Whew, this was a full day at sea. It is 11pm as I start this post after beginning the day with breakfast at 8, and we slowed down only long enough to charge our phones and take the first showers of the cruise.
Simply stated: we were not crazy to take this cruise. In fact, we were very, very wise. If we hadn’t taken a chance and stepped outside our comfort zone, we would never have realized how much we love this ship. Yep, this small ship fan loves this ship. And I am confident of this because I spent the entire day exploring and walking and enjoying and exploring and walking and enjoying. I *think* we’ve covered all of the decks except for the spa area in Deck 6 and Deck 5 (all cabins). I’m pooped tonight!
G slept in a bit, but I went to breakfast in the Sanctuary Restaurant, and, though he did finally join me, it was close to the closing time of 9:30am and we went to the Eatery for him to get an omelet.
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To get to the restaurant, I walked aft on Deck 9 and
entered the upper level of Piazza, with this view.
Nice way to start the day! |
We walked up to the Eatery (buffet) and right into Restaurant Manager Mihai from Romania who we hadn’t seen since we spent three months with him on the Ruby Princess in Australia just before COVID. What a pleasant surprise!! We sat out on the outside deck along the starboard side of Deck 9 while G had his breakfast, then explored the Wakeview Pool area on the back of Deck 8.
We spent the remainder of the morning exploring the upper levels of the ship, including the Dome which had been closed for an event when we tried to see it yesterday. It was the only place that had no loungers available about 11am; the remainder of the pool areas had plenty of empty loungers.
The outside area at the very front of the ship was closed due to wind, which meant the outside portion of the indoor-outdoor pool was closed off, too. I wonder if it’s ever open while the ship is at sea.
We went to lunch at 11:30am so I could get to an enrichment lecture at 1pm, but I’m not sure we’ll make a big effort to get to the Sanctuary Restaurant for lunch most days. It was the standard dining room menu with no special items (though I’ve heard they’ll make just about anything you want).
I swing into Princess Live on the way to the Arena for my lecture, because we’d learned that MTG Joyce, who I’ve hadn’t seen in person in ten years though we stay in touch on Facebook, and also new cruise friends Michael and Zennie who we met on the Emerald Princess were on board and they always do trivias. It was nice to see them all again! They are first and third most traveled guests (we are fourth this cruise).
The enrichment lecture on Life in the Tropical Seas was right up my alley. Naturalist James Engman (a retired marine biology professor) is excellent. But the best part was the quality of his slides and the visual quality of the screen in the Arena. It is shockingly good. I have a lifelong vision issue where I don’t see a lot of depth, and this screen was like looking through an old tine Viewmaster (remember those?) that I used for the fun part of my vision therapy when I was a child. It was shockingly good; the fish seemed to swim off the screen.
More exploring followed, but our phone batteries were exhausted (we’re having to use them constantly to navigate the ship) so we eventually returned to the cabin about 3pm and got cleaned up for the evening.
I think my very favorite part of the ship has to be the cabin bathrooms. The shower is the best one I’ve ever used on any ship. The storage space, the lighting…it’s all good. The only issue I had was the Drybar hair dryer wouldn’t stay plugged into the European outlet at the desk, G offered to stand there holding it in the outlet (really…so sweet) but, while he was doing that, he discovered another one above the refrigerator and that one did work.
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| Just two of the several drawers in the cabin hold nearly all my clothes with lots of room to spare. |
We stopped in the Elite Lounge in Princess Live on our way to dinner at 5:30pm. Dinner has already become the highlight of our days. Waiter Somphot from Thailand and Junior waiter Man from Nepal are so sweet to us, and both nights so far we’ve ordered from the special items, which, if they’re even available in the main dining rooms, would cost extra. I’m betting that G is going to have a filet mignon every single night of this cruise. I opted for the salmon tonight, and it was brought around in a carving station. I added the broccoli I have every night and it was a delicious dinner.
Restaurant Manager Ray carved me the first piece of salmon coulibiac tonight
We left without dessert and coffee to get to tonight’s Arena performance by Janet Martin, and is there anything that lady can’t do? She played violin and sang while doing aerial stunts and played guitar and piano. It was an excellent show.
From there we went back to the Sanctuary Restaurant for cappuccino and G had ice cream, then to Princess Live for comedian Tom Simmons. He was pretty good, really funny at times.
We went up to the Dome to see what it looked like lit up at night but couldn’t stay awake long enough to attend the after party with the DJ up there.
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| This water feature is two stories tall |
The loungers in the Dome are heavily padded
It is now midnight, and I’m going to wrap this up. I’ll fix its many, many typos tomorrow morning; right now I can barely keep my eyes open. Fun days wear me out!
