Sunrise
The sea conditions last night were rougher than we had experienced for the past several days. According to the Captain, we are heading through a low pressure system for the next couple of days, and it was evident by the changing weather. After the sunrise, there was some period of sunny skies, but that soon turned into areas of heavy rain showers, then cloudy conditions, and then back to rain showers. The wind was a little stronger today than yesterday.
After eating our breakfast in the buffet, we walked around the inside decks of the ship, once again watching other passengers looking through all of the items “on sale” in the atrium. Not really sure why people keep looking at the same stuff over and over, maybe they are hoping to find their size this time. Maybe it is just shopping withdrawals…..
Looming Storms
We ran into Mike and Barb in the atrium, they were heading to trivia with two ladies that we had met a couple of nights ago, traveling together on the cruise without their husbands, a “girls only cruise”. We agreed to meet up later in the evening, have some drinks, and head to dinner in the dining room.
We actually noticed that there was a Catholic Mass scheduled for 5:15 PM today, and we were planning on attending that before we got together with Mike and Barb.
Today was another laundry day, this time for one load of colored clothes. We headed to the laundry mat near our cabin, and found it was much busier than the last time we did wash, but luckily, there was one washer available, so we did not have to wait. Stephanie handled that task while I headed to the gym for exercise. Stephanie was having some pain in one of her knees from all of the walking in Funchal, so we decided it was best for her to stay off of the treadmill today. And the grand prize for no exercise was a wonderful time in the laundry mat!
Rain Showers On The Horizon
When I finished exercise, and while Stephanie was waiting on the clothes to dry, I washed our Keene walking shoes, trying to remove at least most of the mud off of the soles from the lavada walk in Funchal. I had brought down an extra towel from the gym, and used the nice large sink in the laundry room to wash off the mud. It was quite a mess due to the deep aggressive tread of the soles on these shoes. All of the deep crevices in the bottom of the shoes were filled with the now dry and hard mud. It took a while to get them cleaned, and the once white towel I used was now a deep brown muddy color. However, the shoe soles were pretty clean, and now ready to pack in our luggage without worrying about getting mud on our clothes when traveling home.
With our cleaning chores complete, it was now time for lunch. We keep discussing attending the sit down lunch in the dining room on a sea day instead of going to the buffet, but the additional effort of wearing long pants, and then siting with a group of strangers for lunch, is just more effort than we want for our time at lunch. We almost went today, but then decided the quicker buffet was the preferred choice once again. It was sunny outside, and we put up our clothesline on the balcony to finish drying some of the washed clothes. There was some concern that we might run into one of the rain bands while we were at the longer dining room lunch, had we decided to go, and our partially dried clothes would get wet. Plus, if it did stay sunny, we wanted a shorter duration lunch so we had more time on the balcony to enjoy the short periods of sunshine.
Once lunch was over, we headed back to the room and did spend some time outside on the balcony before the ship’s course intersected with another rain band, this one was quite dark and stormy. The officer of the watch came on the loudspeaker and made an announcement so that anyone out on the open decks was aware that we were going to get some heavy rain, and we did.
Stephanie took a nap while I worked on some of the photos, and the blog. I spent most of the time using a free computer program called Hugin to stitch together some of the photos we had taken to produce panoramic images. We will try and post them in a separate Panoramic Photo Album, with a link to access this album on the main page of the blog just above the clock
The internet connection was actually working faster than I would have thought for this time of the day, so I was able to load up the post for December 7, and add some photos into the Funchal Photo Album. Maybe everyone else on the ship is running out of internet minutes already, so there are less people on the internet during the day. We were even able to check email and send out some emails to the folks. We have been pretty frugal with our internet minutes, mostly using them for the blog, and for loading up the photos. We have not yet gone through our first free allotment of 250 minutes, so we will have plenty of minutes for the remainder of the cruise. We still have the additional 250 free minutes under Stephanie’s Platinum Cruise Membership benefit.
We got dressed for Mass that was being conducted in the Club Fusion Lounge, and headed that way. Club Fusion is the aft most lounge on Deck 7. There was a trivia contest finishing up, and after everyone from that event left, we went in a sat down. It was a good sized crowd attending Mass, probably 250 people or more. It was hard to tell due to the wide open layout of the tables and chairs in this lounge. The priest was retired, and lived in Jupiter, Florida, having originally spent much of his time in the northeast. His style of saying mass was a little different, he would just stop in the middle of normal prayers and interject some of his thoughts. However, he was pretty interesting, and had an different perspective on the things he discussed.
When Mass was complete, we went back to the room and changed into our dining room attire. We made an adult beverage, and headed over to meet Mike and Barb at their room on the other side of the ship, but on the same deck. We visited for a while, helping them to reduce their adult beverage overstock, as they had helped us with the night before.
We wanted to go to dinner a little earlier than normal in order to catch a “Pub Show” in the Explorer’s lounge. We headed out to dinner about 8:00 PM, hoping to finish before the 9:15 PM show, but we did not quite make it. We got to the show a little late, and there were no available seats, except for two on the side near a group of young people, who seemed to be part of the entertainment staff, but were not in this particular show. One of the young men had the strangest hairdo, sort of a wedge of hair in the front, somehow held in place with some sort of gel. OK, they were strange, or at least strange looking, and Stephanie and Barb made Mike and I sit next to them, then Stephanie and Barb proceeded to laugh at us for the entire show. The other young man in the group knew all of the songs and gestures, so maybe they were standby dancers/singers for the show. They were different to say the least, and one could easily assume they were dancers.
Mike and I did not enjoy the show, and I think the only entertainment Stephanie and Barb got was in watching us, and laughing at us and the strange hairdo person.
After the show, we went back to Mike and Barb’s cabin for a nightcap, and then headed home. The seas were getting rougher, so it was going to be another bumpy night.