Four More Days at Sea

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Geo: -23.8858, -129.023

The passengers on the Queen Mary 2 are mostly Australians with around 200 Americans, lots of Brits, a few New Zealanders, and a few other nationalities. The announcements, including the daily noon navigational report, are given first in English by the captain or the officer on duty, then translated into German, French, Spanish, and Japanese. There are very few children on the trip and not too many adults who look to be younger than 50.

As we cruise westward on the Pacific, we have a lot of time zones to go through. During the first eight days at sea, we had seven time changes. There will be a few more to come having a total of ten by the end of the cruise. Twenty-five hour days, one after the other, have made for a very relaxing trip. By the seventh day of the trip, we were ready to get up for breakfast in the dining room having slept late enough times. Up until then, we pre-ordered breakfast for delivery to the suite at 9 a.m.

With all these days at sea, we have had a chance to explore more of the ship and find that we like the Golden Lion Pub the best for lunch so far. We have walked a lot every day still managing at least 10,000 steps per 24-hour period. My Fitbit is set on home time since it requires an Internet connection to reset the time on it. I do not feel the need to update it at each time zone change. It's good for my brain to do the calculations to get to the correct ship time from what the Fitbit says. Some days I finish my steps in the room. From the entry to the balcony door is about 30 steps round-trip. I have done a lot of laps in the room already.

We went to the planetarium show yesterday. The Queen Mary 2 has the only planetarium at sea. The show was fine, but really just a movie about the universe shown on the ceiling. They have different planetarium shows every two or three days with three showings each day. When we went, the area of the Illuminations Theatre marked off for planetarium shows was about half full.

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Photos

Crew Tug-of-War Competition for Charity
That's Lennox, our waiter, in all black. The restaurant team has won the tug-of-war for six years in a row now.