Today was the day that everything changed. Of course, we didn’t know that when we went to breakfast with Michael and Valenton in the Allegro Dining Room. We weren’t even especially hungry, but knew we were counting down our final meals on board. I had just fruit, since I knew there would be more goodies coming at lunch.
Actually, I didn’t even have to wait that long. We went up to the Terrace Deck where G left me for a minute and then came back with one of juice concoctions for each of us. Sitting there in the shade, looking at that gorgeous sea view…that was nice.
We had received a notice in our cabin yesterday that our balcony would be getting cleaned this morning and not to plan to use it during that timeframe. A couple of days ago on sea day it was off limits to us all day as they were removing rust and painting. I guess this was the finalization of that project. It gave us a good chance to see the size of our balcony compared to the others around us. We are located right under the seawalk, or whatever that glass floored walkway is called. We had a nice balcony!
I was in the cabin when G came rushing in to tell me we needed to go to the World Fresh Marketplace right then as he had seen something he was certain I would want. So I followed him back up there to see what the attraction was, and, yes, they were making pitas and sandwiches from sliced roast chicken and all kinds of roasted veggies. G knows how I am with (especially) roasted peppers so I had a pre-lunch of those and still went to lunch with Michael and Valenton in Allegro.
The ship must be out of Great Value buttery spread. We had the real deal on the table for the remainder of the cruise. Yay!
Here things got a little dicey (literally). I ordered the vegan tofu ramen bowl for lunch and it had just a few small cubes of “tofu” in it. After the first one, I thought that I needed to find out how they prepare tofu because it was a whole lot better than when I do. By the third one I was starting to doubt it was tofu but by the fourth or fifth one I was sure it was cheese. I just couldn’t get figure out what kind of cheese wasn’t melting. I mentioned it to Michael and he was on the case.
He went back to the gallery and returned with a bowl with little cubes of…paneer cheese, a non-melting cheese from India. Sneaky.
I spent part of the afternoon at The Enclave enjoying that for possibly the last time. I don’t like to go home with a wet swimsuit, so will probably skip tomorrow.
And then it was again time to eat, and we took a bottle of champagne we received for…something (I think it was MTG) and shared it with our four nearby table mates. We were so lucky with them; they really made our cruise. G had told me that there would be a surprise for me at dinner, and I couldn’t imagine what that might be. And then our friend Cristian appeared to sit with us for a short time. Big hugs and we got caught up with his family and saw pics of his kids (now 8 and 5!). Gosh it is wonderful to see him!!
I don’t by usually eat any rolls, but Matthew knew I loved this particular kind, offered just once a cruise, and he made certain I got several. #spoiled
We went to the Princess Theater for what we were pretty sure was going to be a good show by Legacy, three vocalists singing Motown and The Commodores and Bruno Mars, etc. and they were good, but early in their show the Captain came on the PA and was making an announcement and they didn’t know and finally the message got through and they stopped the show. I really wish they had just kept going and we hadn’t heard the announcement because it was definitely going to impact us.
Our next cruise is cancelled. Yesterday’s power outage was a harbinger of things to come. I had been immediately suspicious because the backup generator didn’t just kick in yesterday when we lost power and it always had on other ships when we’ve lost power. Captain Maresca had told us at the MTG luncheon that there had been a fire in one engine on the prior cruise and we were down an engine, but it wasn’t causing us to miss port schedules and it was being fixed while the ship was sailing to Texas. I guess that didn’t go as planned.
Oh my.
For our inconvenience, we are receiving a full refund and a 25% future cruise credit, which, as far as compensation goes is pretty darn light. When this happened to us on the Pacific Princess, we got 100% FCC I think. I’m going to go back and check that.
But even more complicating is the fact that we were scheduled to be on the ship after the next cruise. This is kind of like Nice all over again, though much easier as we are in the US. We have a meeting with ship management tomorrow morning to see what this means, though I suspect I already know.
I suspect that we’ll be sleeping in our own really good bed Sunday night.
