Friday April 18th 2008
Noon position: 34 degrees 5' North, 41 degrees 18' West (Course 75 degrees, Speed 18.9 knots)
Bob: Sleeping in a bit, we once again missed the morning stretching class, but we were up in time for the Walk-A-Mile that I hoped would burn off a few of the excess calories I had ingested the night before. Monika was also feeling overfed, so we both kept breakfast down to cereal and skimmed milk, after which we attended Dr. Ryan's next lecture on the history of the luxury liners. This time he used a lot of slides of the old ships, and talked about the development of the liners from the late 1800s up through the SS United States in the 1950s. |
Monika: We barely got up in time for the Walk-A-Mile, both of us feeling groggy and as if we had overindulged. But we knew it was Friday, since, as on all Royal Caribbean ships, the elevators have inlays, that tell you the day of the week. After having walked for 20 minutes in a fresh breeze, we at least felt ready for some food. However, we stuck to the basics: cereal, OJ, and coffee. After breakfast we headed to the destination lecture in the Metropolis Theater. Today's lecture was on the history of ocean liners. The lecturer again was interesting, but the pictures were of one big old ocean liner after another and after a while it became rather boring. But in the question session that he always has at the end I managed to get the correct answer to the question: "Which two ships did Germany have to give up after WWI?" (Deutschland and Vaterland). So now we have two DVDs. |
Bob: I was still sleep deprived, so I took a nap to round out the morning while Monika worked on her journal a bit. Still recovering from our feeding frenzy of the previous evening, we both had a very light lunch and then we split up so that Monika could attend the art auction--she was getting free lithographs for attending and some were quite nice--while I turned in some Vitality tokens for a nice rucksack. Actually, I got sucked into a soccer shooting tournament on the afterdeck, but only got 2 out of five shots into the small goal, so I didn't win a prize but did get yet another Vitality token. Since Monika had earned one for her belly-dancing class that I had (obviously) not attended, we were once again neck-and-neck in our Vitality tokens. We were supposed to meet back at the cruise booking center at 3:00 to make another "ghost booking" for our next cruise, but Monika never showed up so I went ahead and made the booking. A ghost booking is an open-ended booking for the next RCI cruise where you deposit $100 each and then get a matching $100 of credit on our shipboard account when we finally do book our next cruise. Essentially, that gives us a free $200 and still lets us wait until we get the best possible prices on exactly the cruises we want. A ghost booking doesn't give the booking agent a commission, unfortunately, so understandably they are less than enthusiastic about making these reservations but it works out well for us. It turned out that Monika had become so engrossed in the art auction that our appointment with the booking center had completely slipped her mind. So while I was making the booking and wondering where she was, she was wandering all over the ship trying to figure out where I was. She was penitent about missing the appointment, but I just thought it was rather funny considering she spent the morning reminding me about it and, after all, all's well that end's well. We relaxed for the rest of the afternoon in our cabin, sitting for a while on the balcony and working on crossword puzzles while scanning for whales, but no luck. |
Monika: The rest of the morning was spent quietly reading on our balcony and after it got too cold, in our cabin. I actually did see the blow of a whale as it went west, while we were going east. It was too far away to see the body, but with the sea as smooth as it is with no white caps, I was sure, that I did see the waterspout of a whale a few times. Lunch again was sparse. And since we again had lost the hour between 11:30 and 12:30, it was time for the next art auction. I am enjoying finding out what is offered for auctions and how much people bid for it. Again, most pieces were not bid on. Actually I kept track: there were 7 items, that people had offered bids on during the preview, another 12 that were bid on. On most of these, only one person offered the minimum bid. Only once was there actual competitive bidding going on. 27 other items did not even get the minimum bid and were just taken away. The pieces ranged from a lithograph of Chagall and one of Picasso with minimum bids in high 5 figures, to a Mickey Mouse lithograph, and even a framed jersey of Brett Favre. For the actual serious art pieces, the starting bid was usually 85 to 90% of what they said the gallery price was, whereas for some of the more esoteric pieces it was half or even less. The Mickey Mouse piece had a gallery price of several hundred dollars, but the starting bid was 80 dollars. The whole process was fascinating. I left around 3 PM with another lithograph (this one rather nice). Coming back to the room, I found it empty. Since I knew Bob was going to turn in our Vitality Points for a rather nice backpack I went upstairs to look for him. After walking around Decks 13, 12, and 11 and even through the Windjammer without finding him, I went downstairs back to our room, when it hit me. We had had a 3PM appointment with the travel agent for another ghost booking. It had completely slipped my mind although I had reminded Bob repeatedly during the morning. I can only claim senior moment, due to not enough sleep. Indeed, Bob was back in the cabin wondering where I had been. I felt rather foolish and apologized profusely. |
Bob: The seas remained surprisingly calm and smooth, which was pleasant if unexpected, and the skies cleared during the day so that we had an absolutely gorgeous sunset. The light blue sky was decorated with light cirrus clouds and some jet contrails criss-crossing just above the ruddy sunset. We were headed East by Northeast at that time so the sun was setting just off our port stern quarter. Entranced, we both took pictures of it until it was time for dinner with our tablemates, where we once again had to be chased out so that they could reset the tables for the later dinner seating. After dinner, the evening entertainment was a pianist-comedy routine. The first half of his show was short snippets of piano pieces interrupted by comedy skits a la Victor Borge. First the piano bench collapsed and the pianist attempted to repair the bench, but then had problems with insufficient oil in the the grand piano and ended up having to jump start it using a backup toy piano. It that sounds like a terribly tortured metaphor, you get exactly the wacky flavor of the first half of his performance. The second half of the performance, however, was a quite serious piano recital during which he offered us a truly virtuoso performance of various classical pieces. The problem was that I kept wondering when another comedy skit was going to break out, which rather distracted me from really enjoying his playing per se. Still, each half separately was quite enjoyable, just in completely different ways. And so to bed. |
Monika: After another pleasant meal, we went back up onto the deck to try get pictures of another beautiful sunset. Even the almost full moon was up in the sky. We kept taking pictures till it got dark. This far south, the sun really goes down quickly. The evening's entertainment was a rather good pianist, who tried to be a comedian in the style of Victor Borge. However, his humor was even more slap stick and I would have preferred straight music. There was a little more "motion in the ocean" as our captain put it, so we were gently rocked to sleep. Very pleasant. |
| Prolog | Map of Trip | Epilog |
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