Sea Day 11 – Heading to Los Angeles

We started the last part our our journey today, the eight consecutive sea days it will take to travel from Tahiti to Los Angeles. The Captain has informed us that it is about 3,875 nautical miles from Papeete to Los Angeles, a little less distance than I thought, based on my internet search before we left. By the end of this cruise, we will have traveled just about 10,000 nautical miles in total since we began on October 22.

However, this voyage is a long way from being over, we still have almost 1/3 of the total trip before us, it is just all sea days to relax.

It was pretty rough last night, rougher than we have had since we left Los Angeles. The winds were blowing about 25-30 knots, and the seas had a pretty good swell. Making it a little rougher is the fact that we are now heading into the wind and seas, whereas on the way southward towards Tahiti, we were mostly heading with the wind and seas. The forecast is for the seas to increase some more by Saturday.

Sunrise – Sea Day 11

Most of the early morning, the ship was pounding into the waves, you could feel the entire ship shudder at times. In addition, our cabin is now on the windward side of the ship, so we get quite a breeze when we open the balcony door.

The day started out with a nice sunrise at 5:15 AM. I had not planned to get up to watch or photo the sunrise, it was just too early to get up. However, since we sleep with the curtains open, I happened to wake up and see that it was going to be very colorful, and since it was rising on our side of the ship, all I had to do was get up, go out on the balcony and photograph it, so I did.

Of course, I went back to sleep afterward, and we slept in until about 8:30 AM, which was quite late compared to the early wake up calls we had been doing for the recent port days.

We went to breakfast in the buffet, then headed off to see some “merchandise sales” they were having in one of the dining rooms. It was the same items that had been on the earlier cruise sale, junky watches and other items. Since there were no T-shirts for sale, there were not many people (read ladies) trying to dig through them like there had been the first time they had a sale in the dining room. There had been a separate T-shirt sale a few days ago, and it was so funny to watch all of the older ladies, you would have thought they were giving away gold jewelry, the older ladies were just ruthless. I do not understand how people can get so worked up to save $5.00 on the purchase of two T-shirts, that was the extent of the big savings. Instead of $12.99 apiece, you could buy two for $20.00, or one for the original price.  Especially in light of the fact that this cruise had cost so much, or maybe that was the resulting fallout, having to save a few dollars on T-shirts to offset the cruise cost.

We lathered up with sunscreen to relax out in the sun today, only to go through a rain storm about the time we finished and were ready to venture out. The rain quickly passed, and we spent most of the late morning and early afternoon laying in the sun and reading. It was quite windy on the sun deck, and after a while, that amount of wind just wears you out.

We headed back to the room and finished uploading pictures and updating the blog for Moorea and for Papeete.

After showers, we got dressed to go to the dining room, they are having prime rib tonight, and it was very good last time it was served. There was a ventriloquist show at 10:00 PM that we attended. The name of the ventriloquist was Dan Horn. He was pretty good except for a part in the middle of his show where we watched some clips from a movie about five different ventriloquists that he was promoting, so it was sort of like seeing a commercial in the middle of the show, which we thought was in poor taste.

After the show, we headed back to the room, and ended up watching a movie on the TV. We loose an hour of sleep tonight when we make our first time adjustment as we head back to Los Angeles. By tomorrow, we will only be 4 hours different from the East Coast.