Wanderung 26

Bob:

Some folks think that "At Sea" days are boring, but for some reason that never seems to happen to us. We often find ourselves exhausted at the end of an "At Sea" day, and we never even get a chance to do most of the activities offered on ship such as various contests (egg drop, ship construction), trivia, Bingo, and so forth.

After walking on deck for the better part of an hour and getting hot and sweaty from that, we attended the port lecture on Bora Bora. That gave us the information to plan what we were going to do there, which turned out to be taking a boat shuttle to a big public beach on the main island, swimming and snorkeling there, and then taking a shuttle bus back to the ship when we got too hot or too waterlogged or too sunburned. Sunburn is no joke near the equator, and while we were in Sydney our friend Neville had told us that his sunburn at one of these islands had been severe enough to limit what he could do on the following days, which was a cautionary tale indeed.

We just had time to return to the cabin, warm up and practice our recital songs, and then it was time for a Pop Choir rehearsal that lasted from 11:30 - 12:30. Then we popped up to the Horizon Cafe for a belated lunch before immediately heading back to the Rigoletto Dining room where they had an arts and crafts project of making bookmarks from beads strung on a thong. We can always used more bookmarks as our books seem to eat them!

We never even managed to get our bookmarks finished before we had to run off to attend the port lecture for Papeete at 2:00 p.m. in the Princess Theater. I'm telling you, that by the time I had finished taking notes on Papeete, I was completely exhausted and just turned in for a brief nap back in our cabin before hauling myself up yet again to don my "glad rags" for Formal Night. Of course, for a guy, that means I just had to choose which tie I would wear with my black suit, so dressing was easy. In this case however, the Gentle Reader will recall that back in Fiji we had walked the muddy trail in the rain forest. Since I was using the "1-pair-of-shoes" strategy for this trip, I had to clean off all the mud and re-polish my shoes to complete my Formal Night outfit. As it turned out, we were just in time for dinner with our tablemates.

After dinner we attended the "Piano Man" production show that featured two lead singers and six women and four men dancers. The songs were nice and the dancers were energetic, athletic, graceful, and mostly together on their movements. Similarly, the male and female lead singers were on-key, but they did not vary their volume and all songs were sung in the same friendly but uninspired manner. The net effect for me was bland. I hope I'm not getting jaded, but the performance for me was just nothing to write home about, so I won't!

But right after that we went to the Crooner's Lounge to listen to Rose and then participate in her Irish sing-along. Since the sing-along had been my proposal to the cruise director and he had relayed it to Rose, who had then obligingly prepared the lyrics and music for the sing-along, I felt quite obligated to participate. Singing Irish songs for an hour was very pleasant, and the turnout was larger than either Rose or I had expected as the lounge was packed and she gave out all of the 125 sets of lyric sheets she had prepared. All in all, I thought it was a roaring success and was glad I had recommended it, but my voice was really, really tired out by the time we turned in for the night.