Today was a much-appreciated Sea Day after having had such a long day and night yesterday. We both slept in a little, but I still got up earlier than Stephanie and headed down to the Library Bar for my morning coffee at about 7:30 AM. There was hardly anyone up, there was only one other person getting coffee.
I sat for a while and wrote the blog post for two days ago trying not to fall any farther behind. It has just been harder on this trip, we are doing so much and spending time out at night, so the mornings are the only time I have to write. For our Iceland trip, I had mornings and nights, we were in a camper van and there was not a lot going on at either time.
I headed back and woke up Stephanie at about 9:15 AM, giving us enough time to go to the Breakfast Buffet before it closed at 10:00 AM. After breakfast, we walked on the outside decks.
We do not have much of a plan for today other than to relax, We are still on the initial cruise schedule, there were no additional changes. Yesterday in Xiamen was the first day back on that original schedule and we should not make any more modifications, but there are only three days remaining until we disembark the ship.
The skies were overcast, but it was not looking like any rain for today, and the seas were not bad. The typhoon is still lingering over Taiwan but is is a much lower category storm, so the overall winds have decreased dramatically. It did seem like we were cruising fairly close to the coast, we could see land occasionally, and the land was helping to lessen the wind.
We went to the Spa to look at a small jade roller for using to relax muscles that Stephanie had seen one other day in the display case. We looked at it and decided to purchase it after making sure it would actually work. It was made out of real “certified” green jade, there was paperwork to prove it, and it was not that expensive. There were several spa items for sale in the glass cases, and the prices seemed much less than on a typical Viking cruise. They might have been priced for other Chinese Cruisers, which were on the ship before these select date Viking Cruises started in China, and they will continue once these Viking cruises end in a couple of months.
We took it back to the room and decided to put in two loads of laundry into the washers. I went to the Launderette to see if there were any empty washers while Stephanie sorted the clothes. We wanted to do one more wash day before we get off the ship the day after tomorrow. This should give us enough clean clothes to make it the rest of the way until we leave to go home.
Two washers were empty, so I headed back to the room and we quickly headed back to the Launderette hoping no one had gotten there before us, and were happy to find no one had. Then we headed back to the cabin and Stephanie used the new jade roller on my hip muscles until it was time to put the laundry into the dryer.
After placing the clothes in the dryer, we decided to make one more trip to the spa to relax in the hot tubs and steam room. We had 70 minutes before the clothes were finished drying. We had enjoyed our previous two trips to the spa, and it seemed like something good to do on another sea day. We got our bathing suits and headed to the spa, having about 65 minutes before the dryers were done. It was a little after noon, and the spa was a little more crowded than the other days, but there still were not many people there. We stayed for about 30 minutes and then headed to our respective showers to wash off all of the chlorine.
I headed back to the room and Stephanie showed up a short time later. The dryers still had about 15 minutes on them, so we decided to go and get some lunch. There was not enough time, so Stephanie headed back to add time to the dryers, and was worried the people there might be angry she was adding time, but that did not happen.
We went to the buffet and happened to see the menu for The Restaurant for tonight. We have not eaten there yet on this cruise, but we saw lobster tails on the menu and decided to go there tonight for dinner. We had a reservation for The Chef’s table for their Thailand menu, so if we went to the Restaurant, we needed to cancel that reservation. Just to make sure on our choice, we also looked at the menu on the electronic screen for the Thailand Chef’s Table and did not see anything that really looked that good. We had wanted to try all three menus on this cruise since they were all Asian-themed, but this menu did not look that great.
It is nice that there is a reservation desk in the Buffet for the Specialty restaurants, and so we just canceled the Chef’s table reservation as we headed into eat lunch.
After lunch, we had to go and get the laundry out of the dryer, and I let Stephanie handle that. The room is not that large, and if there are more than three people there, it is just crowded. She was gone for more time than I thought she should be, but that was because she could not find one of her small white anklet socks. She talked to a lady about it, maybe it was in her washer, it was one of the ones we had used, so she asked her to put it in the lost and found basket in the Launderette if she found it when hew wash was done.
After the laundry was done we headed to the third deck above the atrium to watch the Baggo Tournament. I took my computer to work on the blog, but I was distracted, the tournament of crew versus passengers was pretty interesting, so I stopped to watch. They made it harder by using the large staircase from Deck 1 to Deck 2. which has a landing in the middle, as two of the spots they threw the bags from.
It was fun and the passengers won. The last throw everyone did was from the top landing and the two Baggo boards were right next to each other. If the opponent’s bag landed on your board, you got the points. They also had a small metal trash can behind the two boards, and getting a bag in the can earned 10,000 points. We were surprised at how many bags made it into the trash can to receive the big score.
After that was over, we headed to the Explorer’s Bar for a glass of wine and to watch the ocean go by. We had one glass and they were setting up for the afternoon special tea session we had already seen twice, so we headed to the Library Bar instead, wanting to enjoy our last sea day.
We went back to the cabin and sat on our balcony for a bit before we got ready for dinner. We wanted to go early and try to beat some of the crowds because it was lobster night. We had one more glass of pre-dinner wine at the Library Bar and then headed up to Deck 2 to go to The Restaurant. There was no line waiting to get in, but it looked pretty crowded inside. There were still a lot of available tables we could see as we walked through to be seated. Of course, as it always seems to happen to us when we dine in The Restaurant for dinner, they took us to a table right by the main entrance to the kitchen.
I was not happy, so I pointed to another table for two that was not near that entrance. I do not know why they even want to put people at these particular tables when there are other open tables far from the main kitchen entrance. It is very distracting with the constant movement of food and people in and out of the entrance. Plus, there were also several wait staff just standing at the entrance.
They took us to the table I wanted and it was between two already occupied two-person tables, and they were both well into their dinners. Maybe they were trying to space people out, and now we were fairly close to the other people next to us, but that was better than the chaos at the other table. Shortly after we were seated, they brought another couple to the table we had rejected, and they sat there. Maybe they just keep trying to fill those tables to give the staff assigned there more customers, and they just wait to see who will be compliant and stay.
We ended up starting a conversation with the couple on one side of us and we enjoyed talking with them while we waited on our food. Of course, I ordered the Lobster Tail, and we could see from the dishes other people had been served that the tails were good-sized, not the size of a large shrimp!
Stephanie is not that fond of lobster, so she ordered the NY Strip Steak instead. We both ordered a Caesar salad, but I wanted to have mine served with my meal, not before. Stephanie had ordered her entire meal first, and had not made that request to have her salad served with her meal. We also ordered off of the Asian menu and split a dish of Kung Pao Chicken.
Obviously, the waiter got all confused about my salad request. Instead of bringing Stephanie here salad as a separate course after the appetizers, and then serving our main courses together, along with my salad, she got her salad and I got my entire meal, lobster tail and salad, all at once. I could not really wait for Stephane to finish her salad so she could get her main course, mine would get cold.
Eventually, they brought out her main course and we ate together for a short time until I was finished. I ordered another lobster and received an entire second meal, that is just the way it works, you can’t just order the lobster tail separately anymore like in the old days of cruising.
Of course, I was really full, the tails were quite large and maybe my eyes were bigger than my stomach, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
We had both ordered cheesecake for our desserts but with different toppings, Stephanie had strawberry and I had raspberry, and both were good. We had ordered the Gnarley Head Zinfandel wine with dinner and it was excellent.
Dinner had taken a little over an hour, but that was quite acceptable, much less the two-hour-plus dinners we had started to experience on the Princess Cruises we had done not too many years ago, and that was entirely too long. That was one reason we had stopped going to the dining rooms for dinner, it just took too long and the service and food were not worth that amount of our time.
We headed to the nearby Library Bar for a nightcap glass of wine, maybe two, before we retired for the night.
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