After a whirlwind start to our cruise with two port days, today we had our first day at sea. We did a whole lot of nothing, so this post isn’t going to be as long as the previous posts. We enjoyed sleeping in this morning, and I realized it was the first day of the whole trip that we stayed in bed past 7am. Now, if you had told me that I’d be getting up before 7am on the first three days of my vacation, I would have laughed at you. But sure enough, it was hard to get off of New York time, and we’d pop out of bed bright and early. (The flip side of that is that I was going to sleep around 8:30pm, but that’s beside the point.)
We enjoyed a leisurely breakfast where we ran into our dinner companion, Mimi, who wanted to know which side of the pool our chairs were on. Um, we just rolled out of bed…who has time to get up early and go reserve pool chairs? After breakfast, we had a Meet and Greet get-together with about 20 other people who frequent the Cruise Critic online message boards. Dan had good luck with those boards in learning about different excursions and such, so we wanted to meet some of the people in person. Everyone was really sweet and interesting, and it was nice to catch up a bit with some of the people from our Moorea tour.
For their sea days, Princess Cruises offers an enrichment lecture series, which sounds like the last thing you want on vacation, but for this cruise they had Captain Dale Erhart of the Canadian Air Force in to talk about F-18 fighter planes and his career in the Air Force. It was really fascinating to hear about the Canadian Air Force’s transition from using the CF-101 Voodoo planes to the F-18s and to listen to stories about his time as a training instructor for the newer pilots. Let’s just say, he’s had plenty of close calls. After his career in the Canadian Air Force, he flew for Air Canada and spent some time as a private jet pilot for a very wealthy client. He’ll be back to discuss different topics on all the sea days this week, and Dan and I are looking forward to attending each session.
After a lunch at the pool-side burger grill, we headed back to the room for a bit, where I promptly fell asleep. Dan’s afternoon was a little more productive, with catching up on some emails and a trip to the gym, but I was conked out. Couldn’t tell you why, since we’ve been getting so much sleep each night, but there you have it.
It was the first of three formal nights for dinner this evening, and it was kind of fun to get all dressed up and see other passengers in their formalwear as well. One of our fellow Moorea tour participants, Mike, is from Florida, and we found out that he LOVES the formal night on cruises. This struck us as funny, since all we had seen him in up to this point was tank tops, shorts, and flip flops, but he said that since that’s all he ever wears at home, he loves the chance to get all dressed up. He did look quite dapper with his wife Nancy this evening. Getting to know some of the other people on the ship has really been one of the highlights for me.
After dinner, we caught the evening show, which was a musical performance by an Australian actress/singer named Belinda Marks. She was a great singer, and it was an enjoyable way to spend an evening with my “No-jito” mocktail. Grapefruit juice instead of rum…I may never go back to alcoholic cocktails again. Yum!