Today was an added Sea Day as we continued south through the Taiwan Strait to try and get past Typhoon Krathon.
We have added another Itinerary to the main menu bar at the top of this blog page. It is titled Revised Typhoon Krathon Itinerary.
I was up at 7:00 AM today, knowing we were not doing anything in particular since it is a sea day. I was looking outside and I noticed there was a large sea bird on our balcony. I tried to get a photo of it sitting on the arm of the chair, but the glare in the glass door was too great. It did not seem to be able to fly off, it just jumped down onto the deck of the balcony and ran around, eventually going over to the balcony on the cabin next door through the opening in the bottom of the partition.
I did not want Stephanie to go out the balcony or open the balcony door door when she got up and accidentally let the bird into the room, that would be a mess. I left a sign on the door telling her about the bird.
I headed down to the Library Bar for my usual coffee and to try and catch up on the blog. I am basically now just one day behind, and it should not be hard to catch up since we don’t do a lot on sea days, so there is not as much to write about.
At 9:00 AM I was getting ready to head back to the cabin to wake Stephanie up so we could go to breakfast in the buffet before it closed at 10:00 AM. She sent me a text that she was already up and had started some laundry. She also saw the note about the bird and had called guest services. The guest services manager and another lady had come to the room to capture the bird on the balcony. Stephanie was able to get a good photo of the bird on the balcony before they arrived. One lady had used a blue plastic bag to capture the bird by hand. They assures Stephanie they were taking it somewhere safe, and would let it go. The bird had gotten confused with all of the glass on the balcony, and had worn itself out. They had already called back to the room and said they had released the bird on an upper deck and it had safely flown off.
I had missed all of this, and by the time I arrived back at the cabin, Stephanie was ready and we headed to breakfast. After breakfast, we went back to the room. I was trying to leave some test messages for our neighbors Mike and Elizabeth before it was too late at night at home. We were trying to understand what was going on with the pontoon boat and the lake level, I did not want the boat to float off the lift if the water got too high, so I was trying to get Mike to tie it off to the lift just in case. While I was doing this and working on the blog, Stephanie finished up the laundry.
Stephanie decided to go to the morning session of Baggo between the crew and the passengers. That is always held in the Atrium on Deck 1. In our part of the world, it is called “cornhole”, but I guess that is not politically correct, and maybe the European name is Baggo. It is fun to watch, they play for quite a while and move the difficulty levels up as they play. There was also a lecture on Pandas taking place in the theater later int he morning, so that was also on her plan for afterward.
I was terribly behind with the blog, and needed to try and catch up a little, we are probably 4-5 days behind, and now that we have sea days, it gets even harder when I am behind. The sea days are very similar, there are not specific excursions to remember the differences by, and they tend to blend together. Add in a couple of glasses of mid-morning wine, (hey, don’t judge), and it gets even worse.
They were having a special Dim Sum lunch today in the World Cafe, so we planned on getting back together before lunch and heading there to try it out.
The Dim Sum was being prepared outside on Deck 7 at the stern of the ship, the normal location for the specialty lunch preparations. Luckily, the weather was still fairly good. The seas were not too bad today, but there was a large ground swell coming from the direction of the Typhoon. I looked on our Weather Channel App and now the typhoon was classified as a “Super Typhoon” with winds over 150 mph. A Super Typhoon is the same as a Category 5 hurricane in the west. It was moving only 5 mph, so it was not moving out of this area very quickly. It was also heading more westward, in our direction, but the forecast track still showed it turning to the north, but much later than initially forecast. Luckily, it was also forecast to diminish I strength over the next 24 hours, and eventually be at a Category 1 hurricane strength before it hits Taiwan.
We enjoyed the Dim Sum themed lunch. Some items were better than others, and it was hard to prepare things quickly for this many people so there were times we had to come back for something they had run out of and were preparing more. We ate at a table outside, enjoying the good weather, knowing it was not long lived. The best part of the lunch was some of the special desserts that made for today’s lunch, we sampled quite a few, enjoying them with some of the wine they were serving with lunch, a Sauvignon Blanc. It is one of the daily house wines they serve for free with meals, but it is good, and we got that instead of something from the bar.
After lunch, we headed toward Guest Services. Since we were headed to the port of Xiamen early, and were planning on staying overnight, we wanted to find out what the excursion schedule was. We did not know if we were going to keep the current excursion schedule or go on a different day since we were going to be there an additional day because of the storm.
First, we needed to go back to the room and gather up the information on the tours we were signed up for already, we had tickets for them that we received on the first day when we checked in, so we wanted to have them for reference in case there were any changes. On the way back to the room, we ran into Michael and Suzie in the Wintergarden on Deck 7. They were sitting in there relaxing, they were both working on cross-stitching projects, and listening to music. We interrupted their relaxation and talked with them for a while.
Afterward, we went to the room and then to Guest Services to find out what to expect in Xiamen. We were told the tours would be on the same schedule as originally planned, and we were not so glad to hear that. There was a lot of rain expected on that day, and we had hoped the tours would be moved to another day. I guess that would require a lot of extra coordination, but now we knew and could plan on the weather accordingly.
We took everything back to the room and then I challenged Stephanie to aa round of Putt-Putt. The weather outside was still mostly sunny, but we could see some storms approaching when we got to the Putt-Putt course on the top deck. It was going to be tough, the ship was moving a lot from the ground swells being produced by the Typhoon. The course was slightly different than the ones we had played on on other Viking Ocean ships. This course had slightly shorter holes, but the big difference was the mounds and hills that were on the course. On the other ships, the deck was just flat, but there was a lot of elevation changes on these holes, and that made the ship movement an even bigger challenge. Basically, there was no way to figure out anything ahead of time, if you adjusted for the hill, and the ship moved in that direction, or in the opposite direction, the ball just followed, never heading where it was aimed.
It was still fun, and I was the grand winner. We had wanted to play another round, but we ran into s rain storm and it started to rain quite heavily, so we put the putters and balls back and got out of the rain. It looked like our good weather had run out for the day, so we headed back inside and went to the Explorer’s Bar for a glass of wine. It is nice there because it is located in the bow of the ship, and with all of the forward facing glass, you get a great view of the ship’s course through the water.
We ordered a glass of wine, I decided to switch it up and get a glass of the Rose, Stephanie stayed with our favorite, the Pinot Grigio. It is not quite as good on this ship, it is a different brand than the Tommasi Pinot Grigio we have had on all of the other Viking cruises. While we were there, they were setting up for an traditional Tea Making Demonstration, so we decided to stay and watch that. There was a lady dressed in traditional attire, and she sat at a table and made tea. It was very demonstrative, every part of the process was done slowly and with grace. We got some explanation from the bartenders as she made the different teas. There were actually three batches of tea made from the same tea leaves, and each subsequent batch was stronger than the first, which seemed the opposite of what I thought, but as the wet tea leaves are soaking between each batch, they release more flavor. About seven servings were made by he lady, and these were distributed to the people in the bar. It was quite crowded. Of course, that was not enough tea servings for everyone in the bar, so there was someone making tea in the room behind the bar at the same time, and the bartenders took those trays of small tea cups and distributed them to the rest of the people watching. We did sample some and it was good, but we are not tea drinkers, so our opinion of the quality is not relevant. I don’t know how representative the large batch tea was compared to the small batches made by the lady performing the demonstration.
She made several batches of different teas during the demonstration, which lasted at least 45 minutes.
We stayed for a bit after the tea demonstration concluded, but eventually headed back to the cabin to get ready for dinner. Our plan was to go to the buffet tonight, we did not want to spend a lot of time eating in The Restaurant, which is the main dining room. Dinner was good, and we enjoyed the peacefulness of the buffet area, it was not that crowded.
After dinner, we headed to Deck 1 to The Library Bar, and had a glass of wine. We would normally have something else at night other than wine, but since they did not have any types of Canadian Whiskeys on the ship, we just stayed with wine. Somehow the conversation came up with the bar staff about our trip to Antarctica, and we showed them some pictures from our phones. It was not crowded in the bar at all, so almost all of the staff was there looking at the photos.
We decided to see what the entertainment was up in the Explorer’s Bar, so we headed to Deck 7.
There was not much goin on there tonight, so we got one glass of wine to go and headed back to the cabin, calling it a night.
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