Day 97 – At Sea – April 11th
Today is the first of five consecutive sea days which we always enjoy. A big part of our World Cruise are all the activities that we take part in the ship.
I was still feeling a little crummy from yesterday so I stayed in the cabin most of the morning and missed the coffee chat, which is at 9:30 AM. Today’s guest was the executive Chef Petr.
My other morning routine is to go down to the casino at 9 AM and sign up for the Texas Hold ‘em games. Depending on the interest, there are three games, sometimes four. I usually play in two games.
I spent most of the morning continuing to edit the safari videos, and since this is written after the fact, those videos are part of the posts from early April that talk about our Safari.
We received an interesting memo this morning from Henk, the hotel director, about a shortage of melons. Hank always tries to write memos with a humorous twist and been quite successful throughout the cruise. This memo talks about the upcoming melon shortage. This one was titled “Melon-chol-y [a feeling of pensive sadness for the shortage of melons]”. The memo explains that our shipment of melons did not arrive in Cape Town as originally planned and they would not have a chance to resupply until Senegal. Rather than supply the normal amount of melons every day and then run out before Senegal Hank decided to allocate the remaining melons over the remaining days so there would be some melons available every day but they might run out during the course of the day. You can see a copy of the memo HERE.
Judy went to the Crow’s Nest for knitting and I met her for lunch by the Lido pool. Judy enjoys having a Turkey and Swiss cheese Panini while I’ll always scour the line and typically get something different depending on what looks good.
Another note we received today was announcing the third and final photo contest. Once again this would be voted on by the passengers. We prefer the way the photo contest has been judged on previous cruises where a select group of officers would judge the entries. Now with so many entries each photo gets a half a dozen to a dozen votes and a photo with 15 votes may win. Voting is only allowed for one day to minimize the allowable time for lobbying your tablemates, etc. to vote for your entry but there’s still an element of the pictures being a popularity contest more than the best photo wins. In a few weeks, at the end of the cruise, the Ship’s Officers will vote on the best photo of the cruise judging the winners of the previous contests.
Pete Neighbour, the jazz clarinetist who performed last night, was our guest for dinner this evening. We have seen him perform on previous cruises and enjoy his performances very much. He was a wonderful dinner guest and we enjoyed learning more about his background and some of the ins and outs about working on cruise ships.
Table 303
Beechers macaroni was one of the entrées for dinner this evening. Every pasta dish is always available as an appetizer size which I always do whenever there’s macaroni and cheese of the menu.
Tonight’s guest entertainers were a quartet called “4ever”. Two of the quartet are from Spain, one is from Uruguay and the other is from Italy. Individually they all have amazing voices and as a group they filled the Queen’s Lounge with their performance. They sang a wide variety of songs from pop hits like Bohemian Rhapsody to an Italian version of Unchained Melody.
Here is a video with some of the highlights of their performance.