Afternoon in Argostoli

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After our morning tour we headed to the Dining room for lunch. Sharon had watermelon gazpacho and grilled chicken breast sandwich in a bun, followed by more coffee ice cream (she forgot to mention that after climbing all of those steps out of the cave, they conveniently located a couple of cafes where we each bought a scoop of ice cream). John had spicy linguini with Andouille sausage and passion fruit mousse in white cake. We were thwarted in many of our attempts to do other shipboard activities. They were out of the daily Sudoku puzzles. And posting our blog took much more time than expected with problematic internet connections. John called his mom and finally connected, was able to say hi when that connection dropped as well. As we were leaving his iPhone showed no signal until mid-morning the next day (about midnight LA time). Along the way John stepped on his glasses so they no longer work the way they should. We missed the daily trivia and caught the tail end of bingo before attending mass in the main showroom.
For dinner, John started with Veal and mushroom in pastry puff, and again having difficulty in choosing soups selected bout the beef goulash soup and the green chili in corn chowder. All were delicious. Sharon had her old reliable standby when the ship’s daily specials get a little too creative/exotic (e.g., when they stray too far from meat and potatoes) and selected the New York strip steak and baked potato. John had the chicken cordon blue, which was good, but again not as fully stuffed as it could have been to be truly superb. Sharon (in hindsight) chose best for dessert with the puff pastry swan with dark chocolate mousse, while John had the bee hive with almonds, all the while looking with envy at Sharon’s chocolate mousse. And yes, she did let me try some just so I knew for sure I’d picked the wrong one. Sharon had had the bee hive on a previous cruise. We had a very enjoyable dinner of nearly two hours and shared a table with a couple from Dayton Ohio of all places, so we had plenty to talk about.
After dinner we attended the 8:00pm show for the magic act, which included the magician and his wife as the assistant, and they gave a very watchable performance that kept your attention. Without his glasses, John was seeing double so when the magician said things like now watch closely it looked to him like he had ten fingers on each hand manipulating the cards. He specializes in close-up magic and has a special show in one of the lounges later in the cruise. He did the change the audience participant’s $1 bill into a $100 dollar bill… but he promised to return his bill to him in the same condition as it was to start with, so it was turned back into $1 right in front of his eyes.
After the show we stopped in the casino, Sharon to find that perfect machine, and John to play blackjack. Sharon got ahead by $10 but had left her room card in the machine and couldn’t cash out, so she waited for me to show up. I started against a very hot dealer, and Ron never would have stayed past the second hand. Things eventually leveled off, and play was reasonable, then got a bit cold again. And then a few hands turned things around with a timely double down, a well-timed blackjack John left with enough chips to put him up for the cruise. We watch Sharon try to get her credits to either $15 or $20 (her set lower/upper limits). After going back and forth just under the top limit and just over the stop loss limit she hit the $15 credits and cashed in (and found out she hadn’t left her card in the room after all, it was in her purse all along.
We then went to the piano bar and were lucky to find a couple of seats and joined the One Hit Wonder trivia contest in progress with a couple at our table. John isn’t very good at these music games. Our team was about average, getting 9 out of 12; but, there were 4 teams getting 11 of 12. One British team got the piano player to accept the British performer who performed the song, since that singer’s version was a bigger hit in Britain than the original US version (or so they claimed). In all it was a raucous good time.

After the piano bar we checked the Internet access and it was back up so we were able to get the blogs posted.

This morning we’re in Santorini but our tour isn’t till 12:30 so thought we’d catch up on the blog again (John’s entries take quite a while to write  ) so will try to get this posted and maybe a few photos before leaving for our tour.

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