We have three more days at sea before we arrive in St. Martin. The weather has been fantastic, and much warmer early on than we had anticipated, and from talking with other guests, that was pretty much the consensus.
The seas have been much calmer for the past few days, and it is very helpful that the swells and the wind are mostly coming from the stern.
Today was just like most of the past few days, I woke up early, watched the sunrise from the balcony, showered, and then headed to Deck 1 for a coffee and snack while Stephanie slept in for about an hour longer. Like most of the cruises we have done, the time before Stephanie gets up is my best time to work on the blog posting for the previous day. I can generally get it completed, and then head back to the cabin to find her up and getting ready.
That was the case today, although it was a little later than normal. We had a shift in time, so it was only later in the daylight time, not in real clock time. The sunrise today was at about 5:30 AM.
We headed up to the World Cafe, and had a good breakfast. We sat in some chairs in the shade to give our cabin steward time to clean the cabin. At about 10:45 AM, and we went back to the cabin to change into our walking clothes. We walked around Deck 2 for 6 laps, making it about 1.5 miles. It is tougher walking when the ship is moving, and even though the seas are relatively calm, the ship still moves enough to put you off balance, and that is more leg strain than just walking on a flat stable surface. We are not sure if there is a “correct” direction to go when walking around the ship, we have seen people going in both directions. For the past two days, we have gone counter clockwise, but next time, we are going to go the other way to balance out our leg strain since the ship sort of moves and rocks in one direction.
Once we finished walking we headed to the gym to get a couple of bottes of water off of the equipment. We are not sure if this is really allowed, bottled water is a scarce commodity on this ship. However, there is not really any choice for getting waters unless you go to a bar or restaurant and sit down and get a cup of the tap water served to you.
Resting At The Stern After Walking
Since we wanted to cool down on the stern of Deck 2 in the shade, and there is nowhere there to get water, we decided it was OK to take the bottles. If not, someone will just have to tell us differently. We do really miss easy access to more bottled water, it would be nice to have a bottle with us while we are walking.
After the noon report from the Captain, we looked at the lunch menus for The Restaurant and for the World Cafe, and decided we wanted to try some of the dishes at the The Restaurant. However, it is a little nicer than the World Cafe buffet, so we needed to change out of our gym clothes, so we headed to the cabin to change.
We arrived at The Restaurant about 12:30, and there was not any line. We were assigned to a table, and were disappointed to see it was the exact same table as we had last night, but on the other side. I guess they just put people there as a rule, but it is too close to all of the commotion and dirty dish handling/stacking for it to be relaxing. It is all about timing because a few minutes later, one of the two person tables opened up next to a window.
It was a little less of a commotion for lunch, but as it got more crowded, it got noisier. We will NOT accept one of these tables again after last night and today’s experience. There were plenty of tables open elsewhere, we will just have to be more emphatic about where we want to sit. We just don’t know where are seats are until we arrive, so it always causes a little bit of a scene to change. When you check in out front, they assign you a table and we don’t know exactly where that will be. Maybe next time we will make a specific table request and wait if need be.
We did see Tony and Angela from the UK, they were sitting one row over, of course, by a window.
We ordered our lunch and some wine, and once again the service was terrible. We each ordered two appetizers, we both wanted the fried calamari, but wanted to try a small portion of the Sweet Corn Chowder. We thought we made that really clear when the waiter took each of our orders. They take your order for everything at the beginning, including your dessert order.
Another server came over and gave me another small fork and knife, as well as a large soup spoon. This was just additional silverware for the appetizers. However, she only gave Stephanie a soup spoon. We sort of wondered why, and a short time later, out came the appetizers, corn chowder for Stephanie and calamari for me. We asked about the other order of calamari for Stephanie and the other order of corn chowder for me. We are not sure if we were served by the waiter, by his assistant, or another person, it is had to tell when they are all wearing masks. Whoever it was, they were perplexed, but left to get the other half of each of our orders. Of course, Stephanie did not have the proper silverware for the calamari, the small knife and fork. I had a spoon, but wondered why since I had not gotten any soup. I don’t think it was because they were bringing them separately, we should have each gotten the same food serving at the same time if that was the case.
Both appetizers were good, but not the service.
We had ordered different main courses, Stephanie ordered the Cannelloni al Forno, which was cannelloni stuffed with Bolognese filling. I ordered the Barolo Braised Beef Short Ribs with walnut mashed potatoes. Both were pretty good. My beef short ribs seemed like it was just chunks of beef that had been cooked in a pressure cooker, it was tender but not very flavorful. There were no bones, so I was not sure it was really “rib” meat. Don’t ribs have bones……
For dessert, I had the blueberry pie, with a side of vanilla ice cream and Stephanie got a platter of various cheeses. Both were good, but I guess I had expected a warm blueberry pie, and it was cold. It was the tiniest piece of pie I had ever seen. The width was so small I think they could probably get about 40 slices out of a regular size pie. I guess I did not really need anymore anyway, we had already eaten way too much for lunch.
Since we have had service issues on all three time we have eaten at The Restaurant, we are hoping it gets better going forward. It has all been service issues, and we just don’t think that should not happen on a cruise line of this caliber.
We walked around a bit to get our food to digest and then went to the shop to see if they had sunscreen. With all of the warm sunny days, we are going to run short on sunscreen. If we can’t make it to St, Martin before we run out, we wanted to know if it was available on the ship. We found it in the shop and a small bottle of spray sunscreen, SPF 30, was almost $28.00, a larger one was $34.00. Piracy does still exist on the open seas. We will try and make ours last, maybe we will have a cloudy day, but if not, and we need some, we will not let that outrageous price ruin our vacation. We certainly won’t buy anything until we run out.
We went back to the cabin and Stephanie took a nap while I sat on the balcony looking out into the ocean to see if I could spot any sea life. We had gone to the Explorer’s Lounge earlier and the whale watching couple was there and said that they had seen several whales and dolphins yesterday afternoon, so they are out there.
Then I broke tradition and worked on the blog post for today so it is now up to real time. We just hung out in the cabin for a while. I was enjoying some time on our balcony while Stephanie napped. It was pretty much a lazy afternoon, but that is what sea days are all about.
At around 5:30 PM, we decided to take showers and start getting ready for dinner. We were still not that hungry from the large lunch, but we knew we had to have something. We also knew it was not going to be from The Restaurant! There were a couple of items we thought we would like on their menu, but those same things were also listed on the menu for the buffet in the World Cafe.
Around 6:30 PM, we headed down to Deck 1 to the bar there, which is officially called The Living Room Bar. The whole atrium area is called The Living Room, and it has a lot of features you would expect seeing in a living room on a home, nice couches and chairs, and other homey things.
We had a couple of beverages at the bar and talked with a few folks who were sitting there. There was piano music when we first arrived, but that soon ended. It was a little interesting to see the crowds depart once the music stopped, but we knew many of them were just waiting there before heading to dinner, just like us.
We went upstairs to Deck 7 to the World Café, and somehow, got more food on our plates than we ever thought we would need to get after such a large lunch. We enjoyed some Coppola Zinfandel with our dinner. It was not crowded in the World Café and it was a peaceful dinner. The best part was that we each got the correct entrée we ordered, or in this case, the food that we picked up ourselves from the buffet.
After dinner, we headed up to the Explorers Lounge and it was very quiet, but fairly full. Apparently we had just missed some type of “name that tune” game, and the people already there had been there for the show. The bar stools were full, so we took two chairs at a small table. We had brought our mini bottles of Seagram’s VO, and got two glasses of ice and ginger ale, and of course, limes. We made our drinks and enjoyed sitting and relaxing.
We did not see any of the people we knew in the bar. Not long after we had arrived, the bar pretty much emptied, and we took our “usual” bar stools at the main bar and visited with the bartender there, Gojko. Gojko is from Montenegro.
Our favorite pretentious “most traveled” passenger and her husband showed up and she did not disappoint us with her conversation and questions. We had another drink, this time a VO substitute of Jameson’s Whiskey. We did not want to drink our dwindling supply of our VO at the empty bar.
After we finished that drink and talked with another passenger from North Carolina, who was nice but a little strange, we decided to go to the Torshavn Bar because Zeus, the guitar player, was scheduled to perform there. That bar was packed. We also ran into Angie and Tony. We all sat at a table and caught up for the day and enjoyed the music.
We had run into another couple we knew Julian and Shane from Arlington, Texas, at the elevator as we were leaving the Explorer’s Lounge, and they were just arriving. We warned them about the “patrons” at the bar, and they wanted to go there and have some “fun” talking with them. They had not stayed there long, they showed up in Torshavn’s about 10 minutes after we had arrived. We moved to a larger seating area in the very back so we could all sit together.
Zeus did not play much longer, and it was nice to have some quiet time where we could all talk without shouting over the music. Unfortunately that did not last long because the Viking Band was setting up to play, and they are really loud in that small venue. They are good, but it is just difficult to talk over the volume of their music.
We stayed a little longer and happened to meet a lady from our town, Lexington, SC. Well, she actually came over because Becky, who we met at lunch a couple of days ago, was there with her and her husband, and had seen us. It turned out that she had also gone to high school with our neighbor Wayne, what a small world it is sometimes. We talked with her for a while, and then I stopped by and talked with Becky and the other lady’s husband on the way out to the restroom.
We all decided we would go up to the Explorer’s Lounge and finish off the evening. Stephanie and I did not know that there was split pea soup available from Mamsen’s late at night. Mamsen’s is right next to the bar and we could order the soup, as well as meat and cheese trays from Gojko, the bartender in the Explorer’s Lounge. I am not a split pea soup fan, so I did not have any of the soup like everyone else.
After our late night snack and another round of drinks, we all called it a night and headed to our respective cabins. It was just past midnight, and this was the latest we had stayed out on the cruise. Unfortunately, we do not get an hour back tonight, so we don’t get that benefit to offset the late evening.