Day 9 - At Sea

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Geo: 29.1122, -45.4397

I awake slowly on this Sunday morning. Light is filtering beneath the curtains and there is still some motion to the ship although it has lessened from the night before. We take our time this morning. the Progressive Trivia does not start till 10am. As it's a Sunday we decide to breakfast on the balcony which means we can eat before we need to shave & shower. I think I have had Eggs Benedict every day of this cruise, I may have to try something different for a change.

We make our way to the Imperial Lounge and make our apologies to the rest of the team for our absence the day before. We find out they did ok without us. Pete's Piranhas are one of the top 5 scoring teams (although we don't know what position within the 5 we are). We start off badly with some tricky questions but recover well to score 13/20. Whether that keeps us in the top 5 remains to be seen. Some people take it far too seriously and are heckling Alison if they don't agree with the answers. It's supposed to be a bit of fun, just relax and enjoy.

It's a glorious sunny day and so we make our way up to the pool deck and bag a couple of loungers and relax for a couple of hours. The clocks go forward one hour at 12.05 (we are now just 2 hours behind UK time). We buy a couple of Lava Flows. Mines Mango, Peters is Strawberry. We remark that the colours match our outfits. We lunch in the Windjammer. Windjammer is always very busy on sea days but with a little patience you can normally find a spot to sit down. Problems are caused when people remain seated long after they have finished eating. We both have a salad and some Pizza. None of the desserts take our fancy so we head down to Cafe Promenade where they have some nice cherry crumble which we take back to the room.

I note in the Cruise Compass a professor is giving a lecture this afternoon on whether there is Extraterrestrial Life in the universe. Knowing this will be of zero interest to Peter I take myself off to the Lyric Theatre at 3pm to see what it's all about. I take a seat at the very back so I can nip out quietly if it's dull. Fully expecting hardly anyone to show up I am surprised by the numbers and variety of people that do come, male/female, young/older. The lecture is very light hearted but informative, the professor clearly knows his stuff and has published over 50 papers on the subject. We all leave the theatre an hour later none the wiser on whether E.T. is out there. He probably is but the vastness of the universe means he will probably never need to worry about phoning home.

I go straight back up to the pool deck where Peter joins me from the gym after cycling another 10 or some miles. Again we relax and people watch from our vantage point, always good fun. We spend the late afternoon and early evening on our balcony catching up on emails etc.

It's the 2nd formal night tonight and so we dress accordingly and head to the Concierge Lounge for a change. Fully expecting it to be full we are surprised to find some empty seats. We grab those and Sucel the Concierge Manager gets us our drinks. After that we head down to the Imperial Lounge where we meet up with Sue & Malcolm. Peter disappears to another table for a while where Mhairi and Tam are. I remain chatting to Joan, a lovely lady from Ireland who is travelling on her own.

Dinner is pleasant although the debate on which member of the royal family is gay gets a little heated. Sue is convinced its Andrew after being 'reliably' informed by some gay Americans. We advise her that it has to be Edward. The Urban myth (or is it) about him trying on Princess Margaret's dresses a dead giveaway we feel. Do any of us really care though? Conversations then turn to Princess Diana and conspiracy theories. We realise we are all a little too tipsy to have any meaningful discussion about that and so we depart.

My turn to be lucky in the casino tonight. We are far from high rollers mind you and only have a small flutter each evening. Never take more money that you would want to lose into a casino is our motto, which we stick to religiously. We end the evening enjoying a glass of wine sat out on the open deck of the Diamond Lounge on Deck 14. It looks as those some staff members are enjoying a competitive basketball match on the sports deck. There is a lovely cool breeze out here underneath the night sky.

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