was still light out (love these long Southern Hemisphere days!), but we could see that sunset was getting close. We walked out on the Promenade Deck (Did you catch that? First, I walked, and second, it was warm enough and calm enough to be on the Promenade Deck!) and caught the beautiful sunset with a touch of green flash at the very end. That bodes well for our weather in Sydney tomorrow, and I have to pinch myself to be certain we really are returning to one of our favorite cities in the world.