Today is the first of our two Sea Days on this cruise. The skies were mostly cloudy this morning, and it was quite cool, about 53 degrees. We could tell we were not going to be doing a lot of outside activities today, it was just too cool and windy outside.
We got ready and went ot the buffet for breakfast. It was very difficult to find a table, a lot of folks we just sitting at the tables, having finished their breakfast, but enjoying the view out of the windows. We have seen this occur on other cooler weather cruises, no one is going outside, so the breakfast buffet area become s an extended stay congregating area. On the warmer cruises, it becomes a rush to get lounge chairs out be the pool instead.
We finally found a table, but it was near a large automated door that went out to and area at the stern of the ship. Every time one of the servers walked by, the automatic doors would open and a rush of cool air would blow in. It did not take us long to finis breakfast, we had to eat fast for the food to still be warm, and the same for ourselves.
After breakfast, we headed up to the Skywalker’s lounge, the highest part of the ship. It is normally a quite, peaceful area during the daytime, lots of passengers go there to read. We picked out some seats, and I started working on the blog while Stephanie read. We were there about 30 minutes when a large and loud group came in and started playing cards, one of the players feeling the need to do play by play commentary for their card game. So much for the nice quiet area. We stayed about another 25 minutes before the noisy group just made it too hard to stay.
We headed down to look at some of the shops in the atrium area. We decided to have some sandwiches from the International Cafe in the Atrium, and had a glass of wine from the Vines Wine Bar with our sandwiches. There was some funny entertainment going on, they had human slot machines, where three people randomly picked different fruit out of a bucket to mimic the fruit on the slot machine bars. They had blindfolds on so they could not see what their other fruit pickers were selecting. Various other passengers were picked out of the crown to be the slot machine “handle”. If the three people picked the same random fruit, there was a winner, similar to having three matching selections across the slot machine.
Later, we went back to our favorite bar, the Calypso Bar near the Calypso Pool. We met a couple from Mississippi and talked with them for a while before heading back to the cabin to get ready for the first of the two formal nights. We were running a little late, so we missed the Captain’s reception entirely. If we were not on the all inclusive beverage package, it might have been a disappointment, it is one of the few times you can get free drinks, albeit usually poor quality, and very limited selection drinks, while on a cruise ship. No matter, we had the ability to order better quality drinks that we liked using our beverage package. We had one glass of wine before heading to dinner in the dinning room. The food was good and we had a nice table, with good service, much better service than the previous night in the dining room.
After dinner, we went to two different photo stations, there were several set up in the Atrium, and nearby areas. We then headed to the Explorers Lounge to watch a session of Karaoke, where the audience voted on the best two performers out of the 10 volunteers that signed up. This is a multiple night event, and there will be a finals night later in the cruise. All of the performers were very good, not your average Karaoke participants. We mainly went there to say hello to one of the assistant cruise director whom we had met on our Barcelona Transatlantic cruise last year. She was dating one of the other assistants, who we had happened to run into earlier at the Calypso Bar in the afternoon. They were still together, and had been able to be transferred to be able to be together on this ship.
After the show we called it a night and headed back to our cabin.