Today starts the first of five days at sea until we arrive at our first Caribbean port of Antigua. I’m not exactly sure how I will blog about these; I’ll start daily and then just see how I feel. I’m struggling a little with this new blog app, but know that the solution to that is not to blog less. I also know that we have a LOT of sea days remaining in our winter, and no new ports, so I have to question whether I will blog at all this winter after this cruise is over. So for now, I will take this one day at a time.
There is not much I enjoy more in this world than a 25 hour day at sea. The trick, we’ve learned, is to keep our active hours centered in the middle of the day. Otherwise, we’ll get up at 4am, but poop out right after dinner. Kinda like we did last night. 😉
So today we went to Sabatini’s at a respectable 8:30am. G is at the point of ordering just bacon and fruit; I’m staying with my smoked salmon, avocado and fruit. We’ve figured out that we’re probably going to eat lunch regardless of how much we have for breakfast, simply because we enjoy seeing our favorite waiters in the Allegro Dining Room, so there’s absolutely no reason to overeat at the start of a sea day.
We attended an enrichment lecture on the life of Michelangelo in the Princess Theater, then spent some time trying to figure out the rest of our winter plans. By making (most) deposits non-refundable, Princess has done nothing more than encourage us to hold off booking cruises until after final payment, particularly if our favorite cabin locations are already unavailable. There’s no point in risking Future Cruise Deposits to book a guarantee when 1) we’re ambivalent about a cruise to begin with, and 2) there are still a lot of cabins available in other locations on the ship, just not favorite locations. We may even find ourselves adding additional cruises once already on a ship, based on whether we are “cruised out” or not (though, let’s face it…one of us would never be cruised out).
We went to lunch in the Allegro Dining Room a little late and then G squeezed in another hot tub session while I read in the cabin before we got cleaned up for the third and fourth Captains Circle parties, held this evening.
I had tortilla soup for lunch. I have really maximized my avocado consumption this cruise with as much cilantro as I can find too. My favorite flavors!
We were the only couple of the top three to attend tonight’s parties, so I’m glad we went. And it all turned out to be quite social, meeting Carolyn and Bob who have read this blog since the early days of forced marches (remember those?). They were so kind in their compliments and, honestly, have no idea how much their words meant to me, particularly as I ponder the future of this blog.
Then we met new friends Terry and Pearl and hit it off with them so much and so fast that they asked us to come back to the Crown Grill for dessert, as they have the Premier Package and dine there every night. They had gone for dinner before the Captains Circle party but had to leave before dessert, and so the waiters (who they said were just wonderful) had encouraged them to return after. So they did, dragging us along, and those amazing waiters were the same amazing waiters who look after us every morning in Sabatini’s. Big hugs, coffee and dessert (much appreciated since we hadn’t gotten to dinner) and it was a really wonderful evening.
We followed up with music in the Wheelhouse before calling it a day.
