Wednesday, November 25th, At Sea

Bob:

Much of the day was simply spent resting after the exertions of the previous day. I attended Clive's farewell lecture for New Zealand, which was again nicely done. Monika finally got a nice New Zealand map (from Clive) to go with the accommodation guides we had picked up at Rotorura on our way to the Tamaki Maori Village. Together that all should help us plan a lengthier return to New Zealand with maybe a driving tour to see the interior regions and the South Island more thoroughly than we had been able to do on our cruise.

In the afternoon I worked on updating our journals and downloading the big batch of pictures we had taking the day before.

The evening meal had the traditional "parade of chefs" between the main meal and the dessert, which was baked Alaska. The executive chef led the way with the entire corps of chefs following him, after which the waiters came in carrying the baked Alaska. Each plate of baked Alaska had a light on top. Nowadays the lights were nice, safe artificial candles, but I still remember vividly our first cruise in 1991 when our waiter carried the flaming (and I mean flaming) desert on his head. [They had to temporarily turn off the fire sensors to do that, I think.] Now that was a show!

After a nice meal, we saw the last evening performance of the song and dance team of the Sun Princess.