Today is another Sea Day, and when we awoke this morning, it was still dark outside. We had forgotten to set our clocks back last night and it was now much earlier than we wanted it to be. The Captain had said we would be going through a cold front last night during yesterday’s noon weather report, and it was now really cloudy outside and had been quite rough last night and continued on this morning.
I made some coffee in the room today with our Keurig type coffee maker and tried to work on the blog for yesterday. I did not get too far before Stephanie woke up and we decided to get ready and go for breakfast, not wanting to miss it again today like yesterday. There was not much chance of that happening, it was only about 8:30 AM on the new adjusted time.
We headed to the World Cafe for breakfast at the buffet. I ordered two sunny side eggs cooked to order and I also had some sausage and a blueberry muffin, which was really good. Stephanie had some fruit and scrambled eggs.
After breakfast, we headed back to the room and took a load of dirty clothes to the laundromat. It is only a few doors down the hall from our room, and since it was empty, we decided to take advantage of the availability and keep up our full complement of clean clothes. We just hung out in the room watching the port lecture on our TV for tomorrow’s visit to Gran Canarias. There was a lot of good information on the excursions, more than what we had read yesterday on the brochure from Guest Services. Based on this port lecture, we decided we had made the correct choice between the two available excursions especially after hearing the new information in the port talk.
After that was over, we headed out to walk some laps on Deck 2, which is the only deck with a walkway that completely goes around the ship. It was quite breezy outside, but really sunny and about 68 degrees. We walked five laps around the ship, and it was really difficult on the windy side of the ship, walking into the wind, but nice on the other side that was more protected, and where we were also walking in the same direction as the wind. Four laps is a mile and we did one more lap. By the time we finished, we were quite hot. It was much more tiring with all of the wind and rougher seas than we had expected. Into the wind, near the bow, we thought we were doing news coverage for a hurricane on the weather channel!
We went back to the cabin to get rid of our jackets and then headed out to find somewhere outside that was not exposed to the wind. We found a nice area on the stern of the ship right outside of the World Cafe. We sat there for a while just trying to drink some water and rehydrate.
The Captain did the noon report and told us we were about three hours behind schedule for our arrival in Gran Canarias tomorrow afternoon. This was due to the sea conditions, the ship was not able to go as fast as we needed to make the schedule. Since we were not scheduled to arrive until 1:00 PM anyway, we were not sure how we could even do much there if we arrived even later at 4:00 PM. The Captain was going to try and make up the time, but the forecast called for less winds in the afternoon, but actually higher ground swells, over 10.5 feet. We only have 9 foot swells this morning, and that had already impacted our speed, as well as the headwind we had. We will just have to wait until tomorrow to see what happens.
We eventually headed back inside to get some lunch and decided try try the Pool Grill. We both had cheeseburgers and fries, and they were cooked to order, we both ordered “medium” and they were served with fries and Coleslaw. We really enjoyed them. I had a glass of wine and Stephanie had a beer to go with the lunches.
Stephanie Napping Upstairs In The Explorer’s Lounge
After lunch we headed back to the upstairs area of the Explorer’s Lounge to relax. I worked on the blog and Stephanie stretched out on a couch and took a nap. The seas were fairly large, but mostly coming from the bow, and generally just a large ground swell as the Captain had said we would see this afternoon during his noon weather report today.
We stayed up in the lounge for a coupe of hours just watching the ocean go by, or in Stephanie’s case, the backs of her eyelids.
We headed back to the cabin and listened to some of the Christmas Music on one of the radio channels on the Ship’s TV while we showered and got dressed for dinner. We looked at the menu’s and decided on the easy route of going to the World Cafe. Stephanie tried the swordfish and I had sushi and also some of the crab legs that were being served again tonight. Both were good.
We really need to plan to go to the Main Dining room called The Restaurant, but that won’t happen tomorrow either since we are late in port at Las Palmas. Then the following night we have reservations in Manfredi’s specialty restaurant. That is one of the nice things about a cruise like this, we have plenty of time to try everything out.
After dinner, we stopped by the World Cafe Bar and had a Seagram’s VO drink at the only bar where we can still get that spirit. The bottle was about empty after the first drink and so we had another and that was the last of the available Seagram’s VO at this bar, and possibly on the entire ship. Oh yeah, this is a premium cruise line……….we just have to keep telling ourselves that as they run out of certain liquors, and Diet Coke.
We got some ice and limes “to go” and headed back to the cabin to have one more drink from the VO we had brought onboard the ship, calling it an early night and keeping us from overindulging at the bar. We watched some TV to try and see what all was on the available channels. There was not much interesting to watch so we listened to more Christmas music from Spotify through our phones and our portable Bose speaker.
About 9:45 PM. we called it a night, glad we were not staying out late.