Today at sea was rather uneventful, at least until dinner time, with a few fun activities thrown in. Breakfast in Snobatini’s accompanied by stellar service, lunch in the Allegro Dining Room accompanied by stellar service, dinner in the Symphony Dining Room accompanied by stellar service, yada, yada, yada…you know the routine.
I went to a 10am enrichment lecture on the cultural and historic importance of the Silk Road, which I found fascinating. A fellow guest said she thought that the speaker was a bit too professorial in style, but that’s exactly what I like most about her. Well, that and the fact that she presents such interesting topics.
Peppered throughout today (and yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before…), the discussions about if and where to travel beginning in January have been non-stop. Who else spends hours on a cruise deciding where to go next? These are basically “escape winter” cruises, no new ports for us and we may just stay on the ship in the ports that are offered. Therefore, it really doesn’t matter to me where we go, and it really came down to preferred ship and cruise length. Today was a final payment day, and, in the end, we decided to stick with our original plan, booked a few months ago.
For those wondering, it looks like we’ll be on ships for another 63 days this winter, possibly more, artfully shoehorned in between holidays at home and indoor track championships. Sadly, I may not do any further blogging this year. Just considering playing hooky makes me positively giddy, thinking about what I might do with an extra hour in every cruise day.
Today’s lunch in the Allegro Dining Room featured the pub lunch menu, which makes us both happy. G always chooses the fish and chips while I love the curry.
We went right from lunch to the Princess Theater to get “good” seats for the finals of The Voice of the Ocean. One of us is quite particular about our seating for that show. And the other is a very good wife. The singers did a brilliant job, all six of them, but the final one, a man from Anchorage, just blew us away with the opening notes of “You Raise Me Up”. No surprise…he won with a whopping 74% of the votes.
And here the day took a little turn. It was formal night, so we returned to the cabin to get showered and dressed for the evening to find it flooded. It was clear the issue originated in the bathroom, but we weren’t sure exactly where. We could see water coming up out of the shower drain, and it had overflowed the bathroom and run into the bedroom area. It didn’t appear to be sewage (thank God!) but we weren’t certain if it was clean or grey water. Someone from housekeeping responded to our call pretty quickly, and we sat on the beds as he called for backup. When he left to get a shop vac and a plumber, we threw on dressy clothes and fled the cabin.
We returned to a fan in the cabin (removed overnight, but I suspect it will be there every day until we disembark trying to dry out this carpet) and the issue, a burst pipe in the utility cabinet behind the toilet, repaired. Now we just have to refrain from tripping on the pool towels covering half of the floor in our cabin during our middle of the night bathroom trips.
I splurged tonight at dinner and we split escargot and I soaked up that delicious garlic butter with a garlic roll. My day was saved!
We had a dearth of entertainment options tonight, a mentalist in the Vista-less Lounge and a gymnastics duo in the Princess Theater. Well, it is the fifth of five days at sea, after all. We chose the mentalist and he wasn’t awful, and then, because we just felt too grody to mingle on a formal night, what with our nonexistent ablutions tonight, sat on the Horizon Terrace listening to the ship’s wake for awhile. And that is where I discovered the ship, which features a new brand of tea bags (Eilles) has rooibos tea. Rooibos tea! My favorite! Do all the Princess ships now have that brand of tea onboard? I hope so.
We move clocks back an hour tonight, and then tomorrow…land ho!
