Steve and Cathy's Blog

OMG, looking at how much minutiae was contained in the previous post, I have promised anyone who has slogged it out thus far and read all this stuff that brevity shall be the driving force in this and, hopefully, subsequent posts.  Rather than farfarfrom06492.com, if I don’t start getting more comprehensive, it’ll have to be renamed farfarlongerthannecessary.com.  I promise, I’ll get better at this.

The next morning, Steve went to the fitness center again for another 25-muinute session with Sho.  An entirely different set of exercises.  I really think this is going to help.

By 7:00, Cathy was ravenous (do you see a theme developing here?) and off we went again to Waves on Deck 9.  We now know our server’s name: Christian.  It’s still cloudy but it is warm, the ship has stopped rolling quite as much as the previous night.  We have a light breakfast passing the time, checking the Currents (the daily ship newspaper and activity listing) to “plan our day.” [Planning our day is a fixture in our daily life; another good and necessary activity insisted on by Cathy, whose German heritage demands such planning).

Of course, we then head for the main dining room for the real breakfast.  The menu for the breakfasts is as varied as it is for the other meals.  If you really wanted to, it would be easy to consume an entire day’s calories at these meals.  That’s how appealing the food is.  We really are being good so far.  I know that because the waitperson we have, after we order, looks at us puzzlingly and asks politely “Is that all?”  A good sign.

Now we are starting to get into shipboard activities.  Cathy spots a needlepoint group activity at 9:30, Steve sees a photography lesson at 10:00 and we both want to attend another enrichment lecture that will both continue the discussion of Caribbean political history and introduce us to Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire, our first three ports of call.

We meet at 11:00 for the enrichment lecture and to compare notes about our separate activities the previous hour.  Cathy is delighted to be part of this group of about a dozen women, and of course makes friends with most of them.  The group will only meet on sea days, but Cathy will be a regular.  Steve desperately needs to learn more about photography, and the person giving those lectures is a font of good information.  He and his wife (who holds a quilting get-together on the ship) have been doing this lecture/get-together gig for four years – in retirement, no less.  Amazing.

The enrichment lecture is done but a person named Peter Croyle.  This guy has so much information to impart that we can see that he is having a hard time deciding what information to include and what to leave for later.  He is limited to an hour, and you can feel his frustration that he would stay up there for another hour or two if he had the chance.  We are going to learn a great deal from him on this journey.

Lunch follows. I am now writing three days later and I can hardly remember the rest of the day, which proves two things: 1) I need to write this blog so we remember what the heck we did and 2) probably some of the details about what we did on board the ship ain’t all that interesting.  If we did it and can’t remember it, how interesting could it be to someone reading this stuff?

The afternoon was uneventful, by that I mean: we took a nap and then messed around in the stateroom.  We truly haven’t taken advantage of all the activities, especially the nighttime activities.  Still getting our sea legs.  Translated that means: the motion of the ship is still making us sleepy.

Dinnertime: Of course, while we are not the first in line by any means, we certainly are in the first shift.  Actually, there aren’t shifts.  You can arrive at the Grand Dining Room anytime between 6:30 and 8:30.  Needless to say, Steve and Cathy show up at 6:30. Still eating by ourselves because we just don’t feel up to shipboard smalltalk with others.  What we overhear from other tables leads us to believe that most of the conversation consists of trading stories with the others at the table about other trips that have been made.  I suppose that can be interesting.  We’ll see.  Besides, we are still treating this as our second honeymoon.  Our first was at Niagara Falls by train for three days (how corny!).

Day is over by 9:00pm.  We anxiously await our first port of call, Aruba, about which everybody who has ever visited there raves.