Clocks were set back an hour last night, so even getting up at 7:45, I had a good sleep. The rocking motion of the boat is great for sleeping! Although the sky was uniformly gray all day yesterday, there were signs of the clouds breaking up this morning, so we had high hopes for some better weather.
We got dressed and headed down for breakfast quickly, since Rachel had a full morning planned. We shared a table at breakfast with a couple from California who were on their 3rd cruise. I decided to go lighter from breakfast this morning and had a bagel and lox - yum! Rachel had her usual stewed prunes and oatmeal, only the oatmeal never came. I shared some of my breakfast, and it was enough for both of us. She then headed off to her water aerobics class, while I changed into my gym clothes. I really didn't want to exercise, but I knew I would feel good if I did. Actually, we get our leg workout in constantly since we're taking the stairs everywhere. This is especially fun when traversing the 8 flights of stairs to go from the Queen's Lounge on deck 2 up to the Crow's Nest on deck 10, which I seem to have done a lot today!
Anyway, I had a good workout in the gym - the elliptical trainers that had bothered me last cruise seemed to work fine this time, and I did my lifting on the machines. Just as I was finishing, Rachel showed up to to start her Boot Camp class, and I headed to the showers. I just barely had time to shower and dress before needing to be back in 10 Forward (aka the Crow's Nest) for Cha Cha lessons. Yes, she convinced my to attend this. Rachel was running late from her class in the gym, so I started without her. She did eventually show up, and we "danced" for about 20 minutes. We're not very good, but it was fun. We met John and Carol there, and while they certainly didn't need lessons, they figured they'd just dance the Cha Cha for fun (along with helping us a bit).
After that, we took a short break and then met Mama and Aunt Merna for lunch. The service was quite slow today as they seemed especially busy. One thing we have noticed is that with all of the elderlies on this ship, it's easier to get into the gym and other classes, harder find room in the bars where the dance music is playing (they *love* to dance) and the dining room is more crowded for breakfast and lunch. At any rate, our food did eventually arrive, and it was well worth it. I had a very spicy lamb taquito (probably made from last night's lamb), and corn and green chile chowder, and a very well prepared fish in traditional lemon/butter/caper sauce. Mmm, the fish is good!
After lunch Rachel went to a "memory class" while I sat on our verandah and wrote yesterday's blog. I wandered the ship for a while and picked up the daily sudoku puzzle in the library (also on deck 10). Oh, did I mention that it's sunny and warm?? After the dance class, we came out on deck and reveled in the sunshine. So I spent quite a bit of time hanging out on the observation deck aft of 10 Forward.
Rachel and I then headed to the front office to look into a future cruise. We've decided that we'd like to take an Alaska cruise during the summer of 2013 to celebrate our 25th anniversary, and we know that you can get a good deal if you book on the ship. Sadly, they didn't have sailing dates determined past April of 2013, so we'll have to wait a few more months before booking.
At 4:00, the ladies were all planning to play bingo, so at a little after 3 I went to Mama's room to start my audio history recording. She was worried that she wouldn't have anything to say, but once I got them going, she and Merna seemed to have a good time talking about their parents and grandparents. We didn't spend more than about 15 or 20 minutes recording this time as I didn't want to make them late to bingo.
About 5pm, as I was getting ready for dinner, Rachel came back to the room very excited. She had won at bingo. No, not the $10,000 jackpot, but about $280 - that's not bad! That'll pay for a spa treatment or two. It was then off to dinner. Our table seems to be gelling well, and we all sat in slightly different seats just to keep it interesting. Mama had told Putu, our waiter, that she couldn't eat garlic the night before, so he had her pre-order her meal for the next night as a special meal that they'd prepare special with no garlic. The rest of us ordered and the food started to come fairly quickly. Rachel won hands-down tonight, and in fact it was the first time on the ship that I was disappointed with the food. Her tuna carpaccio beat my duck quesadilla (although mine was good), her italian wedding soup beat my mulligatawny stew, and my steak was really plain and boring. Oh well, I did have a delightful brownie sundae with ice cream. We finally ordered the Carmenère tonight it it did not disappoint. Hopefully we'll be ready if they through it at us in the blind taste test later this week.
After dinner we headed back to our cabin to relax for a while, and watched the water go by from our verandah. Normally on channel 40 of the TV, they have he "navigation channel" which shows the ships speed, heading, position, weather conditions, sea depth (15,000 feet tonight!), etc. However, someone had decided to use the PC that normally displays these things to edit a slide show of the ship's officers. So, we watched him search the file system for various photos, add metadata to an XML file, etc. Very strange! After we got bored with that, we went up to see our friend Chris the guitarist in 10 Forward, and listened to him for about an hour. At 9:00 the Halcats were going to play jazz and big band standards, and Rachel figured that the elderlies would flock there to dance, so we'd best get there early (which we did). It was a good thing, since she was right. We enjoyed the music and the dancers, but as they never played a Cha Cha, we didn't dance ourselves (just as well!). The band took their usual break at 9:45 and we headed to the Vista Lounge for the comedian. He was quite funny, and sang silly songs about cruising, especially with the elderly. Songs like "it's a small room after all" and one about getting behind slow people in the halls (old coots are just a walking, that's just what they do. One of these days those coots are going to walk in front of you...). We thought it was great, but I wonder how the elderly felt about it?
We decided to call it a night after the show, although we still haven't gotten to the piano bar. Maybe tomorrow night. We set our clocks forward yet again, so it was only a bit after 10:00 in the new timezone, but we were tired.
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